Firstly, sorry for this taking so long. Going through 150+ responses took longer than I expected and then making the notes for what you will see also took me longer than I thought it would. Originally I aimed for the survey to be viewed just by the staff team to identify what the community feels are the more pressing issues driving people away and 'harvest' an understanding of what people believe are the most important elements that needed to be improved. I think it is fair to say that the staff are not fully surprised by the results, but the results definitely vindicate the the need for improvement.
Special thanks to everyone who has contributed their time and effort to the survey, as well as: @Contaan, @Skorak, and unwittingly @Haste for the further contribution of ideas and suggestions beyond what was said in the survey.
NOTE: Some things may seem contradictory, and that is typically because of mixed responses from the survey results.
To begin in earnest, here is what you voted that is pushing people away:
Community (95 votes)
Lack of RP (72 votes)
Dev Team (43 votes)
Admin Team (35 votes)
Official Factions (34 votes)
Story (34 votes)
Forum Lancering (30 votes)
Player-Owned Bases (29 votes)
Server Rules (26 votes)
Requirement of RP (20 votes)
Also, here is what you voted for what to improve:
Events - Combat/Exploration/Trading (58 votes)
RP Quality (54 votes)
Story Quality (39 votes)
Balance (33 votes)
PvE Content (31 votes)
Vision (31 votes)
Staff Team (24 votes)
Money Sinks (22 votes)
OF Benefits (21 votes)
PoBs (16 votes)
Server Rules (12 votes)
Many of the ‘Other’ votes are ‘All’ votes along with things that will be explored later.
Moving forward:
Due to the amount of information that was given, and the need to keep this smaller in length and more presentable, I will be putting each section within spoilers so that people are not greeted by a massive wall of text.
The community has managed to identify itself as one of the main reasons why Discovery pushes people away. There then stands the question that if they know they’re the problem, why do they continue to act like they do?
The likely answer is two-fold. Not everyone is the same in the ways they discourage people from playing, and those that differ typically don’t see how their behaviour can be repulsive for people to enjoy the game or RP. The text responses centered around the following (in order of most common):
The community should be nicer to each other,
The community should stop bullying other members,
The community should stop circle-jerking,
The community should stop taking an exclusionary attitude,
The community thinks everyone else but themselves are stupid,
The community should be more willing to change its attitude,
The community should be more courteous to newer players,
The community believe OFs do not maintain high standards,
The community believe OFs are hostile to, or disregard indies too much,
The community should stop acting in the interests of Pixel Power,
The community believe PvP Aces ruin engagements,
The community insults other people for different RP styles and preferences.
Here is a few other things people suggested, that weren’t commonly stated directly but were implied (in no particular order):
Snowflakes discourage people from playing,
Having the same interactions with traders or hostiles over and over,
Community suppresses player contribution,
Community prides itself on stomping on newer or less skilled players,
Community doesn’t try to balance sides,
PvP’ers log in to attack RP’ers which then discourages them from RP’ing,
There can be conflict without needing to be an ‘arsehole’ about it,
Community looks down on Powertraders,
Community relies on attacking others with rules, instead of RP’ing creatively.
One of the biggest problems with trying to exercise out the behaviour that turns people away is to either make rules against it and begin a campaign of stamping it out. Or hope the community realises or even cares to realise the problems they cause. Unfortunately there are people in the community who genuinely do not care if they insult you, and will do it either out of habit or disregard for mutual respect. Here are the suggestions put forward to encourage improvement:
More frequent punishment for bad behaviour,
Punishments to stretch across all of the official Discovery Freelancer platforms. The Forum, the Discord, and the Game.
The likely consequences of this involve a lot of complaining from individuals hit in the effort, and perhaps they will stop playing or interacting with the community because of it. Likewise there is the issue of ‘how high’ the standard set, and how severe the punishments should be. This also ties into the Admin/Mod team and Server Rules section touched upon later.
RP & Gameplay:
It might seem strange to put these two in the same section, but hear me out. One of the main complaints in general is the lack of passive activity on the server and the lack of roleplay to boot. These two points are not exclusive, instead they are very much joined at the hip. The more passive activity you encourage, the greater chance of encountering RP. A potential consequence of not encouraging this can be seen with the RP seemingly only happening in any significant size or quality on the forums, otherwise known as forum-lancering.
Although one of the highest-listed in the charts, the number of text responses for this part is mostly complaints that the quality needs to be improved. Discovery does not lack the role-players to inject quality into the game, ironically it is mostly that they are not in game. Here is what people said about RP (listed by most common):
‘Higher’ quality RP is not in the game,
People do their RP on the forums, instead of in-game,
People log to PvP instead of RP’ing,
/1 /2 engagement lines are boring and bad quality,
Player governments are more ooRP than they are inRP,
RP reward system encourages goal-orientated RP and not organic,
Serious RP is pre-arranged, and not organic,
House Rules are tedious,
Lowest effort to obtain desired result,
Community is encouraged to rule bash instead of being creative.
Additionally, some players suggested the following but it was either one or two replies and a different understanding in the case of the first in the list:
There should be different encounters and opportunities in RP,
Staff should ensure people respect the spirit of RP,
RP shouldn’t be breaking the lore,
A guide on how to RP should be created.
Unlike the technical need for modding, in order to improve the quality of RP in-game, a combination of player interaction, creativity, and rule enforcement to set the benchmark of quality RP is necessary. Here are the suggestions to help push towards improving the RP quality:
Creation of a Lore Clarification thread/sub-forum,
Creation of a new basic guide to RP,
Updating or creation of a new Wiki,
End to the notion of 2 line engagement notice, specifically using the /1 /2. Enforce a quality level to engagement notices instead of an objective minimum. (not removing the ability to use /1 /2)
RP that is considered lore-breaking should be sanctionable, this is not meant to attack deviant RP from faction norms. Instead meant to prevent instances of lore-breaking RP from occurring.
