Discovery Gaming Community

Hello Disco people, long time no threads of mine with (stupid ) ideas.

CAUTION: Long post ahead. If you lack the attention span to read it please don't bother commenting on it.
Suggestions on how to format this for better readability are welcomed.

Introduction

I recently noticed the rise of popularity of a certain militaristic corporation from the Omicrons among our indie population. And that got me thinking:

What is it that makes people flock to just a small set of corps (usually unofficial factions and a couple of OFs with their own IDs) and not even trying to play several vanilla corporations of Freelancer at all (hello to Synth Foods & Cryer, our newest vanilla revival attempts) ?

Why are people mostly playing Freelancers and Zoners for casual trade despite their supposed disadvantages?

Why is every corporation in Disco played just like a regular Mom & Pops bussiness instead of a ruthless hypercapitalistic giant hellbent on crushing their opposition by any (economic) means necessary?

Is it just that people don't want to be tagged while (silent) trading ? Is it the trade routes ? The rep of those factions ? The "why should I have a boss in the virtual world, if I already have one IRL" mentality ? The mining bonuses ?

Let's try and gain some insights through a short analysis.

The IDs


At first glance most IDs appear to be viable to be played regularly. Many of them share a similar set of limitations, and a few of them stand out by their advantages or disadvantages. Let us compare category by category.

Piracy opportunities

First, the ability to pirate other corporate entities. Now, nobody in Disco seems to think of corporations as ruthless pirates, but the dystopian world of Freelancer should offer plenty of opportunity for intimidation, price dumping and straight out shady bussiness among the corps.

Among the IDs there seems to be three broad categories regarding piracy:

• The corps that have no pirate lines
  
• The House Corps that tend to get along between themselves and only pirate in times of tensions between Houses
  
• The Corps that tend to pirate their inter House and intra-House rivals
  

Liberty Corps tend to be peaceful and avoid piracy, Gallia Corps pirate their external enemies while there are plenty of opportunities for both internal and external strife in the case of Bretonia, Rheinland and Kusari corporations.

Tau oriented Corps seem to be the best bets for those who want a taste of corporate piracy.


Law enforcement lines

Most Corporations don't have these, but the quasi-militaristic ones organised as various Guilds seem to have them at the expense of some other ability.


Cargo demands

Many Corps have none of these. The ones that tend to operate in the Edge and Border Worlds seem to have them, but they often target unlawful entities who don't even trade (or smuggle) often.


Cargo size limitations

The standard is to have no cargo size restriction for Corps. Quasi - militaristic corps and Guilds tend to have their transport ships restricted in exchange for bigger combat ships (or in other cases, more neutrality against Unlawfuls)


Mining bonuses

There are also 3 broad categories here.

• Some Corps purely do shipping and no mining
  
• Some focus only on local or specialised mining
  
• Others are primarily mining oriented with bonuses on many Ores.
  

Hostile reps

This is one of the most blandest categories, I assume because of gameplay reasons. Most corps only tend to only have the common Criminals as enemies. Also KOI being so hostile to anyone seems like a Guard rep leftover ?

Special

The pattern here is that purely shipping Corps get bonuses to their freight and some Corps get access to special ships.

Comments based on player / faction activity

Let's take the last tracker data as a base of our observations

Gallic Metal Service (Unofficial) 28d 03:05:42
Independent Miners Guild 14d 10:55:59
Borderworlds Exports 13d 18:15:16
Gateway Shipping Inc. 12d 11:49:36
Phoenix 11d 10:23:06
Daumann Heavy Construction 10d 13:09:32
Universal Shipping Incorporated 9d 19:41:15
Orbital Spa and Cruise 8d 10:16:31
Omicron Supply Industries 6d 19:26:20
Samura Heavy Industries 6d 13:32:05
Kruger Minerals 5d 04:10:43
Front de Liberation de Gallia 4d 21:39:03
EFL S.P.A 4d 20:29:43
Bretonia Mining and Fabrication 3d 14:09:05
Gas Miners Guild 3d 08:59:46
Bristol Constructions 3d 03:09:52
Deep Space Engineering 2d 23:17:32
Ageira Innovations 1d 11:56:30
Planetform, Inc. 2d 11:17:13 Yes Second Failure
Interspace Commerce 1d 04:46:08 Yes Second Failure
IDF Shipping 10:58:00 Yes Second Failure

