Is it WORTH IT to make a brand new faction? (TLDR)

Hey everyone, I’ve been considering starting a faction from the ground up and wanted to get some perspective from those of you with far more experience. Maybe DECADES of more experience...

I’ve often heard that it’s more efficient to buy an established faction with around 800k respect, but if you didn’t go that route, what kind of realistic time range would you expect to reach 1M respect assuming frequent chaining, regular ranked wars, and organized crimes? The idea of starting something from the ground up and going from helping brand new torn players to eventually having an experienced squad sounds intriguing. to me.

I appreciate any insight you have I'm happy to get pelted by years of experience

TLDR(Post and Comments):

Starting a faction from 5k respect is doable but brutally inefficient. Growth is slow (100k in ~6 months, 500k in ~2 years, 1M in ~2.5 years) and early members are mostly casual players whose perk preferences (travel/crime) conflict with what competitive leaders need (toleration, steadfast, booster cooldowns). This creates long‑term disadvantages, especially massive rehab costs and weaker training.

Leaders who built from scratch say it requires huge time commitment, constant recruiting, diplomacy, payouts, and OC management. Burnout is common unless you delegate. Bronze war payouts are terrible, and early factions must overpay members to compensate for weak perks. You can make money, but only modestly until reaching Silver/Gold.

Buying an established 400k–800k respect faction is universally considered far more efficient for both perks and member retention. Starting from scratch is only “worth it” if you want the pride, challenge, and story of building something from nothing — not for efficiency.

The biggest leadership challenge: your goals vs. your members’ goals. Competitive players want long‑term perks; casuals want short‑term convenience. Balancing both without turning the faction into a “vanity project” is the core difficulty.

Not only is it not worth it, it is a detriment.

For you personally, it's going to wreck you long term. The lack of toleration means you will be rehabbing more often, which is going to drive up your rehab costs quicker and long term that's going to pose a problem

For your members, the same applies, but also they are likely going to leave. If you do good chains or strong RWs they'll get poach away because others have a lot more to offer.

Thanks for your response on this! I haven't thought about the rehab cost aspect yet so I'm glad you brought it up

If I may ask, what's the lowest about of respect I should consider when buying a faction in your opinion?

Having bought a faction at 30k, and having 15 members dedicated right off the bat it still took us close to 4 - 6 months to hit 100k. Even now, 2.5 years later we're only up to 650k.

If you war a lot you can grow that at a far quicker pace, but you're going to burn your members out and be constantly running through them. If you find a good middle ground you can generally make money, grow at a decent rate, and still be able to keep and retain relationships with your members. As far as what respect is a minimum to buy? How ever much you can afford. Though i'll also add that factions are a lot of work, you should understand the game fairly well beforehand to help others, and to atleast have an idea of how you envision your future to help you make your decisions.

Best of luck to you.

Thank you for your response and personal experience! A big part I'm seeing is paying out members and such which I wish was able to be configured automatically in Torn. Maybe it already is but when a group accomplishes and OC the leader should be able to set pay ratios where let's say 20% go to the leader and 80% gets split evenly among the group. Same thing for Ranked war. Split the winnings by number of hits/respect gain or something. That way we dont have to use mods to dish out the payments

OC has in game mechanics to make paying easy. For war you're going to need to devise your own system for how you want to pay them out. I use Google sheets and the API and it's still a basic system where we pay based off hit and not FF. 

Youre likely going to want to learn how to use spreadsheets because without them managing a factions finances can be a bitch, but not everyone uses them. 

You can also check the scripts and coding section to find already made things you can buy and use. from war payment to discord bots. I personally recommend Tornium as a one stop shop for discord management and torn integration

I agree with this whole heartily..

If you care about your members you need toleration atleast..

I know some people like to do it yourself but after doing the maths on gains also it can take YEARS to get to a good %..

So buying a decent shell and working your way up to 800k/1m respect is the way to go, you save not only time but you also make life much more bearable for your members 👏 

Thank you for your sharing your thoughts! I'm really glad I asked because you and others have helped share parts of the faction I haven't thought about before so I'm glad I asked. Maybe I'll  keep my eye out on any good deals that popup for factions. A lot of what I've seen so far is 16-21k per respect

Only if you have a team who can get you to decent respect in a decent amount of time (for example Inglorious Basterds). Otherwise no you'll just be another noob trap.

Good point! I still remember day 0 like it was yeaterday😂

Thanks for sharing some tips! I can get lost in making spreadsheets provide more data than what's needed but it's fun building out formulas that can change the whole sheet in an instance. I'll have to check tornium out.

Honestly, maybe I just won't have the time to run a faction. In IRL, Ihave a full time job, run a side business, and still prioritize family time so as fun as running a faction may be, maybe it'd be too much to handle 

If you keep a good head on your shoulders like you currently have you could probably make it work. Thankfully running a faction doesn't have to rest all upon one person's shoulders. it would be good to have one central idea and leader to keep things moving forward, but making friends and delegating work will make everyone's life easier. 

I agree! Having one person do all the work would be quite a pain😂 That's another fun part of Torn, you never know when you'll come across another friend. They may be halfway across the world but it's crazy how a game called "Torn" can bring people together. Kinda ironic haha

I started TNU (before this shell) from 5k. It is worth it if you want some sort of pride that you built the entire thing yourself.

You will immediately make money through wars, for no cost other than supplies. No worries about having to make your money back.

That said, for your members it's not normally worth it no.

I did it, and you can to. Growth will be slow, along with recruiting, and the long term affects do add up, but most members who join when it's so young will not even be around to reap the rewards.

You can always run a casual, more crime oriented faction that runs chains and doesn't war or war much if time concerns are an issue. But it's hard to attract players without a culture, a vision and activity to go and grow with. In that case, goals will take months and years not days and weeks.

I think, in general, having a vision, a purpose, and a direction beforehand will really tell you whether this is a wise decision or not to start a faction, and whether you should be starting from scratch or buying an established shell.

If you want to lead, be a leader and a visionary for those who want to walk beside and behind you.

Thank you for your input Taxxon and hello again! I absolutely agree that it can be done and the pride of starting it from scratch would absolutely feel good. Plus you're getting the full experience too. I really enjoy managing so I'm sure I'd enjoy leading a faction if I make the time.

Can you make a lot of money just starting out in the new faction? 

'Alot' is relative to whatever you're used to. Generally speaking the early ranks are pretty rough payout wise. If you're able to recruit some high stat members you'll be able to fast track to silver or gold making the profits alot better.

Bronze wars are notoriously bad payouts. Also depends on how much you're providing for your members. With little to no perks, you're going to have to make up benefits somewhere and higher cash payout tends to be the substitute.

Newer OCs pay pretty well but now take even more respect to unlock unlike before.

Whenever you decide to sell your faction you obviously get to reap all the rewards. So there is always that.

Faction flipping is a legitimate business.

Good to know about the payouts per tier. I imagine faction flipping you'd probably need a big group of members everytime you buy a new faction? Or i guess you could be really  good at recruiting members