The last time I've joined the server (in the middle of the summer, I guess), I survived around a week. I managed to collect around 150M with 3Ker transport, and something like a lightning struck me. I just asked myself, "And what's next?"
And I could not answer that question... I realized that I don't want to invest any more time in anything.
I don't want a battleship, battlecruiser, cruiser, or any other cap. I don't want to refresh any of my combat skills if I had any. I just don't find it fun at all.
Guess that's the main reason why players are not logging.
Now, I had several thoughts like: Alright, just gona make one cap ship, or a liner and have some soft RP, not going to play much, twice per week probably.
Then, I went here to forumlancer, and I have no idea, do I want to give another go on not. Probably not.
It's not like the mod is bad, nope, it's actually the best Freelancer mod. It keeps the original atmosphere of the Freelanced, which I just loved. Yeah, I guess that's the reason.
I loved version 4.85. The mod has progressed, I guess more than 10 years passed since 4.86 was introduced, which was already different. Now, Disco is way too different for me. But again, I'm not stating it's bad.
Just way too different for me, and perhaps for most of the players who left and didn't return.
There still will be a place in my heart for Freelancer, and for that great fun, we had in 4.85. Now, it's not touching my heart strong enough.
Interesting thread. I am actually playing personally, I joined three months ago.
I can absolutely see why people would quit playing the server or give up if they are a new joiner like myself. The honest truth based on my observations in the past three months is that quite frankly this server is:
A) Is in huge decline.
B) Will die a slow agonizing death over time.
C) Or alternatively will basically exist as the personal D&D of a select small group of people who seem to be content with that.
The problems I've seen are purely rational, objective, as I've not participated in any previous drama or have a biased view due to 20 years of being here. I am also not nostalgic over some by-gone era. I also fix operational models in real life and some of the stuff here are easy fixes so that leads me to believe that C) above is actually intentional. I also don't need to have been a part of this community for X amount of time to be able to view it objectively. Anyone thinking otherwise are just kidding themselves and can get off their high horse.
Issues in ranking:
1. Gate-keeping.
A lot of it. I've never experienced in my entire gaming industry so much gate-keeping. There's a big percentage of quite toxic old veterans that are hell-bent on gate-keeping. The entire model for changes and some of the rules are gate-keeping and this component has multiple degrees.
Examples of that are numerous.
A) For an RP server, you are extremely limited in what you can do. The moment you deviate from that path in any way, you get reported by people.
B) The moment you band with a group of new players, you are accused of ganking. Even though, some of these people have 15 years of experience in PvP so the reality is that you will never win in a straight ratio. People complaining that a bunch of noobs got together to fight against an experienced vet just blows my mind away. Even when said people actually win and they still complain.
C) Another official faction can essentially bully you into doing whatever they want or you can get FR5-ed. So basically someone with two people can dictate how you play just because they were here 5 years ago and have kept up with the absolute minimum of activity to still ''qualify'' as an OF.
D) You try to recruit from the new joiners, you are essentially told you can't do it even though it's clear that the new joiners aren't sticking around and the population is in huge decline. The stats are ever present and visible for all to see on this site.
E) Certain factions (official ones particularly) are essentially run by the same people. This allows them to seamlessly dictate everything that's happening on the server. They pop online whenever necessary. That's essentially gate-keeping new players from actually using or utilizing these factions. At the same time, they are hardly played, barely scraping the minimum target for activity. This is clearly evidenced again by the activity tracker and one has to has basic understanding of data to see. The dusty old dinosaurs can then essentially dictate every major faction in playing without actually playing it. This essentially eliminates the possibility of any new blood actually making any change or becoming an active part of the community in terms of shaping it. And it also allows ancient 10 year old feuds to keep on going between the same two players for example, in competition for creating and dominating most factions worth having. Speaking in generalities, of course.
F) The administration at best - does not have the time to combat this (most likely this), does not care, or is ignorant of it happening. At worst, it's actually a part of the gate-keeping. Certain factions led by parts of the administration are extremely questionable.