One can observe that purely shipping companies tend to do worse than the mining ones. Seeing as the best profit source for shipping companies is POB and manufacturing supplies, which the players tend to prefer to ship themselves anyway, it is easy to deduce why purely shipping corps are not that popular among players.

Nonetheless, the companies operating in high POB density areas (e.g. Bretonia, Liberty and its border) tend to still easily sail past the minimum tracker requirements.


Piracy opportunities

Since most players don't seem to pay much attention to this category or even seem to prefer Corp IDs without any pirate lines we can conclude it is not currently considered very important for Corporate gameplay. Which is sad. Because pure Pirates are also rare today.


Law enforcement lines

The Core seems to be the most popular for this among the indies, no doubt owing to large traffic of traders and malicious wrongdoers in the Omicrons.


Cargo demands

I have no idea how much has this line been used (if any?) in reality. I have personally witnessed it only being used once. Must be because the demands are often focused on smuggled commodities and smugglers are really rare. And it does not make much sense to try to intercept a smuggler in a fat transport without a CD anyway.


Cargo size limitations

This is also pretty bland. Why would I, as a player, choose a shipping corp over a mining corp if I can do both with a mining ID with very little (or even no) disadvantage ?


Mining bonuses

The smartest move here is obviously to choose a Corp that has the highest numbers in the Ores I am interested in mining. Not that miners are that expensive to set up, so one could obviously have them for all corps pretty easily.


Hostile reps

Players seem to value neutrality above everything else. In the real world (mining) corporations pay all sorts of rackets, taxes and insurance to avoid losses and keep their competitive advantage. The closest thing that comes to that in Disco is the POB fees, if the player run corporate faction happens to own one.

Yet most POBs in Disco are actually Zoner or Freelancer owned. The reason for this becomes obvious if we look at the Zoner reps. Zoners are neutral to the strongest criminal factions and the House factions (both lore, gameplay and playerbase wise) and thus the easiest way to avoid taxes and piracy of any sorts. Corp IDs / corporate 5K transports can still be used to supply Freelancer / Zoner POBs, so there is really no (gameplay) reason to choose any other POB rep aside from Zoners.



Special

Not much can be said about this. Players still tend to avoid Corps that only have shipping bonuses going for them. Yet Ageira is still fairly popular with the access to their special ship and commodities.

Improvement ideas

Now I'm just going to throw out some ideas in a quite disorganised fashion as something that seems like it would be interesting to experiment with:

Lowering cost of civilian ships and equipment

Any decently profitable Corp in Sirious should be able to afford at least some escort ships stationed in various Edge and Border World bases.

This would make piracy harder, but maybe also more rewarding (maybe pirates could make bigger demands) and more thrilling for the wannabe Pirate.


Reorganising POB supplies / routes to favor Shipping companies instead of unafilliated entitites

For Example, in Lore the Zoners only deal in mundane necessities like Water, Oxygen and Food Rations, and tend to buy everything else from House Corps still (such as biodomes from Synth Foods).

Reworking sellpoints so the equipment and module manufacturing supplies would be available mostly in House Space would lessen the self-sustainability of the Zoners and make them more reliant on Unlawfuls, Freelancers and various House Corps, thus promoting more interactions between them.


Increasing the price of some POB supplies

And by some I mean mostly the stuff that is available almost everywhere, such as various types of fuel. GMG would especially benefit from this, as some players / POB owners would, for example, opt to contract GMG for their fuel deliveries instead of wasting both money and time to ship it to their POB. Fuel is only used when a base is under siege anyway, so not much of a change here.


