Survey Report & Suggestions - Printable Version

Preamble:

Firstly, sorry for this taking so long. Going through 150+ responses took longer than I expected and then making the notes for what you will see also took me longer than I thought it would. Originally I aimed for the survey to be viewed just by the staff team to identify what the community feels are the more pressing issues driving people away and 'harvest' an understanding of what people believe are the most important elements that needed to be improved. I think it is fair to say that the staff are not fully surprised by the results, but the results definitely vindicate the the need for improvement.

Special thanks to everyone who has contributed their time and effort to the survey, as well as: @Contaan, @Skorak, and unwittingly @Haste for the further contribution of ideas and suggestions beyond what was said in the survey.

NOTE: Some things may seem contradictory, and that is typically because of mixed responses from the survey results.

Chart Refresh:

You can see the full results > > here < <

To begin in earnest, here is what you voted that is pushing people away:

Community (95 votes)
Lack of RP (72 votes)
Dev Team (43 votes)
Admin Team (35 votes)
Official Factions (34 votes)
Story (34 votes)
Forum Lancering (30 votes)
Player-Owned Bases (29 votes)
Server Rules (26 votes)
Requirement of RP (20 votes)

Also, here is what you voted for what to improve:

Events - Combat/Exploration/Trading (58 votes)
RP Quality (54 votes)
Story Quality (39 votes)
Balance (33 votes)
PvE Content (31 votes)
Vision (31 votes)
Staff Team (24 votes)
Money Sinks (22 votes)
OF Benefits (21 votes)
PoBs (16 votes)
Server Rules (12 votes)
Many of the ‘Other’ votes are ‘All’ votes along with things that will be explored later.

Moving forward:

Due to the amount of information that was given, and the need to keep this smaller in length and more presentable, I will be putting each section within spoilers so that people are not greeted by a massive wall of text.

Community:

Community Section

The community has managed to identify itself as one of the main reasons why Discovery pushes people away. There then stands the question that if they know they’re the problem, why do they continue to act like they do?

The likely answer is two-fold. Not everyone is the same in the ways they discourage people from playing, and those that differ typically don’t see how their behaviour can be repulsive for people to enjoy the game or RP. The text responses centered around the following (in order of most common):

The community should be nicer to each other,
The community should stop bullying other members,
The community should stop circle-jerking,
The community should stop taking an exclusionary attitude,
The community thinks everyone else but themselves are stupid,
The community should be more willing to change its attitude,
The community should be more courteous to newer players,
The community believe OFs do not maintain high standards,
The community believe OFs are hostile to, or disregard indies too much,
The community should stop acting in the interests of Pixel Power,
The community believe PvP Aces ruin engagements,
The community insults other people for different RP styles and preferences.

Here is a few other things people suggested, that weren’t commonly stated directly but were implied (in no particular order):

Snowflakes discourage people from playing,
Having the same interactions with traders or hostiles over and over,
Community suppresses player contribution,
Community prides itself on stomping on newer or less skilled players,
Community doesn’t try to balance sides,
PvP’ers log in to attack RP’ers which then discourages them from RP’ing,
There can be conflict without needing to be an ‘arsehole’ about it,
Community looks down on Powertraders,
Community relies on attacking others with rules, instead of RP’ing creatively.

One of the biggest problems with trying to exercise out the behaviour that turns people away is to either make rules against it and begin a campaign of stamping it out. Or hope the community realises or even cares to realise the problems they cause. Unfortunately there are people in the community who genuinely do not care if they insult you, and will do it either out of habit or disregard for mutual respect. Here are the suggestions put forward to encourage improvement:

More frequent punishment for bad behaviour,
Punishments to stretch across all of the official Discovery Freelancer platforms. The Forum, the Discord, and the Game.

The likely consequences of this involve a lot of complaining from individuals hit in the effort, and perhaps they will stop playing or interacting with the community because of it. Likewise there is the issue of ‘how high’ the standard set, and how severe the punishments should be. This also ties into the Admin/Mod team and Server Rules section touched upon later.

RP & Gameplay:

It might seem strange to put these two in the same section, but hear me out. One of the main complaints in general is the lack of passive activity on the server and the lack of roleplay to boot. These two points are not exclusive, instead they are very much joined at the hip. The more passive activity you encourage, the greater chance of encountering RP. A potential consequence of not encouraging this can be seen with the RP seemingly only happening in any significant size or quality on the forums, otherwise known as forum-lancering.