G) Overall, some of the community is just unhelpful, toxic (quite obviously on forum and on discord), does not contribute and seems to actively want to destroy and prevent new comers from joining. Nothing is done against such people. This again could be lack of time, ignorance, or willful participation (personal D&D desire). Overall, the general atmosphere is unwelcoming, un-tolerant, or actively hostile to new players.
I) The attitude of some people that you need to perform herculean efforts, write a doctorate, or have spent 10 years on this server for your points to actually have any merit. Let's face it guys, you are not rocket scientists, you haven't written any Shakespeare here. There's multitude of games worth playing out there. No one is going to spend 4 years proving themselves to you and you need to get over your fragile egos.
2. Not helping new players.
A) The idea that a new player has to be prepared when jumping into this game is just absurd. There's tons of rules (read below on that point), tons of stuff to read over, tons of factions to remember. The average person with a decent English is likely not going to remember half of just the rule pages in their first weeks. Let alone ships, guns, fighting effectively, etc.
B) The average experienced player is a toxic salt producing machine powerful enough to support a third world country alone. Mind you, not all are like that (I've met some actual honest and good people) but there's enough toxicity to essentially kill any new player.
C) The Wiki is abandoned. A wonderful tool that sadly has been left in utter decay. Why? I've no idea. The idea that one needs to read over 50 pages on a forum to understand something, be it game mechanic, or previous lore is absolute utter nonsense.
D) The idea that a new player has to know every lore change or what happened 10 years ago on the forum. Self-explanatory. Vets keep saying - read the lore first. Where exactly? Again, utter insanity.
E) Gate-keeping new players and preventing them from contributing in a meaningful way. (See the entire gate-keeping section).
3. The rules.
A) A lot of the rules are outdated and in need of updating.
B) A lot of the rules are arbitrary or downright vague. This leads to multiple problems including players not understanding them and also to admins having different interpretations of said rules and applying them differently. There's no standard. More so, it creates a bottleneck for the admins because a lot of decisions don't have a check list and require an interview process which leads to a lot of time spent on deciding stuff behind the scenes, I suspect. Of course, this problem is partly alleviated because I imagine with such a declining population, you also have less requests. I also suspect there's no quality control function in place or the QC mechanism don't work well.
C) No general code of conduct - be it positive or negative. This essentially leads to no one having an idea of what's a good practice or what's a bad practice. People claim ''ganking'' is bad but nowhere can you find that out unless salty old vets cry that you managed to beat them through numbers (which again, let's not forget, is the only real chance you have as a new player to begin with).
D) No examples of good RP and bad RP, no definitions. People keep crying about RP but no one can give you any definitions or examples. In fact, jump drives, a game mechanic in the game that everyone uses are not even supposed to be used RP-wise. How would one know that though unless they actually check with a veteran?
E) Re-evaluation of which rules are actually needed and which prevent gameplay needlessly. Which rules require a time-frame that's not reflective of reality or real life commitment.
F) Allow fresh blood in the administration. People with new and unbiased perspective passionate to make changes. I've already met quite a few people that want to help but are not given tools, the opportunity, or considered at all.
4) Information dissemination.
A) The forum is a good tool for RP-ing threads. It's not a good tool to read on rules, lore, historical choices. You can't get context, you can't see the bigger picture. You can't sift upon pages and pages and pages of old threads.
B) There needs to be an outline and each tool needs to be used for specific purposes - Forum for RP and discussions, Wiki for lore, mechanics, and rules. These two need to work together. Have the community help with building up the wiki again. Have administration rule only in points of conflict if time is of essence.
5) There's literally no dynamic movement or any lore impact whatsoever.