Adding lines to (cargo) pirate Freelancers and Zoners to Corps

Corps are supposed to be big bullies in Freelancer, seeking the highest possible margins, and almost falling short of using guns to achieve this, but as an indie Freelancer I can say I've almost never felt this pressure. Maybe add an option for corps to (cargo ?) pirate Freelancers and Zoners when using snubs (and / or freighters). Would promote teamwork and make Corp snubs and freighters more appealing to play.


Adding TLAGSNET ability to various Criminal factions

Now you might think, how could buffing Pirates make corps better or more popular ? The psychology is simple, people tend to group up in a herd when they feel threatened. Corps, especially with their wast fleets of escort craft, should be the first groups a new player should encounter and run to, when they want to be saved from big bad pirates.

According to Lore, only Lane Hackers should have this. But they sell various data to other criminals and I feel this should be represented by gameplay options. For example Mollys, Rogues, Unioners, Outcasts and GC could get at least access to /showscan.


Reworking reps and sellpoints so that mining companies have a harder time shipping the goods they produce to the sellpoints

And by this I would suggest making sellpoints for various Ores in the House space of a competing mining Corp. For example let's take Aluminium. Both Daumann and Kruger have quite good mining rates for it.

But they sell to Bretonia to a completely unrelated affiliation, thus they can make the trip themselves. If instead they would be forced to rely on a third party (Imperial ?) because the sellpoint was in a competing mining corp that they could not dock with easily it would be a boon for the Shipping companies to also get part of the activity. And would also make the mining corps suck up to the shipping corps (and vice versa) to keep their profits high.


As always, thoughts, suggestions, criticisms, prayers welcome.

As the Ageira 1iC, Ageira has his own ship, that is the special of the NPC/Official Faction.

First of all I feel like you're making a mistake by assuming Freelancer is some kind of bleak dystopia. Actually, in terms of general outlook, the universe of Freelancer is quite positive, it's just that 99% of roleplay these days is edgy and niche. I can only speculate why that is.

Quote:What is it that makes people flock to just a small set of corps (usually unofficial factions and a couple of OFs with their own IDs) and not even trying to play several vanilla corporations of Freelancer at all (hello to Synth Foods & Cryer, our newest vanilla revival attempts) ?

Mining bonuses, pob supplying and grinding credits. That's literally what most corporate RP is about. The so called "smaller corps" like Cryer and Synth are unable to mine and therefore never had much success in finding players. There is roleplay potential in all of them but there is not all that much to do. I know a little bit about it as I led one of the more successful attempts at Cryer in recorded Disco history.

Wisp functioned as a Cryer faction in game only because of a) a large population of Outcasts and Cardamine smugglers at the time and b) a line which allowed Cryer to shoot any Outcasts anywhere. This made it a sort of lawful Corsairs. Once that line was removed because of butthurt, the faction died literally overnight, despite quite a substantial amount of forum RP that was done during that time. You can listen to my conversation with Spazzy from 2015 to learn a bit more about it here.

Quote:Why are people mostly playing Freelancers and Zoners for casual trade despite their supposed disadvantages?

No rephacks. Freedumz. And also because you can actually play them as you like. And because Zoners have good routes and are rarely bothered by anyone because NEUTRALITY. And also the ease of /renameme once you get caught smugglering.

Quote:Why is every corporation in Disco played just like a regular Mom & Pops bussiness instead of a ruthless hypercapitalistic giant hellbent on crushing their opposition by any (economic) means necessary?

Because many of us already have to deal with these in real life and it's nice to do something else for a change. And also I think if you ever spend some time around any kind of people from the upper management of any kind of larger corporation you will find they are less like ruthless hypercapitalistic giants and more like something taken straight out of The Office (US).

