Just to add some detail to my earlier (i'l admit) overly concise summary...
I think the mod has gotten too fragmented and too carried away with itself. Don't get me wrong, what the development team have managed to accomplish is phenomenal, but the discovery mod now is just a shadow of what freelancer was all about to begin with. I could hazard a guess that most new players don't know what the hell is going on, it's a lot to take in to fit in here. I pop onto the forums every few months or so and for me too it's hard to keep up with the changes that occur. New players are frowned upon if they don't follow the cascade of rules that are now in place which start from day one. So in a sense, the margin of players who have the time to play at least a few times a week and that have been here for at least a year are the ones still having any fun. As a result it's these players who (within their rights) tend to influence many of the decisions made to change the mod, and it's usually to introduce something new. The latest discovery mod has lost nearly all the sense of the sort of originality that came with it's predecessors. There's more new factions than i can count on all my fingers and toes. Playing together was what made this mod a brilliant multiplayer feature to an already brilliant computer game. But now everyone has their ideal faction and RP implemented into the game, everyone is left almost alone in their own niche, which i'm sure you'l agree...gets kind of boring.
If this mod is ever to survive I think people have got to admit their mistakes and stop listening to the minority just because they play more frequently.
Many will disagree, but in my opinion:
Gallia in general was a bad idea
The Exiles was also a pretty bad idea
The Liberty - Rheinland war shouldn't have happened
Mining sucked as a concept and in practice to begin with, attempts to improve it should never have been made
Nomad RP should never have got to the stage it's at now
The LSF should have stayed the only lawfully covert faction
Players should never have been given the power to declare wars
Admins shouldn't have been recruited from the most popular/active community members
But then that's just my opinion. We're all dying to see how our factions will progress as each new mod release is prepared, but it simply comes down to a matter of - if it aint broke, don't fix it. Whoever it was calling the shots after .85, to me, fixed many things that weren't broken.
It's easy to put the population decline down to something that the leadership screwed up in the short term. But to be honest, it's been a long time coming.