A) Let the community drive your narrative. If suddenly 100 people start logging in Gallia, have your lore reflect that. Have people be able to actively and dynamically change relations and factions. The idea that certain factions are stuck in a perpetual endless war with no outcome is just boring. Alliances and wars should shift and change the narrative. Administration should get a person to be a some sort of Game Master (one that does not play any faction and is unbiased, with QC in check just in case). Have a faction actually win a war and claim some territory - give people a reason to log. To defend their homeland or to claim some territory. Have the diplomacy which is the core of this game be able to be shifted. Otherwise, your RP is extremely limited and very scripted. You will always be stifled by constraints.
6) No advertisement.
A) This game can actually acquire so many people at absolutely no financial cost. There's plenty of people that understand marketing. Simple targeted posts even on facebook can do the trick for free. Make a helpful landing page for all the new recruits / people. I'm not even going to talk about the potentiality for actual profit from this mod, because that's an entirely different story.
Addendum: The game is absolutely perfect to play and it's not the reason why people don't pick it, stop, or quit. The gameplay is fun, the game is practically in a niche with no serious competitors. The graphics are clearly not an issue. A lot of people play Deep Rock Galactic, or the old Diablo 2 before the remaster, thousands of examples.
There's quite a lot of quick wins that can be done to drastically improve this server and the overall health of the community, and its population. The fact that it's not done leads me to believe that it's intentional and some people just want to have their own personal D&D session. Which is also fine by the way. But I think that if people woke up from their myopic view, they'll actually find out they might enjoy it more than the same old 10 people circle-jerk. Those get old and predictable fast.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
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Quote: The dusty old dinosaurs can then essentially dictate every major faction in playing without actually playing it. This essentially eliminates the possibility of any new blood actually making any change or becoming an active part of the community in terms of shaping it.
For the most part, I pretty much agree with your post, and I feel that it's a collation of opinions that has been repeated time and time again. The real question, what do we do, how do we do it, and how to go about it? The solutions? What will the staff team say? What /can/ they do without invoking immense anger from many users?
But this part here, I wanted to note something regarding OFLs, anyone can make them, and anyone can form their group. They can't stop you, and they certainly cannot change lore, and I agree that groups should be less "us vs them" mentality - Especially when the population actually overlaps in playerbases. You're very likely to meet someone who has both a lawful and unlawful.
Also The "Disco Working Group" chat which had OFL leads in it giving opinion and suggestions for lore was long discontinued, so perhaps thankfully, OFLs do not really have a major ""sole decision"" in making things to a subjective view of one ideology/thoughtline.
Posts: 6,307
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(12-30-2021, 04:23 PM)DariusCiprian Wrote: The solution is easy. Close down the server once and for all.
All things have an end, and disco deserves better than this slow death.
That's a solution, but not the solution.
I believe it can be fixed, but it requires radical thinking and deviation. The issue with too much dynamic stuff going on will make it hard for people to follow up on. I wholeheartedly agree on the notion regarding the wiki, but it also requires a lot of collaboration.
There's also the matter of interpretation of what is npc/lore canon vs player canon, since we're kinda running on a star warsy idea of that the server has a different extended canon based on the npc/infocard canon.
There are things like certain factions can't have bigger ships because they don't have the economics to do them - who cares, this is 2003 game. Also there is that bordering thing that everything or mostly everything must be 100% freelancer style. Well why not go out a little out of that bordering and make something a bit different , be it a few new systems kinda like home of those Sammara Riders or previous Crayter home i've seen in the wiki or outer region of Daam K'Vosh, something new, mystical. Active player (nod)
(12-30-2021, 04:21 PM)Kauket Wrote: The real question, what do we do, how do we do it, and how to go about it? The solutions? What will the staff team say? What /can/ they do without invoking immense anger from many users?
(12-30-2021, 04:27 PM)Kauket Wrote: I believe it can be fixed, but it requires radical thinking and deviation.
All it requires is that certain people (the person you're answering would call them "the gatekeepers") give up their resistance to all the solutions to all the problems that were listed, which have been already presented and re-presented to them for years, some for at least a decade.