Also we've had to deal with the same old Freelancer corporations for almost 20 years now. It's a lot more fun to roleplay a small mom&pop business that operates as a subsidiary of a megacorp because it has a personal touch and you have more opportunity.

I actually quite like the idea of allowing corps to pirate Zoners and Freelancers, I think it's worth a trial run at least. I also think restricting some of them by rephacks would be nice but this might not work out all that well given that people are very attached to their pixel assets and pixel power these days. The rest of your ideas don't really sound like they would have all that much impact on the game.

Tbh I think the main issue is lack of motivation and ideas. Every trade faction has something they can offer for people who know how to use such resources, its just depending in people how they will use it, will they have motivation to keep it going and eventually extend or they give up as soon as start failing.

Okay, I'm a long-time corporate player so I appreciate this analysis, and I'll throw in a few thoughts.

Corporate activity has generally been pretty volatile, and there traditionally hasn't been any clearly determining factors for which specific corporate factions flourish and which do not. Over the last ten years, the most overwhelmingly active corporate faction was IMG, but that was primarily due to active leadership and recruitment, not due to any great advantages in the ID.
Indeed, there have been periods of dominant activity by corporate factions with objectively bad IDs with no mining and suboptimal rephacks, such as Planetform.

Rather than there being anything inherently wrong with corporate IDs, I think the two main reasons why corporate factions struggle with activity these days are economic: Ultimately, even if a corporation is playing militantly and engages in piracy and combat, most people looking to join a corporate faction will do so primarily to make money, and the bulk of faction activity for corporations will almost always be trade.
The two reasons why this has become a problem are as follows.

One, PVE is generally more viable as an income source. It pays more and is more engaging as an activity. And two, there's a lot less need to make money. Partially, this is because a lower proportion of the playerbase is new and in need of money, and partially this is because a fully kitted out capship costs 703 million credits less than it used to. (Edit: Although far less important, it's worth noting that snubs are also much cheaper to make these days)
So if you can make money faster by doing PVE, and you don't even need that money anyway because caps are so cheap to make now, why bother trading? You're only doing it for the RP, and that's not going to be enough for a lot of people.

This has resulted in a game environment that simply doesn't have trade as an activity focus anymore. If you browse the playerlist, you'll probably see traders on it, but almost every instance of an actual group that's doing a group activity will be either roleplay or combat. The cycle then perpetuates itself: You'll look at the list and think, hm, I could go trading. Alone. Probably not even encountering anyone. Or, I could log a ship to roleplay or shoot people, which has a far greater chance of meeting that goal.

The IDs are generally fine, although I would like to see more generous piracy lines on corporate IDs. "Can engage in piracy against non-allied corporate ships outside of house space" could be put on every corporate ID. And their engagement lines could be made more generous as well, with "ships belonging to factions considered hostile be [house]" being replaced by "hostile to [faction]", which could make it easier for corporations to log for combat if they have active enemies.

But overall, the problems corporations are facing are due to other factors not related to them directly.

Corporate Piracy
Very few people are interested in it. Those that do are probably those that play Pirate Characters anyway.
So making Corporations able to pirate Zoners and Freelancers isn't going to do much other than give those who pirate anyway, more customers.
Just look at how much Corporate Piracy happens in the Taus to see how successful implementing this would be.

Shipping Corporations
There is next to no difference between the OF IDs and the Indy IDs.
With a OF Tag, you do in some way paint a target on your back.
As an Indy, you can basically do what you want with no repercussions ie do smuggling.

Mining Factions
As the Lead for one of the most active Mining Faction I can say:
1) Most of our ships don't actually transport ores to sell points - those Faction Members that do, mainly transport Ores using other IDs.
2) Most of our Customers are Indies flying Corporation ID'ed Ships.

