Still you won't get anything from cutting away stuff. If the least visited system is only visited by five people a week, what benefits do you gain from removing it? All you do it take a system away from five people a week. For someone who cares much about the player count on the server, that's a pretty bad attitude. Please care for the players, not for the numbers. If you have a problem about finding interaction, try the LFG forum, join a faction or use the player list to find hotspots. There is a general level of activity in Omicron Delta and New York, the route down to Bretonia is well visited, the road down to Bering is well visited and the Omicrons are blooming every day.
(03-14-2018, 07:23 PM)Sombra Hookier Wrote: Still you won't get anything from cutting away stuff. If the least visited system is only visited by five people a week, what benefits do you gain from removing it? All you do it take a system away from five people a week. For someone who cares much about the player count on the server, that's a pretty bad attitude. Please care for the players, not for the numbers. If you have a problem about finding interaction, try the LFG forum, join a faction or use the player list to find hotspots. There is a general level of activity in Omicron Delta and New York, the route down to Bretonia is well visited, the road down to Bering is well visited and the Omicrons are blooming every day.
Exactly! Cutting the 'redundant' stuff has no positive effects, it is not relevant to issues of hotspots and the like, because there is few people going there anyway. You just remove the fun niches.
(03-14-2018, 07:20 PM)Durandal Wrote: Kappa wasn't removed, Omicron 74 was merged with it. Which made people angry because... reasons.
Anyway content is not an issue, fat is. @"Auzari" once said that Discovery needs more meat. What it has right now is a lot of fat with very little meat, which is to say a lot of content with absolutely zero impact or relevancy on gameplay or story. Right now, we're working on trimming that while at the same time adding content which is more accessible and useful for everyone, as well as working on ways to streamline activity in existing areas. It isn't going to be anywhere near as dramatic as some people are calling for, but you're definitely going to see some changes.
@DRV Hey man, nice to see you back again. While I definitely sympathize with the loss of ye olde 200 player count, what @Lythrilux said is correct. Its been steadily rising since about November or so and I think we can continue to make that number rise. Maybe I'm an optimist, an idiot, or both, and I've certainly been the patron saint of lost causes in the past, but I firmly believe that Discovery has a future if we're smart about it.
What happened to the apes? Don't you dare tell me they've been purged.
I swear to god i will go to Christchurch myself and knock on cannon's door!...
On a serious note, I've been wondering, do we have an advertisement campaign going on for the game? If not, did we ever? If not, should we have one? I think I'll make a thread soon going through some of my thoughts pertaining to how we can advertise. The strength of disco is the RP aspect of it. The player-controlled story that has an effect on the game. That is what we can capitalize on.
And the meat used to be the players. What i mean is, when there would be 15 players in New York, all the pirates would come gather to pirate and terrorize, which meant the navy and police had to log on, which meant rheinland and outcast random players with capital ships felt it was a good time to stop in NY, which meant the junkers come to pick up the scraps of the battle, which meant everyone had a blast! That's what kept people logging on. It got people hooked onto that moment of glory in the middle of a full system when you did something cool and everyone knew.
That's what i'd call meat, but, i'm not sure what would be the meat now.. hmm..
EDIT: I had no idea systems were actually already cut or merged, so at this point i'm not sure if personally i would find something worth cutting. I really just don't know. But i get what you guys are saying, i think that's understandable.
(03-14-2018, 07:31 PM)Death.RunningVerminator Wrote: On a serious note, I've been wondering, do we have an advertisement campaign going on for the game? If not, did we ever? If not, should we have one? I think I'll make a thread soon going through some of my thoughts pertaining to how we can advertise.
There are some youtube and twitch channels, the mod dB page that work as advertizing.
Presently, the biggest problem is that we're not able to keep new players interested, while people who are interested tend to rage quit or burn out the more they're interested.
I'm reluctant to advertize a lot in the current state of the mod before fixing some things, because once new players were disappointed with the mod they won't try it again.
(03-14-2018, 07:31 PM)Death.RunningVerminator Wrote: The player-controlled story that has an effect on the game. That is what we can capitalize on.
While player-controlled story sounds interesting, it has also lead to expectations that can't possibly be met, and some not so good developments like factions making their turf exclusive for themselves instead of interesting for everyone. If you want player-controlled stories/developments, those two problems are something you'll have to deal with somehow.
Do you think part of why they don't get interested is because when they use /restart beginner they start with no shield and cant afford one?
EDIT: If the answer is "well they can use a different /restart command" how do they know about the restarts in the first place? Like we have all those tools at the top of the website but nothing that says something like "New player? Here's how to get started" in big bold color like the "returning player?" part is. It has to pop out in your face so the new player realizes, oh i'll be darned there it is! And clicks and proceeds to learning how to get started. Like i know there are guides on the forum for this but i promise you guys from the perspective of a new player totally clueless about what to do, you have to present something that's right in their face from the first moment so they can use that to start off.
(03-14-2018, 07:45 PM)Death.RunningVerminator Wrote: Do you think part of why they don't get interested is because when they use /restart beginner they start with no shield and cant afford one?
There are many reasons.
-Little thought for noob progression put into gear balancing.