- The vague, incomprehensible, and obsolete rules
- The ridiculous amount of restrictions that strangle RP and gameplay
- The difficulty of finding interations
- The ridiculousness of people with 10/1 kill/death ratios constantly pretending they are getting "ganked" by people with 1/10 kill/death ratios
- The "us vs them attitude" that staff is enabling instead of discouraging with their "moderation" style on forum and discord by farcical censorship
- The little to no help that new players get in terms of rules, lore, and law presentation, not only from players but especially form staff who do more to stop help from being delivered via the game itself than they do to provide that help
Nothing of this is new. Nothing of this has no solution. Nothing of this has a solution that has not arleady been proposed to staff and community multiple times.
All it takes is for certain people, and please dont pretend that you dont know who they are, to stop working against the existing solutions and against the people who try to help implement them, because they care more about being in control than they care about anything else.
(12-30-2021, 04:21 PM)Kauket Wrote: For the most part, I pretty much agree with your post, and I feel that it's a collation of opinions that has been repeated time and time again. The real question, what do we do, how do we do it, and how to go about it? The solutions? What will the staff team say? What /can/ they do without invoking immense anger from many users?
I can provide you solutions quite easily. I literally do this for a living - look at an operating model and fixing it. Implementing changes, processes, eliminate roadblocks, find out where the roadblock or bottleneck is operationally, provide quality control or checks where applicable. Optimization, marketing, you name it.
The questions is how much the administration is actually on board with this and how much they want to revive activity and actually listen. My interaction with the administration team has been limited but so far positive. But then again, I've only interacted with two people I believe. And the administration might be made of various faces with different interests that are divergent and not aligned in the slightest (which in itself, is a problem).
But anyway, solutions that are quick wins from the top of my mind (a proper plan can be made):
1) Fix and update the wiki - this can be community based and driven by the actual players. Long term veterans can write up and update pages of their groups / factions.
I am not the best example as DTR is relatively new Corsair faction (although we created our own wiki page because wiki is awesome). But there's veteran old Outcast players. They can fix the wiki and update it for anything Outcast related.
All of the combined material passes two checks - a community health check and an administration check. In the case, the community can't agree, an admin that the community agrees on their integrity can have the final say.
Repeat that model for every Discovery area - Liberty, Bretonia, etc.
For neutral stuff like guides, trading, fixing prices, everyone can contribute. And it should be easy to push because it's not contentious.
Have the administration make an event with prizes - 10 wiki pages equals to 100 mil or something else to fuel the community if they need additional incentive.
With the combined effort of everyone, the wiki can be fixed in 1 month. Create a page of articles for newbies - rules, good etiquette, good RP, with examples. Point them out to newbie friendly factions to take them under their wing. This way you can mitigate the horrible attrition rate this server has. Looking at just the site data visible to all, the attrition is staggering. Your population is declining from the looks of it and has been declining for some time.
I can make the speculation that probably COVID led to an activity spur at some point but if you don't fix the root cause, you won't attain the players.
2) Once you have this covered and have a good landing page for new players - start some basic marketing. Happy to provide pointers - mind you absolutely free of charge, won't cost a penny.
3) Do a community review on the rules - what's obsolete, what's old, what's stifling gameplay or interactions.
That's just the basics. Utilize Discord and wiki more. I can make an entire plan if I wanted to, assuming of course people are actually interested.
If I understand how the behind the scenes works and the administration, I can review the overall operating model there as well.
Honestly, a lot of the stuff is quick wins that are easy to implement. There are also people that are willing to do it from what I've seen.
The real question is whether this is the personal D&D session of a select group of people or an actual community. If it's the latter, the administration should get behind this easily if they are actually open-minded and able to reflect.
If it's the former, you can't do anything until you eliminate the people in power. They are happy with having their small 15 or whatever people circle-jerk in which case, it's a matter of moving to another game or server.
Happy to elaborate on anything else.
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
![[Image: kauket.gif]](https://sig.grumpybumpers.com/host/kauket.gif)
