(12-31-2018, 09:58 PM)Skorak Wrote: Most MMORPGs don't have a single bit of player driven story.

(12-31-2018, 10:03 PM)Skorak Wrote: You managed to name two out of hundreds of MMORPGs that have somewhat player driven story. And even there it's not player driven properly.

There's like missions that you can work to complete. A preset story line the players can explore.

Mentioning Star Citizen for anything until it's done is kinda... irrelevant.

(12-31-2018, 10:58 PM)Grumblesaur Wrote: TL;DR: Yes, you should roleplay, but don't expect to be Superman and leap tall buildings with a single bound.

Discovery gives a lot of people the impression of being a "big fish in a small pond" due to the limitations of Freelancer's engine, the relative smallness of the playerbase, the relative ease with which a player can travel from one end of the galaxy map to another (you can get from Picardy to Omicron Gamma in 11 jumps -- perhaps even fewer -- for example), and the general goofiness in scale for the distances between planets and differences in size between small ships, large ships, stations, and planet(oid)s, but there's really a lot that we don't see. We're not exactly small fish in a big pond -- it's more like we're big fish on an ocean planet.

Each player has the capacity to affect their local ecosystem drastically, especially by joining up with a faction, or making a faction. I remember periods of frequent Omicron Alpha and Omicron Gamma raids, often back to back. Days of Rheinland battleships sneaking into Texas looking to wrestle with the [LN]. Hordes of traders lining up at the (long since removed) Sigma-13 jump hole in New Berlin, preparing to run diamonds through Blood Dragon territory into Kusari. When the =CR= was still just a BSG fanfic faction stirring up the Taus.

And when you're playing in those roles, when you're leading the charge or the convoy or the colonization effort, you feel like you should be rewarded for your efforts. More than just faction officialdom, more than just a custom shipline -- you want canonization of the events that transpired in-game, you want to be history and change the future. To some extent, the developers want to give you that agency to write history.

But the developers are not just mod maintenance technicians, otherwise it'd still be 4.84 and the Bounty Hunter capital ships would all still be Star Wars imports. The Waran would still be tremendously hideous. Freelancers would still be flying Advanced Trains full of cardamine direct to Manhattan, and the Akegata would still be a toxic waste symbol put through a taffy puller. They're also here to design a surprisingly-still-living game. A big part of a game is creating tension, and giving players things to do. Sometimes what they do to create tension seems totally in contradiction to how the game is actually played, or seems to be played anyway. During the hours that I'm active, a Gallic player, or even just a player in a Gallic system, is a rare sight, yet Gallia is a huge sprawling space kingdom with enough warfighting power to put Cold War Russia to shame.

I would assume the devs want our feedback, but they also have a story they're trying to tell, with some room to bend, but they can't bend all the way backwards. So a lot of folks who play faction-aligned characters (and most of us probably have at least one) get upset, especially if they're in (or running) the official faction that's currently getting the shaft. Because what about all our hard work? What about all the roleplay we did? What about those events we won? It feels like a betrayal. But it's not.

Maybe the devs have their favorites, or maybe they're just working off a secret plan left behind by Igiss detailing the progression of the Discovery story into the 2020s. Whatever, who cares. We have to remember that we're just a few people. We're just a few pilots. Yeah, sure, there are players who have been the heads of state of various houses, or the senior executives of corporations, or what have you, but there's only so much a modest faction of 8 or 10 people can do. Do you really represent the hundreds of thousands or millions of people your faction claims to represent, or are you just a small, elite segment? Do your actions truly affect whole planets and systems, or is this all in a conference room in the upper deck of your liner?

My experience with Discovery is largely tilted by having played in many minor, unofficial factions, or official factions that were only a portion of the home culture they originated from. You might be able to go rooting through my ancient posts and find me complaining about some faction being on the receiving end of some favoritism, or on the group I was in getting the shaft from some new dev decision, but I'm largely of the opinion now that if you feel like your hard work is getting dunked on by the dev team, you either had too-high expectations of what you or your faction deserved and was capable of from the outset, or you don't see how a new twist in the story might be better for so many other players. Sometimes even when you roll a critical hit, the answer to "can I do [x]?" is still "no", just because the premise made the action impossible in the first place.

RP is worth the effort if you're getting a sense of personal satisfaction out of getting to pretend to be someone else for a while, but if you base that satisfaction on changing the story, maybe you should be the dungeon master instead of the player. Players get to make decisions on what they want to do, but the dungeon master gets to decide how the cause-and-effect plays out.

(12-31-2018, 08:48 PM)Durandal Wrote: Is it necessary for you to gain something through RP for you to enjoy the experience? If so, I feel as though you may want to re-evaluate your experience here.