-Overly strict Tech nerf ruins the gear-gathering repping gameplay they're used to and came to expect from Vanilla.
-Noobs don't win PvP. Ever. Balancing and unwritten rules make sure of that.
-Missions are unpredictable and hard, especially when playing alone, like most noobs play in the beginning.
-Game mechanics and rules are hard to learn for lack of proper ingame help.
-Faction restrictions and mining mechanics make everyone create 50 chars they constantly switch between, making it anonymous, poorly RPed, little identification with chars/ships, and hard to makes friends.
-It's hard for vets to play with noobs for the above reasons even if they want to.
It's also sadly wide spread opinion here that noobs are unimportant and annoying, and should either obey vets or serve as victims for them.
That's quite alarming. Oh boy. This is a tough cookie to bite into. Sort of like when grandma used to bake you cookies but because she took medicine that made her groggy she fell asleep before sealing them up. Thus, the cookie becomes stale, cold, and hard as a rock.
What i mean to say is, disco is sort of like a tough nut a squirrel has a hard time really sinking it's tiny teeth into. That's why they run out into the road, cause they're frustrated that a nut was too tough to crack.
My ultimate point is that we need to establish a clear pathway for new players, and find the balance between coddling and letting them have free roam cause both can be helpful and fun.
Usually the best way to help noobs is to recruit them into OFLs so they can access that higher-tier activity experience in a tightly regulated safety net with help only a chat away. For some reason there's a perspective that OFLs need to be exemplar in both gameplay and every RP oppertunity - rather, an OFL is a tightly regulated environment that exists to help indies and create shared Gameplay + RP experiences.
IMG used to be a major institution of the server as it introduced new players to a diversity of gameplay mechanics, helped them earn credits, whilst gaining a sense of appropriate risk/reward and guide players how to avoid negative situations being stressful/how to non-negatively interpret the motives of others. I try to recruit any new Disco players I see around that have reasonable English comprehension into Unioners if they're interested in the RP, as it's relatively easy to create fun-positive learning experiences when you have lots of people under one tag. I encourage other OFLs to also take a hand at this. Congress used to be especially good.
Trader factions with mining bonuses and less skill-based unlawful factions are a great start for people, as are independent world factions. I really hope LR becomes properly active with low entry barriers, as LR has potential to be everyone's my-first-pirate group.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
DRV, and to an extent Durandal and Karlotta are the only people talking any sort of sense in this thread.
New players do not give a shit about 100 slightly different empty wastelands with some coloured clouds and different skyboxes in them. There are other problems as well (see Karlotta's post) but as someone who has over ten years tried to get a huge number of friends, both IRL and online, into Discovery, I am literally telling you that the number one issue is that there is shit-all to actually DO. Veterans do not realise (or don't care about, although I can already hear them screeching their vehement denials) this because they have naturally pidgeonholed themselves into a clique-based roleplay system. This isn't really anything new - there are some roleplay communities that are even worse off than Disco for this sort of thing - but as a legitimate fresh face in this community, how hard do you honestly think it is to manage to even find someone in-game, let alone begin the process of integrating into a purportedly organic (it isn't) roleplay environment? It can take upwards of twenty fucking minutes to actually encounter someone in game, and that's assuming they sit still to let you catch up to them!
The player density on Discovery is a joke and the in-game population, while it might be rising, would need to be at least three times if not five times its current average to comfortably populate the number of systems that bloat and choke the game like tumours. Minutes upon minutes of wasted travel time flying through these endless empty systems to actually find something worth either talking to or shooting at. This is the point at which all the detractors of this line of thought will barrel in whinging about an alternate agenda, something akin to wanting the whole server shrunk to the size of Connecticut so me and the rest of the notorious PvPwhores can farm blues off innocent, angelic 'roleplayers' till the end of time, but in my personal opinion you are either blind or deluded if you think world size has anything to do with the attraction of games and communities like this one. This is not something like Arelith, with an active and motivated DM team who bring life to the tiny, hidden little corners of their expansive and atmospheric world, and give those places a reason to exist. This is not Colonial Marines, with a map size that actually fits its swelling playerbase and provides ample opportunity to enjoy the (admittedly shaky) level of roleplay that server offers. This is a swollen mess of a mod for an incredibly old game, laden with so much extra non-content (nontent?) that admittedly might have potential if the concept of a dynamic event here extended beyond "here are some NPC ships to shoot at."
This is one of the most active forum boards I've ever seen in comparison to its in-game activity. I want to know your reasons why you think so few of those people are jumping in-game on a regular basis, and why people would rather spend time sitting chatting about the game on the forums (or on Skype, God forbid, since we're stuck in the mid 00s here) they think they enjoy rather than actually going and playing it. From where I'm sitting, and from the new players I've talked to after trying to coax them in during the period where I was actually active, it's not hard to figure out. At least the system bloat is a problem that's relatively easily fixed - archaic, awkward, and frankly user-hostile game mechanics like the ones Karlotta mentions will take a hell of a lot more effort.
It is endless circle, as long things will not change, AALLLLLLLLLL those Biter-veterans refuse to log-in, and, in same time, people in charge dont give a damn and stubornly refuse to change things.
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