i was a long time player but now sp saves just get deleted, im done. i wasted almost 20 hours in the that few days thinking i was doing something wrong but its discoverys own fucked up save shit. good bye and fuck this
Shame you didn't go online, single player disco is a bit weird to work with. This is primarily a multiplayer online mod anyways, there's no story to play through nor is there a proper "progression system". Single player is really only used for testing and such.
Launcher deliberately deletes saves each time you run it because they caused bugs in MP, afaik. So SP in DFL made more to test thing, not to just play. Because this is MMO, eh. Not so "Massively", but still, yknow. Welp, you had two options what to do, tbh. And both of them could be found on the forum if you search.
First, the easiest but not the most convenient way – copy your save file before exit the game, and drag it to "...\Documents\My Games\Freelancer\Accts\SinglePlayer" folder each time you run it.
Second, a little more complicated way that allows you not to frick with files every time you run the game – don't use launcher at all. Start the game with Freelancer.exe. To fix widescreen resolution add "-dx" in "Target" line of Freelancer.exe shortcut (it should be like this: "...\EXE\Freelancer.exe" -dx).
So, yah, you definitely did something wrong. At least because you didn't make any effort to figure out the problem. Kthxbai.
Maybe it would be worth changing the launcher behavior a bit.
How about renaming the save files instead of deleting them? If they got renamed to Save5a33.fl.DiscoveryIsMultiplayerMod or something like that, at least people would not lose their SP progress.
When that happens display a warning in the launcher that the SP files have been tampered with. Possibly with a link to the forum, explaining the issue and encouraging players to play online.
This should be pretty quick and simple thing to do. Changing delete files to rename files is probably just one line of code. And there is already a warning message that shows if SP folder contains saves, that the launcher is not able to delete (when they are read only for example)
Even more robust solution would be to allow the player to choose:
a) delete SP saves and play online [RECOMMENDED]
b) keep the SP saves, but disable updates and online
And give a link to forum post explaining the issue and encouraging players to play online.
This should appear on the first start of the launcher after installation. So everyone knows what to expect.