Why is the community population declining?

[AeternusDoleo]

Things are getting old real fast.
The admins/devs ignore experianced players, and cater to the new.
They introduce new items that un-balance game.
They change rep ninja's because "Official factions" say to, and screw all indies.

I can go on and on, but i am sure you get it.

Really now. Let's go point by point here. Seeing as I'm both an admin and a dev, I feel qualified to answer this.
- Ignoring experienced players and catering to the new.
It's true that we try to make this game as accessible as possible to newer players, and we've still got quite a ways to go in that. Discovery uses several unique mechanics that other Freelancer servers will not have. Mainly, because they were developed by us (read: Coded by Cannon). As for experienced players being ignored, I don't really see that. Players who approach the admins and devs in a disrespectful manner do tend to get ignored (at least by me) because frankly, if you can't ask me nicely, you don't deserve an answer.

- Introducing new items that imbalance the game.
I'm assuming you mean the new toys like cloaks, jumpdrives and playerbases? True, they change the mechanics of the game quite a bit, and I'm willing to admit that they do have their problems. The issue with fixing them is that there's never a concensus about how to do it. Jump drive range limit? How do you code that... Jump drive failure rate? What's the penalty effect - what's the failure rate. Cloak countermeasure code? How do those get made, for which ships, for which slot? How does it get coded? You get my point. Issue being mainly, that when you add new toys to the game -someone- is bound to find a way to abuse it in ways we didn't predict on the admin/dev side. And then you're left with needing to figure a way to patch it up. The only alternative is to never add new things again. Which frankly, would make the game kinda stuffy in the end.

- Updates taking a long time
Yes, it takes a long while to bring updates out since the mod is so big that it's hard for an all-volunteer team to stay on top of things. Some folk moving on means you lose some experienced devvers - FrozenBallz, Adoxa, Doom... to call a few. There's few people both skilled and willing to pick up the gap guys like that leave, so yea, things take time. Right now I'm working, almost alone, on balancing out the relative NPC strength between the houses. So you're not stuck with fighting Starflies in one house and Eagles in the other. Equal-ish NPC strength that varies with where you're at in the game (Capitol, house world, border world, edgeworld, warzone, guard system). This requires updating virtually all system files (done), all faction NPC templates (todo still), and for missions, all base entries in MBases (working on this). It's a bit of a job - but we're probably call 4.87 the last -major- update and then focus on smaller, more frequent ones involving minor changes to a system here or there.

- Changing reps because official factions say so
This is a nonissue, as one of the faction rights basically gives them the right to. That rule has been as old as the official factions themselves. Don't like it? Use the Freelancer ID. I'm assuming you're pissed that your Interspace transport couldn't dock in Rheinland for a while or something similar. Roleplaying game. Things happen to your faction. Be glad we don't have Game Masters like most RP servers do or you'd see a whole lot more of that.


Also, Ingenious: SRP and Official Faction request costs? For an Official Faction this tends to be relatively minor as the cost is spread over all people. You can make 50M inside an hour easily - doing it with a group of say, 5 people means you need to play 2 hours to get that amount together (10 hours total playing time dedicated to the faction's creation). And, if the faction succeeds, you can request a CAU8 armor once it's established (see faction rules) - so you actually end up in the plus.
SRPs carry this cost because a lot of folk fired off a "gimme battleship on pirate ID" kind of requests, and frankly, the admins have better things to waste their time on then half-serious requests. Most of the SRPs I've seen passing the list can easily be handled with a standard ID, or a slightly different ship.

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Wide awake in a world that sleeps, enduring thoughts, enduring scenes. The knowledge of what is yet to come.
From a time when all seems lost, from a dead man to a world, without restraint, unafraid and free.

Mostly retired Discovery member. May still visit from time to time.