Discovery Gaming Community

It's been no great secret that our player count has been going down in recent years. At peak times, though, we still manage a player count in the 50s, though, sometimes even higher. This actually isn't bad for a RP mod community in a niche genre game from 15 years ago. Even at peak times, though, I rarely encounter other players, even when trading. Even with extraneous systems retconned out of the mod, players are simply too spread out. And forget piracy anymore. I don't remember the last time I got pirated.

A while back, there was a trade event that ran through the four capital worlds and paid considerably higher profits than other routes. When I was flying it, I saw other players all the time. Almost as many as in the old days. Even saw a number of pirates. It worked because the profits were funneling players along a predictable route and concentrating them in the same area.

I'm thinking that working something like that in as a standard feature of the trade system could be to our benefit. Keep the standard trade formula that gives reasonable profits spread out all over, just like it is now. Players could still fly anywhere they want to go and turn a reasonable profit. But, add in a few higher-profit routes for various factions that run through predictable routes. The routes could be mixed up every month or so, just to keep it interesting. A lot of trade will end up funneled along those routes, driving activity in those areas. With the majority of traders moving along predictable routes, piracy would become viable again, as would police and bounty hunter RP. Traders would have a reason to take escorts with them again. Even with the lower player count, the server could still feel lively.

I thought we still had these few-week boost switches in order to improve activities in the least active areas...

I think that cap missions should require more than one player. This way trading might get back into vogue.

I think most vets have become rather whiny about things not getting delivered on a silver plate when you compare normal trading and ore trading to the absolute anarchy that happens during trade events. Many don't trade unless they either need something very badly or there is a trading event that drives people to stay awake for 24 hours to make billions in very short time.

Ten years ago, people didn't have everything. Now it's not difficult to have every single battleship full equipped within half a year. Many people are simply maxed out.

Hey, at least Discovery doesn't have Elite Dangerous mechanic in which you pay 5% of ship's value as a rebuy after its destruction.

Doesn't sound much, until you realize that in ED full outfit Anaconda is around 400-500 million credits. In Discovery, you need around over 1 billion credits for the best battleship.

Take into account that in ED you earn your credits in a rather slow pace and losing 5 million credits on rebuy is a major step back.

Sure, I think something like this could be good.

I would suggest commodities sold on-base for 1000-2000, giving it somewhat of an investment risk, with sale values of 3,500-5,000 at each other house's capital (along with appropriate unlawful and neutral sale points).

However, I'm not entirely sure if this is a good idea, as making one increasingly effective route is the same as nerfing all other routes, and one of the nice things about freelancer was always the wide variety of choices you can make. Unfortunately, a wide variety of choices has the side-effect of spreading players out more.

My opinion is that all ores should be balanced for the same cr/sec, with a cycling buff that has one ore a bit more profitable than the others for a short time. Maybe one week on, one week off, with each ore getting its turn at being slightly buffed. I would imagine this would be a good player concentrator.

(12-09-2018, 07:10 PM)Mephistoles Wrote: [ -> ]My opinion is that all ores should be balanced for the same cr/sec, with a cycling buff that has one ore a bit more profitable than the others for a short time. Maybe one week on, one week off, with each ore getting its turn at being slightly buffed. I would imagine this would be a good player concentrator.

This is the only way the mining economy can ever be fairly balanced so that all mining factions are treated equally. Otherwise, you've got a "best" route and "best" miners, with all the other trading factions not getting touched unless there's a buff event.

What Mep said

What said. +1 to that idea.