+Major Support
I did always find it weird that DEA and ISD had these very specialist and granular "climb up the ladder" type hierarchies and RSD, while having structure, just has a few whitelisted positions that you kinda just progress through - I can't put my finger on it, but the RSD progression curve feels off? Although bear in mind that I have not progressed anywhere in any of the aforementioned departments, so I'm not that familiar with how they work internally, but hopefully my point gets across about comparing DEA & ISD with RSD and how (at least, I imagine) it'd be easier to divvy up what access and trust starts where across the greater amount of positions that they have, which RSD's considerably smaller hierarchy (and more entry-level positions, too).
All that, despite the fact that RSD is considerably closer to the centre of what the server is supposed to be about, additionally also considering the importance of RSD regarding new players joining the server and retaining interest in it (which I talk about more in-depth
here, with the D-Class/GSD/RSD RP triangle I bring up). I can also see there being a case that forum whitelist applications would be intimidating for newer players (As someone who has previously possessed both in-game whitelist and forum whitelist CL4 roles (E-11 CPT & OSA), I can agree that there is a degree of unapproachability that naturally comes with the latter) and that RSD suddenly jumping from positions you earn in-game via levelling to "if you want to a progress further role in the department, make a whitelist application on the forums" (albeit there's a bit more nuance to that, but) would seem unfriendly to newer players. Having an in-game whitelisted position that is obtained similarly to the entry positions of DEA/ISD would help with that.
Additionally consider the nature of how testing permissions are handled - On either server, you can only do such-and-such test with such-and-such permissions, the red tape of what you can do as a specific class of researcher. A position like this would allow far more flexibility for RP leadership roles to be able to divvy that up (similar to what I said before about DEA & ISD and the access & trust afforded per position as you go up the hierarchy) if there was an additional RSD role they could do so with. I can't think of any off the top of my head (most likely due to my lack of experience in the area), but I imagine if this was discussed with RSD leadership across both servers, they could feasibly determine some weird grey area permissions that would feel too much to allow a Sr. Researcher, but restricting it to Exec+ would be overkill - I imagine that as a DoR yourself, you could hash some out.
Now, if you said that this wouldn't fix RSD overnight, I would agree. This wouldn't be a panacea for RSD and it's entirely likely that similar trust issues would resurface, with things ultimately remaining the same, but just with more positions. After thinking about every factor of this I can reasonably conceive, I firmly believe that the potential benefits of the addition of this job outweigh its problems, however I would understand the hesitancy surrounding adding an entirely new job.
Therefore, I would recommend that this be handled similarly to the
Assistant job slot increase discussion, as they would be somewhat comparable in impact (Plus, the addition of a new RSD job does mean more RSD job slots, however they are technically infinite if you count Junior Researchers) - Both UK and US RSD Leadership should discuss the prospect of this with Content, present the case of what would differentiate this from Sr. Researcher, why it's needed, what purpose it would serve on the server, how it would be beneficial, and a few of the other intricacies of implementing this job (For example, I imagine it would need a loadout similar to Sr. Researcher?).
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