Although one of the highest-listed in the charts, the number of text responses for this part is mostly complaints that the quality needs to be improved. Discovery does not lack the role-players to inject quality into the game, ironically it is mostly that they are not in game. Here is what people said about RP (listed by most common):

‘Higher’ quality RP is not in the game,
People do their RP on the forums, instead of in-game,
People log to PvP instead of RP’ing,
/1 /2 engagement lines are boring and bad quality,
Player governments are more ooRP than they are inRP,
RP reward system encourages goal-orientated RP and not organic,
Serious RP is pre-arranged, and not organic,
House Rules are tedious,
Lowest effort to obtain desired result,
Community is encouraged to rule bash instead of being creative.

Additionally, some players suggested the following but it was either one or two replies and a different understanding in the case of the first in the list:

There should be different encounters and opportunities in RP,
Staff should ensure people respect the spirit of RP,
RP shouldn’t be breaking the lore,
A guide on how to RP should be created.

Unlike the technical need for modding, in order to improve the quality of RP in-game, a combination of player interaction, creativity, and rule enforcement to set the benchmark of quality RP is necessary. Here are the suggestions to help push towards improving the RP quality:

Creation of a Lore Clarification thread/sub-forum,
Creation of a new basic guide to RP,
Updating or creation of a new Wiki,
End to the notion of 2 line engagement notice, specifically using the /1 /2. Enforce a quality level to engagement notices instead of an objective minimum. (not removing the ability to use /1 /2)
RP that is considered lore-breaking should be sanctionable, this is not meant to attack deviant RP from faction norms. Instead meant to prevent instances of lore-breaking RP from occurring.
Rewards for receiving kudos.
Community to encourage more talks to happen in-game instead of on forums.
Players can use the in-game roll system to do DM style events for their factions. (Currently this is a foreign concept to many in disco, but use of the roll system and DM'd events are the norm elsewhere.)

The consequences of this will likely be a rise in sanctions against people who are perceived to just be using the /1 /2 to do the bare minimum to then PvP. Additionally making lore-breaking RP sanctionable will require it first to pass a test of deviancy to determine if it's actually lore-breaking or breaking the norm.

Gameplay

As mentioned before, gameplay should aim to encourage passive activity which then opens up the possibility of more RP occurring in-game.Making moves to encourage activity in-game is no easy task, and will mostly require the community to shift the way it operates to help push it that way. After looking at the responses people have made in relation to gameplay, there does seem to be improvements that can be made without significant technical skill.Here is what people said (ordered by most common):

Events that motivate,
Money Sinks,
More PvE content,
Skill gap in PvP too large,
Events that have story consequence,
More relaxed way to improve pvp skill,
Stimulate the economy.

Some of these seem simpler than they are to improve, I know many people have asked for more player-determined consequences in the story and this is typically countered by a faction’s PvP skill not being representative of the faction inRP. (As a side note, coming from a different RP background than the standard for Disco, I always found it strange that no matter what character a player plays, they always have the same level of PvP skill.) Regardless, here are some of the suggestions made (in no particular order)::

Introduction of more meaningful money sinks. I think there is a missed opportunity here to introduce things to grind for by having simple cosmetic changes to ships and equipment. There is currently some in the game for engines and thrusters, but not really any for shield effects, weapon effects (Such as mines, missiles, CMs, guns etc), OF specific cosmetic variants (Not unique cosmetics for each OF, rather a unique for being an OF). Additionally on what is said below, trade events which allow for the 'donating' of money to see real in-game consequences.
Introduce more events that go beyond the standard generic combat / trade event style. (There is a current event in the works that aims to put a spin on combat events and ties into the next point),
Have more events that will have consequence to the game world. Not everything needs to be of a grand design or scale and lower-tier narratives have been intentionally ignored being deemed as "Things that happen that wouldn't draw the attention of everyone."
Improve the competency of the AI, but also reduce their numbers spawning in combat missions. (This one is tricky as I am not sure if its really possible to make the AI act in a way to allow players to passively improve their pvp skill with pve content.)
Actual matchmaking - Again, I am not sure of the feasibility of this. We all see everyone loitering in Conn, often dueling their friends and not really wanting to spar with newer or less experienced people too frequently. Perhaps there may be a way to set-up two teams automatically for a fight in conn away from the rest of the players. A regular 4v4 that people can jump into, to better their skills without the need to duel or concerns of RP might go a long way to reduce the skill gap. This has the added problem of encouraging more people to stay in conn, and get group fights this way instead of looking to RP and see one develop.
End the monotony of the equalized credits per second on non-ore commodities. While I can understand it being introduced for balance, it only has so far solidified ore as the only thing worth trading. Breaking the monotony of commodity trading would finally encourage more people to trade it when the routes are found. On top of that, make smuggling worth more, as currently it needs to compete with ore while being less profitable, typically less cargo space permitted on IDs, and much higher risk.

