Emergency chats were ok until it was kept more or less fair on the scene.
* anywhere I meantion the 'fairplay' reference I refer only to ship-to-ship fairness, i.e. fighter vs fighter is fair, etc. Not some magical 'skill based fairplay' fairytale.
Just back then more people could accept the defeat from same type vessel in fair fight w\o going into the depth of digging the 'look at these pvp w-words, they are cancer yada yada'.
(03-01-2017, 08:03 AM)sasapinjic Wrote: ^ Yep , i forget to mention skype/team speak "call for ganking" as one of the reasons .
Ah, yes. The infamous "emergency chats".
Emergency chats are just another symptom of shrinking playerbase. Back in the gold era there was no need to use them because when you called in your faction skype, 1-3 people instantly logged. But it was possible to control how many will join the engagement and so on. But now when some lawful factions consist of like 3-5 active people in total, emergency chats are necessary evil when you are outnumbered. It is problem connected to fact that indies, which often logs based on emergency chat call, can not be controlled by almost anybody so if they want to gank, there is not much what can be done with it.
I only see 1 way to improve things for real: Advertisment, advertisment, more advertisment. I firmly believe that there are a few hundred people in Europe that would play Freelancer if it was promoted better. Or at least try it out. The problem is, that we have trouble keeping new guys (I see plenty new guys, I support many of them, and I see many of them leave rather fast again).
The 2nd part is: community mentality. This community is heavily (and negatively) influenced by a few, mentality has been deteriorating for quite some time (e.g. bittervet, memer mentality), and the sense of constructiveness and cooperation has been replaced by powerplaying one's own angle and forcing everything else into submission. Roleplay interaction (unplanned!) on server has become negligible. In the end, this is a path to self-destruction. Efforts are being undertaken to fight this trend, and players should do their part, too by starting interesting roleplay, logging on, flying around, and trying to create interesting meetings (also for the other side).
Faster development would of course also matter, but let's be realistic: it's hard to do with the manpower we have. Still, it would of course do something.
Less exclusivity in snub pvp! It's the first non-trade/grind activity new players engage in: snub pvp. And it is needlessly complex and biased heavily towards the experienced players. If your first impressions of pvp are "ok, it is hopeless", players even leave, or go "pvp is not for me", or go "I buy a cap!". A new player has to get into all parts of the game fast, and killing off whole aspects of the game is a waste of potential.
Come and help with the advertisement part of it all then.
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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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(03-01-2017, 03:40 PM)sindroms Wrote: Come and help with the advertisement part of it all then.
Will gladly when at home again and have access to my real machine and Disco.
Plus: I see my contribution even more in helping new players (newbie-friendly faction), teaching & offering roleplay and cooperative activity. But sure, everybody can and should contribute something to the advertisment effort. We will all profit from it.
I blame the community mentality as well. Because most complaints for people who left in a massive numbers, were against some admins, some moderators, some bad people who ended up for some reason at the leading of key factions and it went all to dust. Basically things need to change with the community itself. I cannot say the game lacks content now, it has enough compared with the ratio of the server pop.
My opinion is that certain people should be replaced with those who are dedicated and really want to invest into this server and it's community. Not just to have a fancy title on a forum, because nobody cares. We need good people to take care of the community and make it grow it's mentality and put aside all the unnecessary crap that started to appear between members. As someone said up, the community is driven and influenced by several individuals who do no good but to stir into the wrong direction what's left of this dying game. If that's changed, we might have a chance to make it a popular thing. We need the ts/skype memesquads removed, we need the personal undoings to be vanished. Basically we are all fans of our beloved Freelancer, and we are what's left to keep it alive. Game's death is on you guys.
Again, people left, many that I knew from years ago, because of the community that changed. Many blamed the admins that did the wrong stuff and decisions and so on. I don't know, your choice guys.
Rudimentary creatures of blood and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding. - Sovereign
Development is actually really good right now. Admins are good right now. Remember, back in the "good old days" there were devs who deliberately buffed the ships of the factions they themselves controlled beyond all possible balance, and admins who banned people for skype related material. Sure, there's been bad team apples since then, but people sure love to blame the greens and yellows before finding fault in themselves. I don't blame the complainers - self-criticism isn't easy, but the standards are pretty square now. You can hardly say Durandal gives HF broken ships. Even Nomads, despite the shennaigans that have always happened around Nomads, are relatively better now. I remember when they were an elitism tool. RP elitism has started to disappear, very notably, from the mod. The Popu-characters, for want of a better term, are accessible, because the players behind them will RP with you. Noobs are clearly running into better influences, because the average English second language untagged 5k is usually able to converse with the people stopping them without losing their heads now. The Fraternal Brotherhood of Memes still run around pooping on people with their ridiculous oorp alliances and questionable loadout combos, but they're getting few and far between. They're steadily running out of exploits, or getting bored at the people growing intolerant of their shtick.
General rule is just to play the game and stick at it. We are, as a rule, getting better. We are a community-based server, but I wouldn't say just a few people influence the overall game - it's an illusion. The player base is in the person who wants to fly their favourite ship, buy a cloak, build a POB, create a faction, build a character, log their indie and create interactions. That's the player base, and they make up the majority. Not a few popular, big-name players.
(02-28-2017, 08:41 PM)SeaFalcon Wrote: Time happend. People grow up. People enjoy other games.
it doesn't have necessarily depend on the effort people put in this game.
^ This is one of the reasons , but only minor one . Do i do have more modern gaming systems/games , i still play my trusty 23 year old PS1 Console , and all old games on it nearly every day . People dont play games by is it old or new , but is it good or bad .
Not all that minor when you consider the amount of new good games that were released over the time of ten years.
Even when older folk still remember Freelancer, most new and younger guys will only see the newer games that have been released after Freelancer.
They won't even begin to consider an older game in the same genre because it doesn't look appealing and the community is tiny as well for modern game standards.
There are too many other and better options for anyone that wants to play a online space arcade game. Which is still the Freelancer genre as it was never focused on role-playing.
Once people played a game they tend to look for an interesting mod to give more a challenge or simply to add more content to their current game.
This is the main reason why Discovery grew to what it was back in the day. It offered more content but remained mostly vanilla as it was more or less a ship pack that allowed for people to fly everything in the game that normally wasn't flyable.
All in all, you cannot expect many new members and people really have to learn to make do with what they have and stop nagging at each other.
Sure you can disagree with each other but refrain from trying to get people to stop playing the game.
As for the Development pace that @Durandal mentioned.
If anything I disliked pretty much all patches of the last two years, even when they are faster, their quality and content didn't add a whole lot to the Discovery universe.
Older patches added content people dreamed of like ships for Factions that didn't have them, simply because they didn't have them yet. The current patches only add things to try and improve gameplay and balance which no one really seems all that interested in. At least from what I've seen. I like how when I am typing this someone posts about why Cruiser razors were removed.
Some new systems are pretty and nice to fly through, some system merges may have added to people getting somewhere more often but it hasn't made people play this game more.
How patches are being implanted is another thing. Most of the recent patches I have seen were littered with bugs only half thought out ideas that 'accidentally' got put in the game. I understand that a lot of developers are inexperienced but half the issues I have seen could have been resolved with taking one hour to check your work.
New patches don't attract people either and if they are not what people wish for them to be it tends to just make people not want to play either.
In short, Patches don't contribute all that much to the population of the server.
On a final note, if you require videos of what this game offers, you can find some on my youtube channel that can be found in my signature.
You can put them anywhere you like and if it's not linked directly from youtube, you just put my channel under it and it's fine.