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Full Version: My opinion on why the game has constantly been losing players
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Starting off, I've been meaning to do this for a while now, but I was constantly lazy to do and since it's nearly new year time, it's time for reflection so here it goes: even though this is a new account with no posts, I've been playing Discovery on and off for about 8 years, since 2009 to be precise and I've seen the mod go from the chaotic state it was in 4.84 to the glory days many call 4.85 and to its present, weird version.

So, why do I think disco has been on a downward spiral for the last few years? I'm gonna try to bring up some arguments, listed below, in no particular order of severity.


1. The game has got old.

The truth is, Freelancer is an old game and it shows, even with the latest additions.

Its relatively simplistic nature doesn't leave much space for customization or for complex gameplay scenarios, and its outdated mechanics and netcode don't help either.


2. The community is an aging niche market.

Freelancer is neither a space sim like the preceeding Wing Commander and Freespace games, and neither a full blown arcade shooter, it's somewhere in the middle.

Another aging-related problem might be the users themselves, I was 12 when I first started playing, and as such, whenever I played I faction I was fully invested in that faction, developing an us vs them mindset, which made me irrationally hate the enemy factions, leading to hilarious flame outbursts, trolling and admittedly, toxicity.

Although I have no proof of this, I believe quite a few of the old members back then were also of a young age with similar... issues.


3. The various balancing changes to the game.

When 4.86 came out, the forum was ablaze with "bring 4.85 back" and "this mod sucks" posts, and although I don't remember what others hated about the mod because it was quite some time ago, I remember what my gripes with it were: the removal of many old jumpholes from 4.85 and the introduction of even more filler systems that made travels longer and replaced old and dear systems(read: minor), messing with hitboxes by making them smaller and harder to hit and thus making this game feel like it wasn't quite the Freelancer I used to know anymore (this might be wrong, although I have looked at hardCMP shield bubbles and varios vanilla ships had smaller bubbles than their vanilla shield bubbles, I don't actually know if it happened in 4.86 exactly or if it was just me).

When 4.87 came out, the gun rebalances happened(I think), and oh boy was that a mess.

Suddenly, most of the codeguns people used to like were now useless, having bad stats compared to the standard guns, for the most part.

But this wasn't the worst offender in my opinion, what was even worse was the change in diversity and uniqueness.

Back then, Krakens were sitting high atop the dps charts compared to the other standard weapons, but used more energy.

Vampires did crappy damage but used less energy, Buckshots also did crappy damage and used a lot of energy but had 750 m/s speed and range.

I won't pretend that this system was perfect or even good, I remember quite clearly how people rushed to play LN for their plasmas, outcasts for krakens and inferno and factions like IMG which had the vampire preferred codes whenever possible, but it was more interesting than having most weapons be either 650 speed and 3.03 fire rate with very similar stats or other damage, speed and rate of fire combinations that are so prevalent today.

Another thing that I didn't like were the new effects and gun types, having the souped-up but true to vanilla guns butchered into new types of guns like hornvipers becoming a green photon with skyblast B sound effects and is still considered tachyon.


4. The introduction of conn and lenghtening of popular raid routes.

When conn was introduced, access to pvp against a wide variety of people and ships without any roleplay required became instantaneous, as did the transferring of goods, making the game universe feel less significant and important.

I think this is particularly huge, because although Discovery is a roleplay server, a great part of the players did enjoy pvp quite a lot.

With ez conn access, people randomly waiting in space and eventually gathering up before bursting into a full blown raid slowly became less and less of a possibility, combined with the increased traveling distances meant that raids died a slow death. Why wait in space pointlessly until enough of you gather up for a raid when you can just do it in conn, right away, hassle-free? People will always find the best/easiest way to do things.

Furthermore, the sum of all the changes made Discovery's gameplay feel change from a mostly logical expansion upon the Freelancer univers to a game that kind of resembles Freelancer.


And that sums up what I can gather for now, I might edit the post later if more things come to mind, but for now I await your opinions on the matter.