Staff Team & Vision:

Staff Team

The results showed that a large portion of players believe that the Dev team is pushing players away. This is in contrast to the text responses where the Admin Team was referenced heavily. Trying to deduce the reason for this centers on the idea that either people were confused and assumed the Admins were a part of the Dev Team and wanted to complain about the whole or the complaints against the Dev Team were mostly due to the story which featured in the responses. This section will not be dealing with Story or Server Rules. Here is what people responded (ordered by most commonly said):

Staff only do the bare minimum / are lazy / apathetic,
Staff are incompetent,
Staff are corrupt and/or biased,
The Community has a low-level of faith in the Admins,
Staff ignore the community,
Admins ignore problems,
Team fails to communicate with the community,
Admins do not punish harmful members of the community,
Admins do not know how to moderate,
Admins are too strict with SRPs (The opposite has also been mentioned),
Admins take themselves too seriously and not seriously at the same time,
If staff are no longer interested in the game, they should no longer hold a position,

Unlike the many complaints about the Staff team, ways in which to improve the system were not all that frequent. But some did surface within the responses such as (in no particular order):

Remove inactive or barely-active Admins,
Staff should be more transparent,
Staff should be more responsible,
Admins need to designate someone responsible for resolving sanctions,
Gear towards promotion of RP and fairplay over rule bashing,
Ditch the current ‘old way’ mentality,
Split the team into Server Management and RP Moderators. (This one seems rather strange, and would likely need more developing beyond just stating it here to really understand the idea),
Respect your moderators

Balance Specific:
This might seem better placed into the gameplay section, and I did debate having it there. But since it was directed at a section of the Dev Team, and by that a section of the Staff Team I put it here instead. A portion of the Dev Team complaints also accompanied issues with balance, although this was a small portion when compared to the majority which was about Story.

Tech cells are bad,
Bomber rework is bad / Bomber rework is good (around equal measure),
Balance decisions orientate around the few not the many,
Ships feel too similar,
PvP takes too long,
Make more cool things,
Make it easier for newer players to contribute to fights.

Balance is a tricky beast to tackle. There is a large element of skill and experience involved in some of the ways to conduct PvP in the game and due to the low population count you are more likely to encounter someone who has dedicated more time and effort into being a stronger PvP player. Either way, here were some suggestions:

Simplify tech cells to 100% and 10% or remove (ID restrictions apply),
Balance instead for the many, not the few (Disco focus should be on RP, not the competitive scene. An extreme and radical example would be to remove strafe),
Consider the removal of Nanobots and adjust balance accordingly,
Rework capital ships to shorten the time to kill (Cruiser rework in the works),
Make more cool things

Some explanation for the “Extreme & Radical” example: One of the greatest tools currently in use to avoid taking damage in almost all PvP is strafing. Although the removal of it will have major consequences, it would in theory allow newer players to deal more damage to better players, but also means more can be dealt to them. Testing with it may produce better results..

Systems Specific:
You should know the drill by now!

Systems need to encourage exploration,
Removal / rework of systems has removed good aspects of the game,
Systems reduction of systems is catering to the PvP’ers,
Need better jump connections,
Takes too long to get around.

A lot of what has been complained about for systems leans on opinion; certain camps of players do not like to see many systems they need to fly through to find people. Likewise others want more systems to explore instead of having the same ones over and over again but perhaps invaded by assets from a different system to boot. It’s difficult to see a way to appease both sides, but perhaps there is one. Here are the suggestions:

More details, nicer compositions, and more environmental story-telling,
Orientate towards the use of highways and ‘system clusters’ to develop exploration but allow for quick travel along the ‘main’ routes,
Following on from above, use the highway junctions as chokepoints for trade flow,
Shrink the size of some of the more egregious system sizes,
Stop the removal or merging of systems.

