After spending the last few months away from this place for many reasons I'm curious why anyone still even bothers with disco.
Disco was fun back in the day but let's face facts. The age of disco is over. Let me give a few reasons for that statement.
-The graphics are horrendous. (Your playing a game that's over 10 years old and it shows its age)
-The serious RPers have mostly left leaving nothing but blue happy pvpers.
-Freelancers combat was never that great and changes by Devs have made it worse.
-There is nothing to "discover" as the Devs see fit to reduce the number of systems instead of expanding them like they should be.
-Gallia( A tiresome storyline that has only got more tedious in recent years.)
-A toxic community( when I first started playing disco this was a great place with great people. Most of those people are gone now leaving the trolls in control.
-Interactions so narrowly defined that it takes all fun out of the RP. (ID restrictions- Seriously admins it's bad enough that people abuse the rules but adding more and more restrictions until you have paragraphs of restrictions for every id is completely ridiculous.)
-Admin bias. The biggest problem with this place without question. Having a admin or two in your friends list on Skype gives you influence over others whether directly or indirectly. Certain admins are more to blame then others whereas certain admins are the pillar of integrity (Garrett Jax you are awesome and I have zero critiscm of you)
-The lack of any realism and physics( Umm Gravity, Where art thou?) Also though tradelanes are a fun gameplay mechanic they make Zero sense in reality. (Planets revolve around the sun so a straight line of tradelanes would be out of position before they were even setup. I won't even get into the stations that magically stay in the same place all the time( imagine the fuel requirements to achieve that even assuming the stations were set at Lagrange points)
-Extremely unrealistic planet sizes( there are some stations so big that they are practically mini planets in comparison.
-POBs...... Where do I even begin...... One of the most unique features of disco... One of my favorite features of disco..... Nickeled and died into irrelevency.... I can't even begin to count the hours I wasted building and supplying my POB and others.... For what? The core upgrade process is so difficult as to be worthless. Months and months of RP and effort into making a station and upgrading only to be told your base doesn't have enough RP to upgrade( despite citing over a hundred RP references and the station being owned by an official faction). Sadly they are a waste of time and energy and has led to many many players leaving.
-Jumpdrives - Another great feature destroyed by the Devs. Wanna start a jump trading operation? Good luck! You're gonna spend hours getting coordinates. The cargo restrictions for group jumps make it impractical to make a decent profit unless you have many ships involved in the jumps. Licenses to jump into houses are incredibly expensive and difficult to obtain. You can only jump a few systems at a time making group jumps even more impractical.
Before you dismiss me as a hater just know I used to Love this game. I spent literally thousands of hours Ingame and on these forums. I'm saddened that disco has become what it now is.
But never fear...... The age of disco might be ending........ But a new game has arisen one that takes our beloved freelancer and improves on every aspect of the game.
I'm talking about......... Star Citizen (LolNope..... Silly people that game will never actually be released)
No I'm talking about Elite: Dangerous Horizons.. An amazingly realistic game that allows you to explore the Entire Milky way Galaxy( Approximately 400 billion systems in game)
Why is it superior?
Physics( Oh hi gravity pleasure to meet you)
Realism (Wow those are some impressive planets..... Textures and scale)
Planetary Landings( Imagine approaching a planet going into orbit( hi again gravity) finding a suitable landing spot and deploying your scarab (a moon Rover on steriods) and setting off to explore this world. A world that is completely to scale that would take months to fully explore.
Combat- The combat in this game is phenomenal. Amazing weapons. Npcs that aren't pushover and that can give you a run for your money. Realistic damage. And that's just the beginning. Grab some friends and assault a planetary outpost. A few scarabs to take out the aa guns and see the ships swoop in to wipe out the outpost.
I don't want this to seem like an ad for elite but I have nothing but good things to say about it. Besides the above it has fantastic graphics, an awesome community, and gives you the ability to do whatever your heart desires in a Realistic Space Simulator.
I treasure my time in disco and the many good people I interacted with. I hope to see some of you flying in Elite!