Yes. What's the point of this thread though?
Add the fact that NPCs in a game like this were a key-feature. They populated all systems and they gave good entertainment when they haven't been nerfed; NPC convoys were funny to destroy for example and all NPCs had good cargo "rewards". Today you can approach to an enemy station without any single danger if there isn't any player in a system; now NPCs are useless, weak and they risk even to not spawn! Yesterday I mapped an entire HOSTILE House space without any problem or obstacle since it was desert. Ok, I was in a camera ship but no trade lance disruptions, no patrolling snubs, no battleship spams into the House capital that can damage you, no CDs to stop you. It was completely boring!

P.S. for Ingame Server feedback I don't think it's the right place to post.
I really rather have the people who aren't interested in providing anything to the RP environment sitting in Conn and have fun with other people and provide training targets than having them sitting around in the RP environment, memeing or giving the cheapest RP lines (Beep. Boop.) and emptying one system after another. Finding raid targets or enemies to fight is not a problem at all, really.
Thank you, i was always thinking why people don't play Discovery. I don't agree with you about your second point, there are a lot of people who would like to play Freelancer again, and they actually payed millions of dollars to do it, kickstarting Star Citizen.
If i remember correctly i read here somewhere there are a lot of new players every month, who install Discovery, and start the game, but they don't stay around too much. And you summed it up nicely, this isn't Freelancer anymore, it's something else, something different that doesn't feel like a continuation of the game they just finished in single player.
That feeling of arriving in Omicron Alpha, seeing the wreck of the Hispania and then docking on Malta, that doesn't feel important anymore in Discovery, who are Outcasts anyway, they are not the dangerous foes they used to be, they are nobody. The Omicrons overall, do they still feel like that far away place?
It's very hard to capture a feeling in a game, and no matter how good the devs are they can't compete with the level of quality that Freelancer had, after all, it was a high level production, financed by Microsoft.

Oh and the RP standard, it alienates people a lot. Think about it, you want me to play a space shooter without shooting stuff, and i also have to write stories? Ok, bye.
Conn is something different to the actual game. In conn you don't get interesting rp before a fight. Its just pew pew, which it was made to be. Conn has a different set of rules than the real game, so combat tactics are different. Rather gain experience in the actual game than conn.
Raids happen a lot, there have been quiet a few in recent weeks.
Tbh, he might be right with /conn and it is funny.

When we gathered around Malta in the past, I don't care how much you disliked seeing people dueling and calling it 'simulations' in RP, but it made people gather there as Outcasts, and after a few duels, it ended up with the group moving on to the surrounding systems to take on other factions.

Those people also simulated duels 'inRP' and meanwhile were contributing to the RP environment while they were not dueling. They also added an active population to their system and any faction that wanted to interact with the outcasts, like the Corsairs that gathered huge fleets and raided very often, they had a reason to with the active pop there.

/conn is off course not the only reason for the loss of population around Malta, and might even be less significant compared to the other reasons whatever they might be, but it is funny how the pop died off there about the same time as the introduction of that server command.
(12-31-2017, 03:56 PM)SnakThree Wrote: [ -> ]Yes. What's the point of this thread though?
I thought it'd be an interesting and possibly useful brainstorm, though perhaps I worded it badly and it sounds more like whining.


(12-31-2017, 04:04 PM)Piombo65 Wrote: [ -> ]Add the fact that NPCs in a game like this were a key-feature. They populated all systems and they gave good entertainment when they haven't been nerfed; NPC convoys were funny to destroy for example and all NPCs had good cargo "rewards". Today you can approach to an enemy station without any single danger if there isn't any player in a system; now NPCs are useless, weak and they risk even to not spawn! Yesterday I mapped an entire HOSTILE House space without any problem or obstacle since it was desert. Ok, I was in a camera ship but no trade lance disruptions, no patrolling snubs, no battleship spams into the House capital that can damage you, no CDs to stop you. It was completely boring!

P.S. for Ingame Server feedback I don't think it's the right place to post.
I both agree and disagree, I agree because I remember when going through Omega-55 used to be scary due to the wild npcs and especially gunboats, now, without cruise disruptors it's pretty much safe everywhere in sirius, aside from a few cap spawns which you can go around very easily.
On the other hand, I remember NPCs influencing small scale fights when they spawned in droves, though perhaps you'd consider this a good thing aswell.



(12-31-2017, 04:10 PM)Sombra Hookier Wrote: [ -> ]I really rather have the people who aren't interested in providing anything to the RP environment sitting in Conn and have fun with other people and provide training targets than having them sitting around in the RP environment, memeing or giving the cheapest RP lines (Beep. Boop.) and emptying one system after another. Finding raid targets or enemies to fight is not a problem at all, really.