Exploration always comes from the discovery of something new. While this does not really require a new system to explore, we are missing out on a large part of what a space game is if we spite the idea because of travel times. Travel times could be addressed by approaching the layout of certain systems to allow for quicker travel on the ‘highways’ and the further you proceed from them the more frontier-like the systems become. This does already exist to some extent but systems are not clustered and the addition of more systems with the current style leads to warping of connections.

Economy Specific:
This section shares overlap with gameplay.

Better money sinks are needed (this was mentioned -a lot-),
Economy is stagnant,
Smuggling is high risk, low reward,
Too few things left to trade or mine,

The majority of the complaints for the economy centered around two points. The first one being a lack of money sinks and the second one is that it is stagnant. By stagnant it is meant that there is little change of worth that makes the economy more dynamic, thereby making the route more boring. Here are the suggestions:

The use of cosmetic changes to ships and gun effects to create money sinks,
Perhaps allow OFs to purchase unique ships/equipment with cosmetic changes for their factionlines (not every OF gets its own cosmetic variant),
Rotate a boost to commodity routes to the same level or exceed the level of ore to add something different,
Make smuggling more profitable.

Ore currently dominates the money-making scene, and there are a lot of them to choose from. I would argue a lot of the problems with the economy is discovery comes from the reliance on ores as the most reliable way of making big bucks. Ores themselves rarely change location, rarely require you to use different routes and more or less encourage the same back and forth as a trader. This is both good and bad as it makes you more predictable for a pirate but it means you mostly see the same scenery over and over again.

Vision

I feel it best to do some explaining here as to the current situation with the Discovery hierarchy as it is now compared to how it was before. Once upon a time the server arguably had two figures at the top, Durandal and Xalrok. Certain decisions under their leadership were very controversial and mired the story for years. They both left, giving the reigns to Lanakov (who was an active serviceman in the French military.). For about a year the one guy with the authority and responsibility over Disco was absent due to irl, Disco carried on under the guidance of the Head Admin & Devs which it continues to do today. To explain a little more, the Head Admin along with the Head Devs currently operate as council of leadership for Discovery Freelancer, and they have been doing so in the absence of Lanakov as well.

What does this have to do with vision? You may wonder. When people responded to the survey and opted to choose 'Vision' it came in two forms: Firstly and most commonly 'Having a vision' was expressed. Secondly, 'Singular vision' was also listed. The difference between comes to who has the authority and responsibility for Discovery, but both are really asking for what is the direction we are going. For those that never saw, > here < is Lanakov's address to the community.

So what do we do?
Currently the leadership of Discovery is not good at communicating to the community what they want to do, or want to try to do. You could go as far as to say the team doesn't work cohesively, but that would be mostly speculation on my part. So long as an agreed direction among those with authority is followed and the community can see this I believe this can resolve the vision issue.

If you have spoken to me before about this, I have said Discovery needs a leader. The recent examples have not been very good at showing to the community this is a good idea, but in almost every project I can fathom that has not stagnated itself to death, there has always been a singular person where the buck stops. Having a bad choice can be equally or even more so damaging to the community in the same stride as having one could take Discovery out of its rut.

Story:

Story

Official Factions:

OFs

Sever Rules & IDs:

Rules and ID

Ending note:

If the number of responses are to be believed then there is over 100 people who are willing to take a survey on Discovery Freelancer and coincidentally to become reinvested into the server. I believe it's fair to say that Discovery has potential but people wish to see if it is truly worth their investment of time. Of course this also runs into two sides who disagree about one important element that the server advertises itself on, RP. The current climate and expectation of RP on Discovery are fairly low, with very little to no moderation unless someone reports it on the forums and even then this could potentially take months to resolve. Additionally, the minimal RP oversight sets the tone that the server merely parades itself as an RP server, but never takes itself seriously enough to be one. It becomes understandable that the path of least resistance keeps being taken, to not even bother with the game.

To conclude, there are a number of suggestions that are included in this thread that could improve Discovery overall without changing anything dramatically, although I doubt superficial changes would really do much to reverse the decline. It is now up to the community, staff included, to maintain the status quo or to push on and perhaps give Discovery another huzzah, preferably one lasting more than a COVID lockdown.

Lastly, this thread covers the most prominent responses but not all. So feel free to post alternative suggestions below if you have them.