more context for the situation definitely helped since uh. it pushed me into deciding to stick my head in with my two cents.

which is that........ unfortunately, i really don't think there's going to be a lot you can do about it.

part of it is just. the inherent nature of rp. most people tend to want to play characters who aren't normal, and it's not really hard to understand why - at the end of the day, rping is telling a story, and when just about every single story we hear features a character with some kind of ~specialness~, imo, ofc most people aren't going to be interested in playing your average joe schmoe the office worker. especially not when rp is an escapist fantasy for so many people, which means it's v attractive to play someone ~special~ over the average, ordinary, everyday folk they are.

part of it is the fact that well. "normal" characters don't tend to get the same support or attention on rp sites. since i mean. if you have a game of thrones site and you make your average commoner of king's landing when everyone else has the various lords and ladies of the realms, imo, it's going to be really hard to get plots for your commoner if you don't have a reason to interject them into the spaces those lords and ladies occupy. it's also a lot harder to find want ads for those "normal" characters that are worth filling - the vast majority of the time, the requests tend to be pretty hard to plot outside of those ads and/or end up with a character that's basically a glorified npc. which both of these facts hit all the harder when you start factoring in activity requirements - since imo if you're constantly struggling to get that one post a month you need to stay active on a character and it feels like pulling teeth to get any interest in them, it's not really incentive to want to keep them / stick around on the site.

part of it is also your community - from the way y'all talked about the situation, it sounds like "not-normal" characters are the norm on the site / "normal" characters are not really valued half as much. and that's in and of itself going to be a problem, because you're not wrong in saying that it's not really fair to put restrictions in place for newbies to live by when the problem is much more the established members but also because, well, "like attracts like", so to an extent, when that's the atmosphere on the site, you're going to attract more of them, not less, especially if the circumstances are not hospitable to getting the opposite (in other words, if i'm running a slice-of-life site and i have 10 different gangs running around the city in various formats, i'm probably gonna have a hard time discouraging more gang members and/or encouraging more cops + civilians).

you might be able to make some headway by trying to actively encourage + support those "normal" characters (award "bonus" site currency to members who make them, go out of your way to try to plot with them, give them high-quality plots that make them want to stick around), but unfortunately, there's just....... not a whole lot you can do by this point since the "solution" is more shifting the entire community vibe than it is anything else, and to a certain extent, that's probably gonna be difficult just because of what you are (a modern slice-of-life site with political intrigue).

yeah this. definitely sounds like it's an issue where the crux of the problem is that the staff are trying to pull in one direction where the members are another.

i...... honestly don't know what advice to really offer you in that regard.

in theory, it could be that some of these problems start to resolve themselves once you guys are..... not so much out of beta per se as much as it is "pieces are able to start moving on the site". even if that option is technically available now, people might not be in a place to be able to do that, either because they're lacking a key piece to set the events in motion (ie, if you have a criminal gang that's going to take over another gang but the first gang only has 2 members in it atm) or because they feel like they can't rock the boat out of the current stalemate (whether from a lack of a site event or just in-general not wanting to upset the status quo that is the current setting).

but that's also the best case scenario here - that your members actively want that political intrigue and just can't or don't know how to pull in that direction quite yet.

which is where the worst case scenario comes in - that what the community wants out of the site isn't the same thing as what you as the staff intended to do.

it could be that you have a significant portion of the community that genuinely like the setting you guys have come up with but largely want to do their slice-of-life style stuff. which would still make sense for why you're seeing the world you're seeing - as someone who used to run a marvel/dc site that was more of a slice-of-life setting, we still saw very precious few civilians + villains from the simple perspective that "it's a superhero site, people are going to make superheroes" irregardless of any other factor. to the same extent, you've set up the world where the vast majority of big players are on a higher-level playing field, so ofc that's what you're going to see more apps for even if the players have little interest in doing much with that.

the reason that's the worst case scenario is that, well. imo that's the one where there really isn't going to be anything y'all can do to fix it. the interest just isn't there, and trying to force the site into trying to be something it isn't is just going to lead to frustration for everyone involved (as i've said in other threads for why site plots are rare these days - it doesn't matter how many times you tell the members that they have to defeat the dragon or it'll burn the town, it doesn't matter what the rewards are for defeating that dragon or the consequences for not defeating it are; if the members aren't interested in defeating the dragon, they're not going to do it, and that's just reality).

alternatively, y'all could just be in what's essentially the "middle ground" situation - which is that the members do want that political intrigue but they just aren't interested in it under the terms y'all have laid out as staff.

personally, i think faction-based sites are very hit-or-miss; it's part of why i'm generally not a huge fan of them anymore. in my experience, most rpers tend to prefer being able to create their own groups over joining someone else's, and this is something that holds true whether you have member-based groups (like guilds for a vrmmo site) or site-wide groups (like three warring gods). part of it is probably tied up in that whole ~specialness~ factor (since imo if you're ~just that special~ then ofc you're going to be a leader of some faction and not playing second-fiddle to anyone else) and part of it is probably tied up in the creating something new vs just filling out a role (which dovetails into issues with creative control since imo the best way to make sure a gang is set up the way i want it to be + won't take a sudden left turn that leaves me uneasy with it is for me to just make it myself).

this also tends to dovetail rather poorly with site canons - since while i can definitely respect why you would want, say, the leader of the one (1) mafia gang you have ruling your city to be the best mobster ever or why you would want your chief of police to be the best cop on the force....... i also know that this is something that can sit really poorly. it's something that tends to bother me as a member since at best, it's a little annoying to know that my character who is supposedly a notorious pirate will never be able to even remotely stand on the same tier as the pirate king regardless of what either of us do; at worst, it ends up feeling super sus in situations where the staff have most of those canon positions since imo it then starts feeling like the staff are trying to use the excuse of "oh well they're the site canons" in order to get plot armor for why their characters are the best and mine aren't nearly as good. which that latter category definitely sounds like it would be something that would be popping up in my mind as a member if y'all started trying to nip out the powercreep you have going on, regardless of how justified y'all might actually be in that regard.

like i said..... i honestly don't know what the solution is for you guys. it's something i've never really figured out how to deal with myself since my "solution" was largely just to shrug loudly and shove myself back into my lil slice-of-life box that i preferred anyway. so to that regard, i'm definitely not really qualified in terms of offering solutions as much as....... "here's some perspective as an outsider and thoughts on how you probably got here so that y'all can have an easier time trying to figure out how to get out of here", as it were.

(maybe it'd be better for y'all to see if it's possible to open things up to be more member-based factions where their influence is more based on the prestige they earn via participation from other members + actual influence that they manage to get on the site or if it might be a good idea to see if something like hoenn's infamy system might be a better metric for y'all to use in terms of establishing who actually has influence on the site + the plot, but idk, this isn't my cup of tea for rp purposes, so i'm largely just spitballing here-)