Thoughts on the "Fun Group" attitude evolution on Disco

[Stoat]

As an older player, like Joe, I also remember things differently where .84 is concerned. But as with most things, everything is coloured by our perceptions. One thing is sure, we've all had a hell of a lot of fun here, over the years, and long may it continue.

---

My Stories

[sindroms]

Joe, after Hale kicked out [Merc]Sindroms from Liberty and I went to chill in the Omicrons and Taus, I did not step foot in Liberty, since for two years that character was my only one. I had no interactions with the groups you suggested, apart from some Sigma 13 plebbing.

Neither did I join a faction for at least a year or so, until my nomad RP began taking place, but it was the overall feeling I had from listening to Ros, 101st and SOB.

They specifically told us indies to eff over every single corsair PLAYER we encounter, so there was quite a fair bit of hate around.

---

--------------
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
----------

[Bojangles]

In my opinion, the game would be better if people played fewer factions. Having too much faction diversity makes for stale diplomacy and makes power/metagaming too accessible.

[Korny]

Being in more than one faction sure increases the diversity of encounters and things to do, but I have to agree, back when I was in SOB and only had my Outcast (literally my only character for ages), I put much more dedication into it and it did feel more rewarding.

Might be just my nostalgia goggles...but I do feel that factions nowadays just lack integrity and seem to be just 'there', for the sake of being there. I'm in two factions at the moment, [LN] and JM|. [LN] being the older one I remember how things were years ago. It just had more substance than it does today. Faction leaders change, and I don't want to blame current leaders for doing a bad job or anything. But neither of the two factions feel as cohesive as I remember from the old days, especially JM|, which is a rather new faction.

JM| did start out good, that's why I hopped on the train, but to be honest...it's not engaging at all at this point. It just lacks something. Something old factions back then had.

---

[Srkad]

I remember there being a lot of hate for indies simply because there were a lot of indies that went outside the bounds of either their IFF RP or their ID rules. I'm not really sure what this post is necessarily about, but it is 100% true that everyone is going to have different opinions of how things have changed because everyone has had different experiences.

---

[Sarawr!?]

The removal of the phantoms might have been the last ditch attempt to hint to the rest of the community that such an attitude towards the server was a huge mistake. That Disco in order for it to remain what it was, needed to avoid going down that path. Needless to say, it failed.
Now such groups are a norm. I personally enjoy being in them as well. But I will say that the attitude towards Disco is probably the biggest issue with it. And funnily enough I did bring it up once during outings like this, and the overall reaction by the people involved was simple: "I would give more of a crap if others did. If others don't, why should I?"

The removal of the Phantoms was the removal of an outdated idea that no longer fitted with the current roleplay style. The "fun-group" as you like to put it, is an unrelated phenomenon, which has been partly created by yourself. You refer to the skype-friends mentality of having characters scattered all over sirius as if that is something that didn't exist in the past, but the truth is that has existed for the entire time I have been involved in the community. For the entire time I have played here, from way back in 2007, people have been cross-factioning and have logged characters with their friends in hot-spots as they appeared.

This is not the same thing as having an RP-shallow squad of people who do whatever the hell they wanna do.
You appear to be trying to make a point which isn't actually backed up by disco's history.

I agree with Joe here, and as a member of The Phantoms pre-death, I can confirm that the Phantoms died out pretty much because they couldn't figure out a way to integrate and adapt to the changing climate of Discovery.

More importantly though however, I have to say that as a long time member of a wide variety of factions (SCRA|, BAF|, LPI-, [LN], CR|, and even .:j:. way way back, to name a few.) I never encountered the "You must be in this faction and this faction only!" attitude mentioned previously in this thread.

Being in multiple factions (Official or otherwise), does NOT necessarily diminish ones quality of roleplaying (Unless yanno, they don't actually CARE about the character they've created, which is a personal problem if anything in that case XD), neither is it the same as creating "Characters" for a random "lolgroup" that uses a bare minimum of RP to go around and kill all the things.

---

[LN] Recruitment | Rachel Baker Bio

[Blodo]

People pretend like people on disco were any different in 4.84, when there was always the same amount of drama and trolling, as well as well staged RP that nobody except the initially approved group of people was allowed to interact with (or sometimes even know about). The only difference maybe is that back then you had a marked focus on "who is the best pilot" and so you had a bunch of players who were (to put it politely) constantly courted by others to go fly for their faction so they can win in pvp (hence pvp whore insults). These days you only get that in conn, while any active officials have pretty much lost their pvp competitiveness (or didn't have it in the first place if they are a post 4.85 non trading faction).

