Discovery Gaming Community

Okay, so there was this little bit in a nearby thread:

(shameless ripping out of context intensifies here)

(07-12-2014, 07:10 PM)Scumbag Wrote: [ -> ]Remember that it was the community who asked for Gallia.

Just thought I'd say a few thought of my own regarding that since while I was never directly involved in making that part of the mod I have nonetheless was keeping an eye on its development from the beginning before any announcements regarding it were made. So a quick personal retrospect.

To be perfectly honest Gallia began as a personal concept Igiss had. And it was Igiss, Doom and few others whose names I can't even remember that began actively working on it. When I looked at it initially before anything got into the mod it did look fine, on paper as well as first thing that were made, they all seemed like a genuinely interesting idea and there were so many new things about as well. Worth to note that at the time back then the mod steadily grew in popularity, so you know, the overall idea to expand it with a new house looked alright. Besides that the intent was to bring in new antagonist into the global storyline as nomads were moved off the stage and set to be recovering after their loss. Whatever people may say about Gallia now as a whole it wasn't as bad as some make it out be. The ideas that were there and the intent was nice and at the time the folks were quite eager to fly all that new stuff and try out new factions and environments. Except it just didn't turn out as well as it was hoped to be nor has it succeeded in captivating the amount of interest it was made for. There was initial spark of course, factions began appearing, there was a lot of about who takes what factions and so on. Of course initial version was plagued by some breaking design decision such as making all NPCs in entirety of Gallia way too strong. There wasn't like system and zone-based difficulty variation where some areas would be more difficult than others and some easier than most. Also the initial version was fairly limited in size and scope, it was just a very few systems, so aside from few problems here and there it was mostly okay and there was decent activity there for a time. You know, more ships, more weapons, all that sort of stuff. From the initial start the community did ask for more and somewhere along that road it grew way out of proportions. That's where I think a sheer quantity begins to have a negative effect on quality. There got to be a good measure in that as well, and you can look at how bad things got with adding a system between t-37 and alpha, not to mention all the way between outcast home and corsair home, and by the way outcast-corsair wars were one of them most vicious and active ones for many years, and now?

May be Gallia would have worked out if there were more players occupying all the important parts of it, but for the scope and sheer amount of things there are it will not be possible anyway as even if there were as many players around as needed the server just would not be able to handle.

So to me Gallia is an example where sheer amount of content vastly exceeds the amount of interest and activity that can be reached in there for those and other complicated reasons as well, and let's be honest, overall this mod is a very niche thing.

That and some more gave me a lot of thinking on how to approach redoing Omicrons and not to step into same mistakes that were made in Gallia.

But more on that in next post a bit later.

Simply put, I am in agreement that Gallia, on the whole, was a mistake.
-It is un-needed extra space.
-The lore is paper-thin and doesn't intersect with Disco Basics except to piss all over otherwise great houses (Kusari and Bretonia, mostly).
-The ships initially looked cool,but their performance is 'meh' on a good day.

In the end, it is my opinion that it has had little positive effect on the mod since I joined in '08, and has drained the mod of players and spread thin some great lore that should have remained much more concise.
/rant

Gallic Junkers never happened.

Unlike most of them, I do like to travel Gallic space. The amount of work put in there is appreciable but which was not thought out very well maybe, going by all the QQ in the forums. I won't mind seeing Gallia rescaled with some "VERY" irrelevant systems removed so that, there is less room which creates more encounters instead of the whole #deletegallia revolts.

Maybe the trade routes there can be revised, giving the corporations there, good trade inter house trade routes, to propel activity in there, which in turn might provoke unlawful activity. Which again in turn might motivate the long dead GRP to stop them. Maybe I am too optimistic, but this is the way I see, the reasons of high activity in Liberty and Bretonia too.

btw, good luck with Omicrons, :muchlove:

http://www.discoverygc.com/forums/showth...#pid751025

Well, it's nice to see DevTeam acknowledging certain problems.
There, some thoughts on the whole activity hub stuff. (Starting from /ooRP section)


Closer to the topic. In my humble opinion, while you guys acknowledging the mistakes made during the course of Disco development (even if a little bit too late) - but do you know where are you moving to? Or, to be precise, where do you want to move, how things should work according to your intentions? Did you fully analyze decisions made prior and after Dublin goldrush up to current point, where server's activity reached maximum numbers, and then dropped when somebody decided it'd be a great idea to spread players around Sirius. (Remember that moment very well, for first time in weeks I could log in the evenings without waiting in queue.) And then someone else decided putting few systems before OCies and Sairs will magically make people fight in Sigmas. ^^

I'm using dublin goldrush as a turning point here merely because I've arrived during it's times, and don't have much knowledge to what has been happening here before it. But I do remember what kind of Activity Hub it was, back then.


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On a side note: Over years of playing here, and especially after getting involved into mod development project for a different game, I've found myself willing to ask a question - how much time does Discovery devteam devote to the game itself?

Because from my own experiences, occurrences (from various projects, not just on Disco) where Developer Team holds great technical knowledge of their product, but is not as familiar with the way things work out and how they correlate with their original intentions are quite damn common.

For example, initial results of the whole gunboat weapon rebalance year ago showed that whoever was responsible for it did not have sufficient knowledge/experience of the game and that there was no active beta-testing team consisting of experienced players that would point out rather obvious flaws in the decision. Or the "Sigma decision", which was also obvious at the time it was being made.

p.s. helluva sleepy, could've missed smth.

Conspirator Notice: A plan to shrink Gallia is already in the works, and to my knowledge shall be implemented in the 4.87 Final Release

Player Comment: Gallia is actually a fun place that has provided a lot of different and interesting roleplay flavor to this community. And though I'm happy it's getting shrinked, I sure am glad it exists.

Gallia, fundamentally, wasn't a bad idea. The main problems it suffered from were implementation. There's simply too much gallia for people to really get 'into' it. It's too physically large for anyone to really explore, and too hostile for most freelancers to get into. Were it merely left as a few border worlds, or otherwise kept small and manageable (comprable in size to other houses) it probably would be more successful.

Personally, if I were going to introduce an antagonist faction to Discovery, I'd either expand the Coalition or come up with some manner of alien engineered threat, or atleast a house that wasn't France (Space Ottomans or Space Persians maybe?)

But Gallia is symptomatic of a larger problem, I see. In that the devs, up to this point, have been scrambling up the Jumphole networks and putting extraneous systems in asinine places (Omicron 81 or whatever it is between T-37 and Alpha) in the name of "Balance", which seems to translate into "Make Trade Routes as long and repetitive as possible to slow down Lolwuts from getting Battleships". The downside is it makes it more difficult for pirates, smugglers, and semi-lawfuls to navigate. Admittedly, part of this is a necessary evil unless we get a Crossfire-esque dynamic economy going.

As for "too many systems", my feelings on this are such: I like having lots of systems to explore. Having neat and cute little backwaters here and there makes some room to explore. But they should largely be systems like Omega-9 or Kansas. Eye candy with lots of cool "spacy stuff", neat to look at, remote places for players to mine and set up infrastructure of their own, but without a lot (or any) NPCs.

I like the idea of lots of "explorer" systems out on the ragged edges of human habitation for people to explore with some goodies like mining fields or codie wrecks, and possibly some "raid boss" killer NPCs which drop boucous loot. The kinds of systems you take a trip to to explore and maybe colonize, but that are far enough away and by nature aren't a drain on activity, since they're not meant to be permanently inhabited.