(06-29-2021, 04:56 PM)sindroms Wrote: [ -> ]I agree that new members should be the focus, but there is no reason not to prepare disco for them.
And the issues with these threads are usually the same: Disco has condensed to the most thick-skinned or thick-headed people of the community and it is very hard for them alone to look at it objectively to find what needs to be changed.
Can I suggest you all to reach out to your non-disco buddies on discord and ask them if they can help us figure out our current state by playing disco for 1-2 hours every day for 1 week and submitting a constructive ''first impressions'' of the ingame server and the community.
I would love to gush about all the things I personally think would make disco more fun, but then again - science data. So perhaps I am not the wisest man around.
Replying instead of edditing because reasons.
Ask them to keep an eye for the following things apart from just the game enviroment:
1. How easy is it to find answers to any problem they might encounter.
2. If they cannot find the solution, let them describe their chain of actions that lead to a dead end
3. How easy is it to learn the lore of the game and the lore of disco afterwards.
4. How easy is it to get their head around the roleplay enviroment in both cases where they are and aren't used to online RP.
5. How easy is it to immerse yourself in disco and detatch yourself from the ''there is a player on the other side of that ship'' aspect of disco.
6. What would they say is the end goal of their (at that point) play.
(06-29-2021, 04:56 PM)sindroms Wrote: [ -> ]I agree that new members should be the focus, but there is no reason not to prepare disco for them.
And the issues with these threads are usually the same: Disco has condensed to the most thick-skinned or thick-headed people of the community and it is very hard for them alone to look at it objectively to find what needs to be changed.
Can I suggest you all to reach out to your non-disco buddies on discord and ask them if they can help us figure out our current state by playing disco for 1-2 hours every day for 1 week and submitting a constructive ''first impressions'' of the ingame server and the community.
I would love to gush about all the things I personally think would make disco more fun, but then again - science data. So perhaps I am not the wisest man around.
I already did that with 3-ish people, and the few people I tried to pull in will say either the issue with elitism, too much grinding, or everything is mega confusing. Or oddly enough, can't install the Discovery Installer, but that was one guy though.
People view the mod through rose tinted glasses, it is for the best to grab a friend who doesn't play Disco, and get their honest opinion.
Also, I am not telling you to dump the link into some channel. I am asking you to selectively approach 1 or 2 people who are close to you friend-wise and who would agree to this not because they are interested in the game, but rather because you asked for their help.
That part is very important, please.
It needs to be someone who can talk to you in full detail and disclosure afterwrads.
Getting a new player's impressions is a great idea. I've done that sometimes on projects I've done, and it's incredibly helpful.
Even better if you can do it in person, as you can get a lot of information from non-visual cues, see momentary frustrations, and other things a person might not even think to mention.
Thinking back several months (6 or so) to my first impressions, they went a little like this:
I started out just doing trading, with the vague idea of making enough to buy a capital ship. I really didn't have a character concept in mind, my ship was just named Commodore_Shawn. I did some routes around liberty, before finding a decent route up into Kusari. I didn't really interact with anybody.
Eventually, on one of my kusari runs (I think I was in a Train by then) I ran into some power traders who showed me how to really make money (doing ore runs out of Gallia), and invited me to a discord community where I spent some time, and started interacting with others in and out of game. That's I met WiseTaurus and found my home in HS>
I think the keys to my retention was that I didn't "meet" the larger disco community until I was already established. Didn't have a forum account for months, nor joined the official discord server (which I mostly avoid even now). It was a small, friendly, helpful group that got me locked in.
I wouldn't mind being able to do a few things that aren't allowed still. I still don't think that allowing certain things will really hurt anymore because things are a little different now. If it turned out that population suddenly explodes and turns things around, I'd say well that's a fair exchange.
Things are still pretty quiet and although the roleplay continues, I still wonder why there seems to be a thing against allowing for more, and taking our chances it might benefit everyone more than not. It would be nice to see a few things done to spice things up for those who still try to keep at it after many years.
At this point, I believe that keeping JD4's locked from jumping other (transport) ships kills a lot of the value behind them and limits player capabilities greatly (actually hurting the economy). I really don't see why someone can't fly a couple of ships at the same time anymore either. Let people use drone ships, or use a carrier as a base ship and fly a small ship on the side. If you can, why not? If you come across double the ships, it means double the value!
