Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-18014300-20170420064223/@comment-18014300-20170424195714

Touloir wrote: Except Assassin's Creed "Mercenaries" are a faction.

This goes back to what I was saying about how we're supposed to be avoiding writing in terms of gameplay mechanics. The idea of thieves, mercenaries, and courtesans as distinct factions is mostly a gameplay mechanics although it has been integrated into the lore enough that it's clear the Italian Brotherhood did have an organized view of their allies into these three factions. However, not all mercenaries, thieves, and courtesans are part of these "factions". For example, Juhani Otso Berg himself was a mercenary as were the Orsi brothers and other famous individuals. Helene Dufranc and Fillan McCarthy are but two examples of people who were thieves but weren't "Thieves" in the gameplay sense of employable factions or controlling those factions. In other words, these professions all exist outside of mere, discrete factions that aid Ezio just as in real-life. So that might be a case for going for the singular for factions as well. However, we might think that in the case of such factions, it is still important to treat them as groups.