Piracy
Very contentious issue.
1) Pirates complain of AFK Powertraders
2) Traders complain of 5milordie Pirates. I have met a lot of pirates in my travels and most are of this category (it almost feels like they are pushing for a reason to collect that blue). You see them log in just as you enter a system and then log off just as you leave the system after paying them. I always feel cheated in the 0 interaction other than the: 5milordie demand - you try to make some conversation - they say "you have 5 seconds to pay" - you pay the pirate - then carry on with journey.
3) Get an Escort - on a dwindling Community, not always easy to do. From experience, Pirate ignores the Escort and goes for the kill on the Trader anyway.
Pirate complains about using an Escort that scouts out ahead as this is just avoiding interaction.

Now with the Battlezones and potential to earn 100+ million per hour and collect 200+ million worth of guns/thrusters when they drop, Trading doesn't appeal much to people as a way to make credits. You are generally left with those that are new and trying to earn their credits, so they can buy their Battleships (generally hauling Ores) or those who Trade to chill out and mostly just transport normal commodities (oh! and those that are keeping their POBs supplied).

Is there a way to improve it?

I don't really think so.

The whole System would have to be built from the ground up again, where everything would actually be 'balanced' and not where one way is so heavily weighted to attract most of the interest.

Corporate piracy is tough, as you can go after more IDs with better ships on other IDs
And there's annoyances like e.g. Dublin where you used to be able to pirate being reclassified to House space so e.g. IMG can't even touch BMM taking gold from an IMG gold field.

People also get confused and don't get what's happening when you do corporate pirate a competitive miner etc- this is how rare it is and people don't like when corporations act like pirates when 97% of the time they don't, and tend to get confused+annoyed. Look at Taus where people seem to be oblivious they can freely cooperate between military and corporate IDs where Corporations target transports with piracy... This failed experiment proved how little people care about corporate piracy, I don't think it's worth investing much time globally. Let specific trading/mining OFs request added piracy lines and be open to them if they care but that's about it I think.

EDIT: Also
We clearly need to do a lot more outreach lol. FLG and Maquis are Extremist Revolutionaires with newly gained military defected to them. I know when normal (read: non Gallia playing) people see us in their houses it's on convoys and propaganda freighters and could mistake us for a trading faction but damn - we need to raise more awareness.



EDIT2: also because of the allied defense line all corporations could literally join any fight anywhere as long as someone neutral+ groups with them regardless of Zoi. But besides Karst who keeps yeeting our [RM] and Kruger with GMG on his ALG and occasional Ageira combat in Liberty again nobody cares. The IDs are very strong, it's just that people generally don't join corporations to be combat oriented.

When many combat factions, have their own supply fleet or just use have members fly indy's to get materials there is probably little incentive for many players to join OF.

In fact probably more disincentives as using an OF tag is an advert for piracy and you will not suffer any real consequences if caught smuggling or bending ID rules.

There are still a number of trading factions on the tracker maybe those who want this way are saturated with current population.

Maybe make all >3600 hold trade graft run a corporate banner?

(01-04-2022, 09:21 PM)Relation-Ship Wrote: [ -> ]Corporate piracy is tough, as you can go after more IDs with better ships on other IDs
And there's annoyances like e.g. Dublin where you used to be able to pirate being reclassified to House space so e.g. IMG can't even touch BMM taking gold from an IMG gold field.

People also get confused and don't get what's happening when you do corporate pirate a competitive miner etc- this is how rare it is and people don't like when corporations act like pirates when 97% of the time they don't, and tend to get confused+annoyed. Look at Taus where people seem to be oblivious they can freely cooperate between military and corporate IDs where Corporations target transports with piracy... This failed experiment proved how little people care about corporate piracy, I don't think it's worth investing much time globally. Let specific trading/mining OFs request added piracy lines and be open to them if they care but that's about it I think.

EDIT: Also

Spoiler

We clearly need to do a lot more outreach lol. FLG and Maquis are Extremist Revolutionaires with newly gained military defected to them. I know when normal (read: non Gallia playing) people see us in their houses it's on convoys and propaganda freighters and could mistake us for a trading faction but damn - we need to raise more awareness.



