Question to the community

[R.P.Curator]

If this was an incognito survey:
- age: I am 40 and my reflexes are way past their prime. Snub PVP ace or even good is grinding and grueling. Its tiring for the hands and eyes. After 8-10 hours of work in front of the desktop, to focus on hitting a small, fast moving target while dodging and deploying/countering mines at the same time for 30-40 minutes or more is not my cup of tea.
- reason: why? What good does it serve me to train and be a Snub PVP ace? I have nothing to prove to anyone but myself and it's not something I want for myself as per the answer above.
- time: I don't have the time or the motivation to allocate hours into ConnBotting.
I did try to get good at PVP when I joined Weskers RHA back in 2018.
I stopped cause I left Discovery. Now I will not go down that path again, I won't even bother. I got better things to do with my time on Discovery, like having "Oinkers" in my engagement lines.

[Ravenna Nagash]

Main reasons:

• Lack of time.
  
  
• The investment in time doesn't justify the cost.
  
  
• There are other competing games for my time that I am more interested in.
  

I started in Freelancer during COVID era so I had more time on my hands. Even back then, leading DTR and the project itself was almost like a 2nd job, which didn't really leave me with time to invest in PVP skills. I did get okeish in battleships though thanks to Bonsai and a few other people that spent time to teach me for which I am grateful. These days with work, side projects, other games, and a family - it's virtually impossible to find the time to sit and grind at Conn.

Contributing factors:

• Lack of resources/videos/etc. to learn. It's just a grueling experience that most people don't want to deal with.
  
  
• The balance changes often which is not necessarily a bad thing but I doubt I would ever have the time to play catch up. This is probably true for others.
  
  
• The insufferable silly honor code that makes Disco fights absolutely sterile and boring. I come primarily from a strategy background and Disco's silly honor code just makes no sense to me. Not being able to use chokes, not being able to use the environment, having to do X and Y, having to have exactly the same numbers with zero consideration for skills/or ship balance. Basically 99% of Disco fights are with this formula - you have to gather 10 people in empty space and wait for other 10 people to come and you shoot each other. It's honestly like something from Soviet Womble. Any deviation from this and boy you are gonna hear it.
  
  
• Which brings me to the next point - the drama. There's quite a few soy latte enjoyers that every battle, win-or-lose, there's drama. It honestly got to the point where even when you lose, the people that won were still crying. I also find it that the better the players, the more crying (with some notable exceptions of course, definitely don't want to generalize here). I must admit though that it's always hilarious to read the comments from certain people so there's a benefit to that. But yeah, some people in the community are just not good-faith actors. Which makes the game just not enjoyable overall, let alone PVP. I do miss early days fights with RM/OC/Core back when we were actually having fun (Omicron Xi was a blast, best system ever). Overall, no point in investing time to grind in a community where if you win you are gonna get drama and if you lose, well you are still gonna get drama. People having to walk on egg-shells over every fight is just nonsense. I've never seen this in another game.
  
  
• The PVP clique. Not applicable to everyone and again definitely don't want to generalize but there's a certain group of people who absolutely enjoy curb-stomping/skill-stacking who benefit greatly from the silly Freelancer honor code. These people also like to DM potentially good up-coming PVPers with messages of the sort ''why are you playing with X, they are shit at PVP, come play with Y''. So it's a skill-stacking gallery. Boy do these same people cry on the off-chance they die 1 time out of 10. Thankfully, there are some decent examples of good PVPers to offset this trend who do their best to try to teach people or to balance in-and-out of events. People that thankfully understand that one-sided stomps are not fun for anyone involved.
  

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Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

[Omi]

Much lower server population across the board has shifted the fight culture more towards pre-arranged events, which were never as fun for me as organic interactions were back in the day. These days everyone knows everyone and there's an implicit explanation that everyone should 'spread out' to balance fights, and every faction has crossbred with one another to such a degree that it all ends up feeling artificial anyway when you do get around to a proper groupfight. There's nowhere near the same sense of camaraderie any longer -- while I think I can still find more than enough friends to fly around with (still love some of you guys!! xoxo), the old sense of flying around as a cohesive faction or group is long gone now that many people feel obliged to swap wholesale to the other side just to prop them up. At that point, any sense of characterisation or roleplay pretence to the fights themselves is gone; you're just fighting throwaway Firstname.Lastname ships that sprung up like glorified NPCs for you to click on. I get that this is just the reality of a PvP scene trying to keep itself alive without wiping out all the newer blood before they can get invested, but to me it ends up feeling pointless. Playing with people you enjoy shouldn't feel like an unattainable goal half the time.

