I’d like to repeat some things I’ve said before in other places, which should be changed asap to make the game experience better especially for new players. This is really much more important than any minor storyline development or weapon rebalancing thing on which so much time is wasted in every update.
1. The into logon message
Now:
Welcome to the year 824 A.S. (740 A.G.S.) on Discovery Freelancer 24/7 RP server!
Type /help for more information.
Press the ENTER key in order to send messages to other players or to use server commands.
Press the Y key in order to access the ingame player list and chat history. This is a role-playing server. Players are required by server rules to roleplay here. Visit our forums at http://www.discoverygc.com to find out more as well as introduce yourself to the server rules.
Server administrators are: Alley, Clavius, Sindroms, Skorak, St.Denis and Tunicle.
Other players are here to answer your questions, help with the basics of our mod and direct new players to official factions that may interest them. Contact higher-ranked players or ones with [Helper] or similar tags for help ingame, but for the best results, please visit our forums and our Help and Tutorials section! LATEST NEWS:
*New capital ship missiles have been added for testing purposes and can be bought on the New Haven station in the Connecticut System. They can and SHOULD be used outside of the Connecticut system in order to gather the most amount of feedback! Please leave your feedback regarding usage of these weapons in the Balance section on our fourms. ACTIVE EVENT: The salvage process following up the attack on Fulda Border Station in the Frankfurt System is now under way. Bonuses are given to the ALG, Ageira, Junker, AI and Generic Miner IDs and their respective official faction versions.
Too long to quickly absorb and remember the information, and cluttered with useless information and text.
It's so long it disappears off the screen before anyone can read it entirely, which is a problem for people who are new to multiplayer and don’t know about how to bring up the chat history.
-“(740 A.G.S.)” Confusing and totally useless information to 99% of players
-it’s a role play server players are required to role play useless repetition without additional information
-names of admins useless information
-there is almost always no [HELPER] online so no point in telling it there
-asking for feedback about recent mod changes should be done on the forums, where people are registered anyway. Here it just adds text for people who aren’t interested in it
-the event should be mentioned by console shouts and on the forum, not in the intro message, especially when you need to read the forum to understand the event.
So replace it with:
Welcome to the Discovery Freelancer 24/7 RP server!
To see past messages and the player list, press Y.
To type messages and commands, press ENTER.
To learn about useful features, enter /help. This is a Role-Play server!
Players must act like characters living in the Sirius sector.
The year is 824 A.S, 24 years after the events of “Freelancer”.
Please read the server rule item in your cargo hold and visit discoverygc.com for the best game experience.
2 . Writing style in server messages, rules, and help manuals
A general rule of thumb: Use the least words possible. The more and the longer messages are, the less likely they will be read entirely. Convey the most important part of the info near the beginning (preferable in the first words. Avoid long sentences. And yes, you have to be very perfectionist about this, because this is the most useful tool to affect new player’s experience and opinions. Lengthy formulations like “we would like to remind you that” and “in order to” should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.
3. Early noob activites
It’s a become phenomenon (for a long time now) that people generate tons and tons of characters in every faction, most prominently the best-bonused no-personality mining drone that is hopped onto for 10 minutes a soon as a trader enters the system. Apart from generating bad RP (for obvious reasons), it generates anonymity, because nobody knows who is who so its hard to recognize people and build friendly relations. If you want people to come back to the game also to interact with people and not only to try out the ship they wanted, that must be changed. People used to think it was good to spread players out among many factions, but that is now a thing of the past because there are now more factions than active players. So to remedy that:
Make the same ship and char more versatile:
-larger ZOIs and more rights for every ID
-more mining opportunities for the same ship/ID
-delete miner ID and give Freelancer ID the mining bonus and ability to transfer ore to a partner (ore only comes with mining laser and not with regular guns)
-make the mining bonus between IDs less variable. Like 100% best ID, 85% second best ID, 70% freelance ID instead of 100% 50% 30% like it is now for some ores.
-if you help people set up a new char like a miner, encourage not only immersive names but also similar names among chars to people can recognize each other.
4. Exploring, hording, and repping
-These were the major motivators for playing freelancer and used to make up 90% of the fun, and the restarts for every faction killed it almost entirely. It’s unrealistic to expect people to only log on to interact with players, and now the only other reason to do so is credit grinding (or base feeding), which is too boring to do without any other distraction like watching a movie or read. So remove the restarts except for the most important and civilian ones. It’s still possible to pass each other IDs to speed up character repping.