EDIT2: also because of the allied defense line all corporations could literally join any fight anywhere as long as someone neutral+ groups with them regardless of Zoi. But besides Karst who keeps yeeting our [RM] and Kruger with GMG on his ALG and occasional Ageira combat in Liberty again nobody cares. The IDs are very strong, it's just that people generally don't join corporations to be combat oriented.

Yeah, I agree with almost all of that, at least the analytical part, maybe not the conclusions.

Corporate piracy and combat lines should be more generous so people actually use them and get comfortable with the idea that these factions can engage in gameplay other than just trading.
This is partially a player issue of people simply not doing something they already can, and partly a rules issue of somewhat more restrictive IDs and rules, such as the aforementioned Dublin having ceased to be a piracy zone.

But the economic problem also plays into this. If people were really motivated to log corporate ships in the Taus to do mining, maybe they could spark conflicts with competing corps, and they might at that point also realize that they can cooperate with military forces with the corporate ally line.
But they aren't, so they don't, and the Tau conflict -currently probably the most active conflict zone- remains the exclusive domain of military IDs.

I would like to see corporation ID's get more sandbox abilities, and I think that could be done with a few small things.

First of all, corporations don't really have many places that are exclusively their frontier. And literally. We could use some new solar systems that are freshly being colonized, but perhaps they are 'so far out' no house navy can send anything, so a system with two corporation ID's having a starting base, and a bunch of planets or moons to 'colonize' would mean the best ID to use for those areas would be the corporation ID in question. Say a new star system was added between Kusari and Liberty, supposed to be out away from Sirius a bit but technically link via JH. So you could put a DSE base and a Samura base, and let them compete over colonizing the system, over mining rights, etc. That situation could be done for a bunch of different combos. Even without new systems, that could be allowed for existing places that still could be 'colonized'.

Which leads me to my next point, similar to a battle system, a simple inrp development system could be used to let factions earn new planet/moon bases like docking rings/mooring fixtures. Let DSE then mine or buy the scidata to get a trade event to try to build a docking ring, or a mooring fixture. Technically, there could be an event just to get a starting atmospheric entry point. The same could and should be done with jumpgates. We complain we have a dead game... What
we need is an administration that can run events so it really is the player corps shipping all the time to build jumpgates, even trade lanes! We're throwing away activity all the time by removing the point of flying. When one corp gets ahead and starts a building project, there will always be a competitor, or unlawfuls, looking to take matters into their own hands.

Also, for these ID's, we could use more exclusive consumable, practical commodities. Things that have a need, that only corporation IDs can transport well (easily, maybe legally), so people will need to go to these groups for supplies. I suggested a long time ago they add the need for POB's to consume either Armaments or Munitions to respawn WP's. Meaning, during a siege, for a base to keep its WP's respawning after each time its taken out, they'd need X units (say 200) in stock to respawn the WP. If you kept 5000 units of munitions aboard, that's 25 respawns. They'd just have to make it so when a WP is destroyed, it won't respawn unless there's at least 200 units of the ammo on board. If a base can't remain stocked, even with a bunch of defense modules, it will eventually stop re-spawning WP's. Ex. If you have 4 WP's, once you hit 0 munitions, the WP's will not respawn, and you could take them out one by one, removing the threat while the base is kept empty of ammo.

That would add more purpose to the need to run ammo and technically a base could be 'neutralized' by being blockaded and depleted of munitions. The first step in every siege, would first be about taking out the WP's, and blocking any further runs of munitions (as well as shield fuel and repair materials). Not to mention, captured ammo could be used by the interdicting side. I think, with how fast core levels can be built and WP's can be deployed these days, it would be a good balancing factor for POB's, on top of spreading out the work to Corporate ID's.

And I know it might be a more work, but if repair ships could also be useable on POB's, and they could be changed to only be usable by corporate ID's, that would make hiring a Corporation to both help repair and supply POB's more attractive.