This is the type of place we could easily still have set up for really good adventures but we need to loosen the reigns on this stuff. If I could fly my Bustard, and freighter at the same time, and dock the freighter on the carrier, jump around, jump out to the really distant systems with other ships (transports), I'd be happily online way more often, and I think there would be a lot more going on here at any given time. This place should be the type of 'world' where people could come here and build a space corporation, build a fleet, jump ships out to the edge systems and build bases to colonize those areas. Specifically the Nomad systems. Let people make use of these systems, if players want to put up a fight, let the games begin. Otherwise people could be spreading out into those systems and writing the story of their 'expansion' as we go. Its not too late to kick the place into a higher gear by just adjusting what we allow with what already have, and free up some capabilities for people to carve out some new activities. Despite allowing for jump supply/trade, I still think it will increase conventional trading and mean more ships online, and a JD doesn't save you from everything. There are definitely ways to make detecting jumps and jump activity easier for those on the other side of the line.
That makes more sense to me, instead of keeping people from doing that stuff and preferring places stay frozen or empty for no real reason! I always will say, there is a big universe to disco but much of it goes unused. I still support making more things accessible/purchase-able by scidata, maybe add some new fields out in Nomad space to make it worth colonizing.
I would completely re-arrange Omicron Major and put all the wormholes above the atmosphere to the dyson sphere surface, and put a scidata field down into the atmo, just above the hard surface, so you'd have to dive down low and get near it to go mining (something), and then come back up to return to base or leave the system. (Might want to lower that surface to its way more below plane so people could jump in and out safer). If it were me, I'd copy that surface 5 more times and just put them together to make it a giant cube and, say it was discovered to be a giant cube and not a sphere! :p But then we could actually fly around the giant cube and build bases around it, etc).
Wall of text here, based on personal experiences, marked the central bits in red.
I'd say just make the game fun to play and focus on that.
If people have fun with jumptrading etc. then go for it, the economy has already been completely destroyed by missions and NPC payouts. The old truism of jumptrading being bad because it removes piracy interactions is irrelevant anyways since conventional trading is pretty much non-existent already. When you can do missions in a VHF that pays nearly a million credits per NPC kill you've already completely buried the concept of trading as the catalyst for player interaction.
Currently there's not a lot of stuff to do, players are spread out and interactions in-game, except for a few specific avenues, are few and far between.
As a new player what motivated me was seeing lots of people gathering for big fights in all those cool ships in places like Alpha, Gamma and NY. I'd fly around in a dinky ship and then look at a giant space battle and wanted to grind out money for a big ship to join in that. The Liberty vs Rheinland war, the buzz in both houses when something was brewing and massive fleets were organising and moving through House space. It was a great backdrop, and it was fun to be a part of. It was awesome, stuff was happening that seemed interesting and the bar of entry was quite low, "yes sir"/"no sir" RP where you get clear instructions from your leaders is very easy to get into for new players, and the teams either side were always interested in including new players. It was the same thing that was exciting in vanilla Freelancer: You undock and see a giant Rheinland ship getting exploded right in front of you and you instantly want to be a part of what's going on.
I think new players today are generally initially motivated by the same thing (the arcade shooter gameplay in Freelancer/Discovery is actually fun and engaging, even in 2021), except due to the direction the mod has taken story-wise as well as limited player numbers, new players are mostly introduced to that sort of thing by the Liberty Navy only. They trade, get some ships and join up to do some NPC missions or to hang out in a big group, but then there's practically nothing to shoot at, which results in 5 lawful ships on your tail every time you log an unlawful. It's not bad intention, it's just that they are bored and eager to play. They want to have fun but there's so little to do, so they swarm. The unlawful playstyle where absolutely everything in the game is pitted against you at all times is just not very attractive unless you enjoy constant PVP, but without anyone to regularly play the "badguys" the game will just die, there will be nothing to do but limited text chat in a one-line format and shooting NPC's. There should be a bigger incentive to *not* go the Liberty Navy route and instead choose a direct adversary to generate more activity and fun. All games with PVP elements are ruined when practically all players choose to play on 1 team, it's something to avoid like the plague.
I think a war without a clear "goodguy" and "badguy" between Liberty and another major house would be a good thing, and that capital NPC missions should be available exclusively in contested systems to spice things up a bit and introduce real risk/reward. These missions could then have their payouts continuously tweaked based on which side needs more players, i.e. if everyone is playing Liberty the payouts for cap missions are set much lower than the opposing side to incentivise more even distribution of players. It's good to have a situation where you can distribute the players that like to play "the goodguys" and do naval combat RP to two houses pitted against one another, possibly in systems with no NPC's and a lack of places to dock everywhere so there's more of an "end-game"/nullsec vibe to it. It would leave core house space more open to pirates and unlawfuls and encourage bounty hunters and Police factions to handle the internal security, while the massive navy deals with actual war. Story-wise it would also be a means to get rid of some of the base clutter many systems are riddled with.