I have next to no interest in flying anything larger than a bomber, so a large portion of gameplay has been locked out for me for a number of years now, too. I'm sure flying caps is very rewarding once you get into it, but it's not something that I think is likely to change. I'm told that mixed fights (caps and snubs in the same battle) are a lot more palatable for snub players now, and while I admit I haven't tried them firsthand since any of these changes were implemented, I still feel like they're going to boil down to the same boring box-and-shoot scenario with extra steps no matter how you slice it. I've never ever been excited to shoot Dunkirks in my Lynx, not since 2014, and I don't think that's ever going to change either. Bombers, likewise, have just been a pain to fly ever since the SNAC change. I think instakills were unfairly demonised and identified as something that had to be removed due to an incompatibility with our server rules, rather than adjusting the rules to suit the gameplay.

On that note, the new-age snub gameplay is much less appealing to me than it used to be. I don't have a ton of experience with it, as I quit not long after the first wave of changes were being slotted in, but I have sensed the general trend that the new development paradigm revolves around trying to push a certain style of fighting (especially in fighter combat) as the 'ideal' way to play the game, rather than allowing an established meta to evolve on its own, like with SNAC bombers becoming effective (if unreliable) generalists in larger-scale groupfights a few years ago. There is an obsession with balance now that almost feels artificial, and that has led to a degradation in how unique certain aspects of the game are allowed to feel when you actually sit down and play with them.

My interest in terms of factions to play has been relatively niche for years, too, so finding the organic interactions I mentioned earlier has felt next to impossible for me for a long time. It feels like you need throwaway ships spread all across Sirius to really guarantee yourself the ability to log consistently and actually find anyone to talk to or shoot at, which is pretty destructive to focusing a lot of effort into your actual character. You need a wide spread of ships anyway to participate in the myriad of different, copy-paste events that constitute the bulk of group PvP in recent years now, too.

Otherwise ngl PvP in this game has never felt that rewarding to me (at least in terms of effort vs what you get out of it) compared to games like Smash or Titanfall. For me, I really enjoy PvP in games where you can do some cool shit, share the clip with people and it's fairly easy to appreciate what is going on even to someone with only surface-level knowledge of the game. Interestingly, when I've tried to do that with clips from Disco (both mine and other people's) 3rd party observers struggle to get a grasp of what's actually going on, and often it just doesn't look very cool or interesting and the result is bland. In essence THIS GAME HAS NO SAUCE.

For me PvP was more of like a means to an end. It's only those moments that created permanent memories like the Ranseur Megazord with the Teamspeak Squad back in the day or the insane Core vs the Universe Delta rumble where you had to coordinate a lot of people effectively against crazy odds to win in order to release dopamine. The bragging rights for surviving that were sweet too.

Far too often I'd just have PvP experiences, die, and look at my screen and think "I could have spent those couple hours doing something else".

Lyth pretty much nails it too. It was about the overall experience of playing with friends rather than the actual mechanics of the fight for me, and that sense of building a little squad of your own and setting out to fight for your common roleplay cause is essentially gone. Half your Discord will swap sides for balancing reasons now when you're still 2 jumps out, and then you'll get to experience another bland, obsessively balanced fight with no real stakes or soul behind it whatsoever.

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[HUMPHRESS]

I want to be respected. I want to be seen as competant and helpful in the groups I am present in.
I also like the pvp itself, there is certainly a sense of satisfaction to taking someone else down.
Another reason is I want to help others improve in PvP, answer the questions I didnt have answers to when I first joined.

Finally; discovery has great ships and weapons. There is a character and imagination to every fight, and the weapons and ships have a "rule of cool" to them that I adore. I remeber playing HoI4 and feeling that sense of building a glorious empire to last for a hundred, nay, thousand years. Freelancer also invokes such a feeling, the sense of a vicious brawl between 2 vessels as their crews scramble to keep the ships running, as the commanders of the ships give orders and guns fire. For everyfight I feel like I can immerse myself in it, imagine the fight in my minds eye. It works because discovery's charecters, ships, guns, politics, and universe feel like they give so much that my mind wants to picture.

The main thing I dislike about pvp is the drama;
If you tried to win in anyway that wasnt a pure 1v1 skill challenge, you did something underhanded and unfair.
I have felt salty after enocunters, but I go out of my way to keep a cool head and show empathy for others.
Its a shame others do not adapt this mindset.

This game should be an escape, it should be enjoyable.
Maybe its a sign of my immaturity that I dont understand why people dont just talk shit out or shut up.


TL;DR
Shooting stuff feels great!
The community suffers from an "us vs them" mindset, and devolves into pointless arguing and ends up killing my fun.
Still; I like many of the people in this community, and watching things go boom is fun, so I stick around and continue shooting things

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[Lythrilux]

Lyth pretty much nails it too. It was about the overall experience of playing with friends rather than the actual mechanics of the fight for me, and that sense of building a little squad of your own and setting out to fight for your common roleplay cause is essentially gone. Half your Discord will swap sides for balancing reasons now when you're still 2 jumps out, and then you'll get to experience another bland, obsessively balanced fight with no real stakes or soul behind it whatsoever.