Anyway, the point is nostalgia goggles are unnecessary for this thread. The fallout that Sairs and OC had in 4.84 was the same kind of fallout that Hessians and RM had in 4.86, and it was the same kind of fallout that KNF and BAF had in 4.85, and all the other ones that I didn't mention. Fallouts like this always happen at war when the pvpers get bored and the rest of the faction descends from duking it out in space to seething about their in RP enemies on skype chats, and will keep happening for the same reason.

The only difference between now and then is that there's a lot less people joining the community, there's a lot less focus on pvp training server wide, and so the new guys who join don't really want to train excessively, the old players get bored of the same old fights with the same old people, there's nobody to really replace them when they need to step back for the health of their faction, and so they feel obliged to stay in their factions out of attachment. Result: they overstay themselves, become bitter, end up "not caring because the other guy doesn't". Most of the pals you fly with Sindroms started out RP heavy, and deteriorated from that point on to the point where they get sanctioned/banned on a semi regular basis. And there's many more like them. All those people, if they think that disco lost something and they want it back, then they can start with thinking how they used to interact with disco when they joined, whether it was more fun for them, and if it was - change their own behaviour first of all.

And yes I really do believe that the community wide focus on the pvp aces and training was the one thing that made 4.84 different from now, debatably in a good way because it kept people very involved and active.

[Jihadjoe]

People pretend like people on disco were any different in 4.84, when there was always the same amount of drama and trolling

Yeah, there certainly was a fair bit of this. I'm not pretending that is was all group hugs and niceness. I mean, I can remember huge arguments that blew up between various groups in those days - but they were nearly always created and pursued by a minority.

The fallout that Sairs and OC had in 4.84 was the same kind of fallout that Hessians and RM had in 4.86, and it was the same kind of fallout that KNF and BAF had in 4.85, and all the other ones that I didn't mention. Fallouts like this always happen at war when the pvpers get bored and the rest of the faction descends from duking it out in space to seething about their in RP enemies on skype chats, and will keep happening for the same reason.

Through all of those situations, you tend to find that aside from momentary and extremely transient situations, there has never been any real "faction nationalism" occuring. The OC and Corsair incident was really an argument between five or six players, while the vast majority were happily playing both sides and being generally pretty cool with everyone involved.

The only difference between now and then is that there's a lot less people joining the community, there's a lot less focus on pvp training server wide, and so the new guys who join don't really want to train excessively, the old players get bored of the same old fights with the same old people, there's nobody to really replace them when they need to step back for the health of their faction, and so they feel obliged to stay in their factions out of attachment. Result: they overstay themselves, become bitter, end up "not caring because the other guy doesn't". Most of the pals you fly with Sindroms started out RP heavy, and deteriorated from that point on to the point where they get sanctioned/banned on a semi regular basis. And there's many more like them. All those people, if they think that disco lost something and they want it back, then they can start with thinking how they used to interact with disco when they joined, whether it was more fun for them, and if it was - change their own behaviour first of all.

And yes I really do believe that the community wide focus on the pvp aces and training was the one thing that made 4.84 different from now, debatably in a good way because it kept people very involved and active.

Yes (to most of it). I would go into some more detail about why some of the veterans got bitter and angry, but I feel that may be for another discussion and not this one.

[n00bl3t]

Interesting to see how opinions differ on 4.83/84/85 times amongst people who were heavily involved in it.
That in itself seems to send up red flags on how people view things and how inaccurate they were/could be.

---

Anything I say is not intended as offensive, and to try and deliberately misinterpret it as such would be an attempt at trolling via misrepresentation.

It's not a conspiracy, it's localised bias. They're not intelligent enough to form a conspiracy.

[Vox]

A lot of longer-term players that I observed constantly look for things to bash in other players: "your ignorance of game mechanics sucks your ignorance of rules sucks your RP sucks your spelling sucks your snub-pvp skills suck your ganking sucks your ignorance of lore sucks your attitude sucks".

One could go deeper into what the need for denigration of others and self-aggrandizement over a computer game actually says about them, and about the huge discrepancy between how they think they are perceived and how they are really perceived.

However the relevance in regard to the OP is that it seems more likely that over time, the population of the server shifted from people who played because they enjoy multiplayer sci-fi, to people who play because of the feeling of superiority that it gives them. What is called "fun group" in the OP is really a group of long term players who found a new excuse to troll people who are not part of their gang, with little RP connection to the sci-fi universe, and just one manifestation of the phenomenon.

The resulting decline in friendly eye-to-eye interactions made the game considerably less enjoyable for everyone, including the ubermen, because of the backlash.