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+--- Thread: Thoughts on the "Fun Group" attitude evolution on Disco (/showthread.php?tid=124551)
RE: Thoughts on the "Fun Group" attitude evolution on Disco - Durandal - 01-29-2015
The biggest change between 4.84/earlier versions and 4.85/later versions was that the attitude existed that Discovery was not a vanilla Freelancer mod. New things could be done, and this was not only okay, it was encouraged and engaged in by the people who were at the top of Discovery's administration at the time. You had people who were a part of that particular clique (RoS, Phantoms), people who were actually somewhat against them ([HF], I think CR but I don't know quite enough about the CR to comment), and people who were kind of just in the middle. Regardless of your position, adding new stuff to Discovery was encouraged.
Then 4.85 rolled along.
I think what happened here is a certain stigma arose against these factions due to them becoming cults of personality to an extent, that would wax and wane depending on the leadership at the time, and also lacked indies to support any meaningful claim to their existence. There were a myriad of other factors as well of course, such as the introduction of Gallia and the fact that a number of these factions were being run by people who either went heavily against the grain of Discovery's intended goals, or were a conglomerate of people who ran the place. I don't think the attitude of "Discovery is too big, play an existing faction, keep things vanilla" has been helpful at all here, as vanilla factions wax and wane just as much depending on leaderships as the previous closed ones. I think it was a situation that was handled poorly and could've been largely alleviated by more dev/non vanilla faction talk to better integrate them into the mod, and having a clear cut mission goal for Discovery, other than "this is a roleplay server" which incredible vague and can be interpreted many different ways.
Ultimately, that's the only real difference that comes to mind. I don't think it's a good idea to go back now that the community has changed drastically and is strongly in favor of the way things are now. I still think having a clear cut mission statement for Discovery would save newer players a lot of grief when trying to do something that doesn't conform to Discovery's agenda. I probably would've clashed heads with Discovery's administration and development teams a lot less if such a statement had been in place from the start, and either played the game for what it was or not at all rather than constantly trying to fight for something new.
The only other notable thing I can think of is that pvp used to be seen as something that was normal and part of the server, not seperated from RP. Whereas now like Blodo said, official factions have become a little bit biased against shootery and consequently have worse pilots who are more interested in simply talking. Doesn't make either right or wrong, just an observation.
So while the attitude towards what's acceptable and what isn't has changed around a bit, the people really haven't.
Edit: Was digging through Joe's post history and didn't realize I sort of gravedug this, but it's still somebody else's perspective on the situation so np.