-Also make the technerf chart much more tolerant. It really isn’t a problem if for example that will make LN use BAF guns or if freelancers will have military grade guns. The dutch airforce uses American F16s, civilians in the USA have AR15 as well as AK47s. The gear gathering aspect should definitely return because that’s what noobs will always be trying to do first, and then they get a technerf that they don’t understand.
-give the restarts less extensive maps, and make the focus players into certain trade routes. You can also make maps purchasable in bars (the bar npcs give you multiple locations instead of 1 like it is now) or elsewhere.
All this is fine but the most discouraging factor for ages is when new player undocks with his ship and 5 min later he's attacked by players for not responding properly to the RP or anything. Then he undocks again and, while being inexperienced lad, get's also banned for re-engagement. With lesser players online the probability of this only increased dramatically as 95% of activity seems to be focused on logging in and shooting someone who's in your ZOI.
(10-25-2017, 04:39 PM)Curios Wrote: All this is fine but the most discouraging factor for ages is when new player undocks with his ship and 5 min later he's attacked by players for not responding properly to the RP or anything. Then he undocks again and, while being inexperienced lad, get's also banned for re-engagement. With lesser players online the probability of this only increased dramatically as 95% of activity seems to be focused on logging in and shooting someone who's in your ZOI.
wasn't there a rule where people couldn't pirate / engage others under a certain rank
There were no Angels either.
And due to their ID which offered teleportation and other admin-features, their recruitment was virtuall non-existant because the brass of the faction did not wish to entrust anyone with it.
In the end, no matter how much you wish to help newbies, players are here to play the game. They do not have the time for education newbies and feel as though it is not their job.
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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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That was true, but at least I was active way back when. ^_^
I still help where I can at least with tutorials and stuffz, am working on a big one atm. (Also I liked the angel tag and forum signature, which I'm gonna bring back cause I like it)
I think it would be worth expanding the help section into different catorgires to offer extended information, which I don't believe is that difficult to do with FLHook. I'll look into it.
(10-25-2017, 04:39 PM)Curios Wrote: All this is fine but the most discouraging factor for ages is when new player undocks with his ship and 5 min later he's attacked by players for not responding properly to the RP or anything. Then he undocks again and, while being inexperienced lad, get's also banned for re-engagement. With lesser players online the probability of this only increased dramatically as 95% of activity seems to be focused on logging in and shooting someone who's in your ZOI.
wasn't there a rule where people couldn't pirate / engage others under a certain rank
Yes, it's Rank 30 which is basically restart + 2-3 missions, or so. I saw a lot of such actions in before when there was a low ranked player with wrong ship in wrong ZOI with wrong ID, who is obviously got lost in what's going on, get's chased by local 'hardcore rpers' who talk some nonesense to him in some very fancy manner (and they believe that manner of talking makes them even more special and hardcore RPers) and then kill the poor lad leaving him with little to no understanding in what was that and what he did wrong.
I won't go for forum trials and won't call names and factions but you may guess yourself.
Anyway there is a lot of risk for new player to be flipped over at the doorstep. A lot of complicated rules, a lot of complicated faction rules, a lot of complicated new systems and in game relations. Always been that way, just it was less complicated before and was a better supply of new players to keep the server busy so no questions were asked. Now the players are on short supply and of cause the problems are more important now then before.
And ye, Angels. I remember they said they lack numbers and asked forum for volunteers to work in their ranks. I had some spare time at hand and decided to apply - they didn't even had my application reviewed in the end. So you may guess how useful they were. (Spoiler, Angels are useless 100%)
(10-25-2017, 05:22 PM)sindroms Wrote: In the end, no matter how much you wish to help newbies, players are here to play the game. They do not have the time for education newbies and feel as though it is not their job.
There is a very simple solution to help remedy that, and that's to have ingame text that vets can point noobs to instead of having to explain the same thing over and over and over again, and in stead of telling them to go look on a badly organized forum where they' spend 5-20 minutes looking for a thread that includes the tiny bit of information they need, and 10 more extracting the information from a needlessly lengthy tutorial post.
Speaking of which... can someone tell me what's the status on this?
(10-25-2017, 05:42 PM)Laz Wrote: I think it would be worth expanding the help section into different catorgires to offer extended information, which I don't believe is that difficult to do with FLHook. I'll look into it.
Been there, done that (see links above), several times over. But this is a community where it took 2 years until someone put the link to the rules on the first page so people didnt have to read through 3 pages containing 30+ links each before they even found them. Meanwhile 1000 times more energy than it took to do that was spent on discussing intricate several weeks lasting review systems for SRPs where people could ask to have their engines made pink.