When I made my initial post, I was still on the fence about playing again. Since then I have been playing more and partaking in more PvP. Have to say what Omi says rings true. Almost none of the fights I have partaken in have felt organic, or that there's any soul to them (I had one pew in Dublin that felt natural-ish) It really does feel like pvp is just rotating flavours of Firstname.Lastname. And whilst I get their implementation these fairplay rules are honestly so stupid for the RP environment, it really is just making every brawl feel like glorified conn. Nothing feels natural. And I don't think it's feasible in the long run.

Otherwise, it's login, hope I find someone worse than me I can clobber, or I get clobbered by someone better than me. It's difficult to find something that feels genuinely even and balanced (which is ironic, given the fairplay rules). I had forgotten how staggering the skill gap in this game can feel, even with the new mechanics in place. The core of the issue to me is it highlights one of Discovery's biggest problems with PvP and I'll go out and admit it: it's tough to enjoy a fight without winning it. It feels like the whole experience leading up to either scoring a blue message of being faced with the death screen just still isn't that great - it's just a means to an end. The roleplay, or the circlejerking, or whatever other magic you have with these moments just isn't there like it was before.

You either come out with a tiny drizzle of dopamine from the blue, or you're just left feeling like shit afterwards because you spent 30 minutes floundering around in a pew that two minutes in you could already tell wasn't going to go in your favour. It's things like that which make me think the game really needs instakills again, or just SOMETHING to add some spice to pvp to make it feel more dynamic and allow genuine comebacks to be possible. It feels way too much like a numbers game and you're counting down seconds on a clock.

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[vladimir26]

I mostly keep to myself and don't engage on forum chit-chats, but since this went pretty far maybe one extra opinion might help out in the long run.

Ever since my first days on Disco, regarding PvP I was encouraged to take the capital ships road. Not because they are all mighty and imposing, but because they are a lot easier to play and learn to fight in than snubs. In my not so many attempts to fly snubs in PvP I found this to be true, my efforts were fruitless, mostly because it is a completely different fish food.

Personally I find the snub skill cap way too demanding to learn by just casual raids and events, unlike the cap gameplay. While the cap gameplay is mostly chill, you can enjoy a beer while raiding and so on, snub gameplay requires your fingerplay to be as of a piano player on triple dose of cardamine and a redbull (at least for me). Sure, this can all get better with conn, practice and dedication, but is it worth it? Not for everyone. Not that I'm old, but being in my 30's I have bigger priorities than try harding snub PvP in Conn. Even if your conjuncture allows you to train hard and learn them, not everyone will take this road. Maybe, just maybe, it would be a bit better overall if snubs would be easier to fly, for people like me who have some restrains in flying them, so that anyone with a tiny bit of experience can perform average in any scenario.

I would love to fly snubs more often, or when the situation demands it to be able to switch to a snub and do my job in a decent or average way like I do in caps, but it might never happen.

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[Leeon26]

As an aside to this,

When I first started really getting into pvp, I had people that were basically practice partners at an equal skill level as me like @HonourWolf and @Leeon26 where I could improve together with them. Because of IRL obligations and time zone issues that just stopped happening. I also had players like Wesker and @Levenna who really never pulled punches and were quite blunt in telling me where I was weak as I was learning the game, and eventually became good friends with them.

I find dueling at an extremely high level satisfying and rewarding even in defeats, often times feeling like a chess match as players try to counter each others styles. Coming from a background in mixed martial arts probably attributes to some of that, but I understand that I’m more of an oddball in that way.

If I get motivated to get back into this community, I want to spend more time making digestible content that makes learning snubs not so daunting. I think it’s easier than most people think to get to a level where they are serviceable in groupfights. Duels are a different story, but most people I think enjoy groups more anyways.

Couldn't have said it better.
One has to ask themself if they're willing to spend a certain time (ranging from 3 months to infinitely much) into training, for them to become one of the top players.
Whoever sets themself such goal has to do a lot for it.
Some is talent, some is dedication, the mixture makes the progress easier.
It's never been easier to learn at least the basics with what @Chxlls has given us. His tutorials are extremely helpful for new players that are willing to learn the basics of PvP.
Dueling must be the most difficult level of pvping on discovery. As Chills said, it really feels like a chess game quite often, especially with people around your level.

For me, I always wanted to duel the best of the best, not for my ego, but for the satisfaction of seeing results, which never disappoints me ever.
Going into bad odds of winning a fight, maybe even an unbalanced fight outside of conn, is where fun really hits its peak though.

It's very different for each person as to how much time they have to invest to become considerably average or above, but it does require at least some dedication.
And at the end it's just like with every hobby, if you don't feel it, you won't have enough motivation to make it (most of the time).