I think another (very) good idea would be for naval factions to remove internal killboards or at the very least limit them to tagged ships and listed individuals only. The internal killboards encourage an overly aggressive style with very little roleplay, where the new player trying out an unlawful playstyle gets 0 chance of survival because the naval player has a direct interest in getting a blue to post to rank up. It's not very appealing for newbie unlawful players to be KoS by organized faction players with some PVP-training and an extreme eagerness to prove themselves, and that results in fewer unlawful players, which in turn results in less things for Navy players to do and thus an ever-increasing focus whenever anything shows up red on scanners. The internal killboards feed into a negative loop.
Aggression is incentivised through killboards and I think that's a bit problematic for Navy/Police factions, roleplay-wise too. I'm not thinking about any specific faction, but you don't have to browse the internal boards for very long to see some kills that are quite low-bar (/l1/l2 destruction of transports, newbies doing missions, people barely speaking any english/still too shy to type getting deleted in seconds etc.). I think a more lenient stance towards newbie players rather than just KoS every single time would be very positive, but currently there's too big of an incentive for Navy players to just shoot everything red in a scenario that is wildly unbalanced in their own favour.
Conflict is at the centre of almost every game (especially those with guns), it's the core of Freelancer's narrative as well; I think conflict should be used primarily as a gameplay device and then have the narrative built around that rather than vice versa. I think it is a mistake not to have a big and somewhat evenly balanced outlet for exactly that in the game.*
*Yes, HS> jumps to Liberty and provides great entertainment, but it takes some coordination and really isn't the same as a constant war with a neighbouring house.
Well not much you can do - it's not lawful/unlawful really. In Liberty there's back and forth and it's the closest house, believe me - there was recently a period when lawfuls were completely outmatched and piled, now it seems to be turning back again in lawful favour (I wouldn't say it is in fighters just yet, but in Capital ships for sure, especially since even top tier cap players are rather easily countered by bombers)
In other regions the unlawfuls reign Supreme by sheer numbers because their factions are just more fun and have better leaders than lawfuls (Kusari).
And in many reagions factions aren't seen for a long time and then masslog and dominate with both immense skill and numbers when there are objectives (sieges+events+raids) - this is the case with multiple lawful and unlawful groups that often share players.
Now, you can try whatever NPC balance magic you want, but it will just not change as the only thing that can change it in an archaic game that lacks matchmaking is one thing - goodwill of the players and communication. E.g. a leader each can arrange a rougly balanced fight if they just talk, experienced players can have sense and roughly balance sides by taking both numbers and skill differences into account and staying out etc. etc.
And of course then there's signup events.
Not intending to make this offensive but don't listen to whatever bullshit Lemon posted.
The """raids""" in Liberty(if you can even call them that) are 10 mins fights where it's either 1) unlawfuls get clapped in mere seconds sometimes 2) lawfuls lose because the unlawfuls bring out half the server so nobody will log to counter them. This is anything but fun for both sides and just leads to people turning into blue whores that'll shoot and gank anything that comes at them. A good example of this is the Gallic war which according to many bittervets was "good" and "of quality". Couldn't be much further from the truth when the actual gameplay in it was just GRN playerbase getting demolished by BAF, Outcasts, LN, Gaians etc. (Those who joined during the Enclave know even better what I mean by this)
As for the mentioned Kusari problem, MAYBE try for once to look from another opinion on what the actual situation is
All I'll say is, there have been multiple attempts to restore lawfuls to at least a playable state. All of these attemps failed because GC- and their buddies ganked everyone who dared log an unlawful out of the damn mod.
As a last thing I'll mention, the game can't be saved
It's 20 years old by now (almost) and the playerbase too small and too fractured (and I mean it seriously, out of the 150 players left, more than half are here just to complain and have pixels)
Enjoy it while you can and use the opportunity to make it better, at least for whatever period of time it'll still be in a playable state.
raids are only enjoyable when there's similar numbers and similar varieties of ships
a pack of bombers dropping on a lone cap or six battleships and battlecruisers dropping on a pack of fighters and gunboats on the other hand
shouldve left this thread dead btw, the fact you still lobby for jump trading is just the icing on your multi-layered bad idea cake