While it's true that the standard of RP was atrocious back in the day, due to lolwuts like me, those filler players also made the game universe meaningful by providing interaction, as cheap as it was. Besides, there's a start to everything, I'm sure there's people that can RP properly now but were completely useless in the past and as for memeing, I believe most people did that in groups anyway, since even in the past, people frowned upon being openly and continually OORP in local.
If finding raid targets were that easy though, why doesn't it happen anymore? Why do people just stay docked or just overall do nothing more than base supplying or trading? Imo it's why we need events, because nobody does anything otherwise.

(12-31-2017, 04:23 PM)Scumbag Wrote: [ -> ]Thank you, i was always thinking why people don't play Discovery. I don't agree with you about your second point, there are a lot of people who would like to play Freelancer again, and they actually payed millions of dollars to do it, kickstarting Star Citizen.
If i remember correctly i read here somewhere there are a lot of new players every month, who install Discovery, and start the game, but they don't stay around too much. And you summed it up nicely, this isn't Freelancer anymore, it's something else, something different that doesn't feel like a continuation of the game they just finished in single player.
That feeling of arriving in Omicron Alpha, seeing the wreck of the Hispania and then docking on Malta, that doesn't feel important anymore in Discovery, who are Outcasts anyway, they are not the dangerous foes they used to be, they are nobody. The Omicrons overall, do they still feel like that far away place?
It's very hard to capture a feeling in a game, and no matter how good the devs are they can't compete with the level of quality that Freelancer had, after all, it was a high level production, financed by Microsoft.

Oh and the RP standard, it alienates people a lot. Think about it, you want me to play a space shooter without shooting stuff, and i also have to write stories? Ok, bye.
I don't think Star Citizen is quite as arcadey as Freelancer, it's more along the lines of Wing Commander games but with an open world, kind of like Privateer (though I might be wrong, I didn't play SC and I've only seen it on yt) and I also don't know about how many people do log in and try disco out, but unless they played freelancer before, I don't think they'll stick around anyway because they'll be at a loss as to what to do, since there's no in-game tutorial and this is not a themepark MMO.
The feeling of meaningfulness was probably killed by restarts, because although endlessly convenient, they make investing in a single character not worth it, unless you specifically want to, as you can just restart and try out the other factions at will and delete if it doesn't suit your liking, completely avoiding having to buy bribes for your characters because you thought shooting those depots up was a good idea.
I'd actually give the devs more credit, they did some things right which the original creators did wrong, like making the universe more like a real world situation, with houses being on par with eachother technologically, whereas in vanilla it was stated in rumors that Liberty allocated enough resources to fight 2 houses at once, yet they were the weakest in terms of weapons and ships, maxing out at class 6 weapons while all other houses had better equipment at their disposal, or making mining a worthy activity in game, which it was not in vanilla, balancing missions with trade, because in vanilla trading was always better until you got to alpha/gamma and had an eagle with nom tech on it, at which point running missions was clearly more profitable.
Removing the nomad weapons which made absolutely no sense since nomads dropped them, of all things, and were completely overpowered since they had no damage type, so they did 100% damage to everything while at the same time having the highest dps and used 0 energy. It made no sense for them to just "drop" from nomad ships who'd have no need to carry such weapons adapted to human ships, let alone to have a freelancer which is basically a civillian be equipped with weapons more powerful than those manufactured in house space.
Good things could also be said about making capital ships intimidating while they were target practice in vanilla, or continuing the storyline in a believable manner while the original devs didn't do much besides small fixes after the game's release.
5. We are trying to fix it by posting 861 word long ideas, instead of playing.

Developing the game is the developers' job. We are players. Would be nice to get in contact with the devs if you have some good ideas -- but we players won't solve it by presenting cunning plans to each other instead of playing.
(12-31-2017, 05:42 PM)Thunderer Wrote: [ -> ]5. We are trying to fix it by posting 861 word long ideas, instead of playing.

Developing the game is the developers' job. We are players. Would be nice to get in contact with the devs if you have some good ideas -- but we players won't solve it by presenting cunning plans to each other instead of playing.

Did you actually count all the words? Big Grin
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