Rewards for receiving kudos.
Community to encourage more talks to happen in-game instead of on forums.
Players can use the in-game roll system to do DM style events for their factions. (Currently this is a foreign concept to many in disco, but use of the roll system and DM'd events are the norm elsewhere.)
The consequences of this will likely be a rise in sanctions against people who are perceived to just be using the /1 /2 to do the bare minimum to then PvP. Additionally making lore-breaking RP sanctionable will require it first to pass a test of deviancy to determine if it's actually lore-breaking or breaking the norm.
As mentioned before, gameplay should aim to encourage passive activity which then opens up the possibility of more RP occurring in-game.Making moves to encourage activity in-game is no easy task, and will mostly require the community to shift the way it operates to help push it that way. After looking at the responses people have made in relation to gameplay, there does seem to be improvements that can be made without significant technical skill.Here is what people said (ordered by most common):
Events that motivate,
Money Sinks,
More PvE content,
Skill gap in PvP too large,
Events that have story consequence,
More relaxed way to improve pvp skill,
Stimulate the economy.
Some of these seem simpler than they are to improve, I know many people have asked for more player-determined consequences in the story and this is typically countered by a faction’s PvP skill not being representative of the faction inRP. (As a side note, coming from a different RP background than the standard for Disco, I always found it strange that no matter what character a player plays, they always have the same level of PvP skill.) Regardless, here are some of the suggestions made (in no particular order)::
Introduction of more meaningful money sinks. I think there is a missed opportunity here to introduce things to grind for by having simple cosmetic changes to ships and equipment. There is currently some in the game for engines and thrusters, but not really any for shield effects, weapon effects (Such as mines, missiles, CMs, guns etc), OF specific cosmetic variants (Not unique cosmetics for each OF, rather a unique for being an OF). Additionally on what is said below, trade events which allow for the 'donating' of money to see real in-game consequences.
Introduce more events that go beyond the standard generic combat / trade event style. (There is a current event in the works that aims to put a spin on combat events and ties into the next point),
Have more events that will have consequence to the game world. Not everything needs to be of a grand design or scale and lower-tier narratives have been intentionally ignored being deemed as "Things that happen that wouldn't draw the attention of everyone."
Improve the competency of the AI, but also reduce their numbers spawning in combat missions. (This one is tricky as I am not sure if its really possible to make the AI act in a way to allow players to passively improve their pvp skill with pve content.)
Actual matchmaking - Again, I am not sure of the feasibility of this. We all see everyone loitering in Conn, often dueling their friends and not really wanting to spar with newer or less experienced people too frequently. Perhaps there may be a way to set-up two teams automatically for a fight in conn away from the rest of the players. A regular 4v4 that people can jump into, to better their skills without the need to duel or concerns of RP might go a long way to reduce the skill gap. This has the added problem of encouraging more people to stay in conn, and get group fights this way instead of looking to RP and see one develop.
End the monotony of the equalized credits per second on non-ore commodities. While I can understand it being introduced for balance, it only has so far solidified ore as the only thing worth trading. Breaking the monotony of commodity trading would finally encourage more people to trade it when the routes are found. On top of that, make smuggling worth more, as currently it needs to compete with ore while being less profitable, typically less cargo space permitted on IDs, and much higher risk.
The results showed that a large portion of players believe that the Dev team is pushing players away. This is in contrast to the text responses where the Admin Team was referenced heavily. Trying to deduce the reason for this centers on the idea that either people were confused and assumed the Admins were a part of the Dev Team and wanted to complain about the whole or the complaints against the Dev Team were mostly due to the story which featured in the responses. This section will not be dealing with Story or Server Rules. Here is what people responded (ordered by most commonly said):
Staff only do the bare minimum / are lazy / apathetic,
Staff are incompetent,
Staff are corrupt and/or biased,
The Community has a low-level of faith in the Admins,
Staff ignore the community,
Admins ignore problems,
Team fails to communicate with the community,
Admins do not punish harmful members of the community,
Admins do not know how to moderate,
Admins are too strict with SRPs (The opposite has also been mentioned),
Admins take themselves too seriously and not seriously at the same time,
If staff are no longer interested in the game, they should no longer hold a position,
Unlike the many complaints about the Staff team, ways in which to improve the system were not all that frequent. But some did surface within the responses such as (in no particular order):
Remove inactive or barely-active Admins,
Staff should be more transparent,
Staff should be more responsible,
Admins need to designate someone responsible for resolving sanctions,
Gear towards promotion of RP and fairplay over rule bashing,
Ditch the current ‘old way’ mentality,
Split the team into Server Management and RP Moderators. (This one seems rather strange, and would likely need more developing beyond just stating it here to really understand the idea),
Respect your moderators
Balance Specific:
This might seem better placed into the gameplay section, and I did debate having it there. But since it was directed at a section of the Dev Team, and by that a section of the Staff Team I put it here instead. A portion of the Dev Team complaints also accompanied issues with balance, although this was a small portion when compared to the majority which was about Story.
Tech cells are bad,
Bomber rework is bad / Bomber rework is good (around equal measure),
Balance decisions orientate around the few not the many,
Ships feel too similar,
PvP takes too long,
Make more cool things,
Make it easier for newer players to contribute to fights.
Balance is a tricky beast to tackle. There is a large element of skill and experience involved in some of the ways to conduct PvP in the game and due to the low population count you are more likely to encounter someone who has dedicated more time and effort into being a stronger PvP player. Either way, here were some suggestions:
Simplify tech cells to 100% and 10% or remove (ID restrictions apply),
Balance instead for the many, not the few (Disco focus should be on RP, not the competitive scene. An extreme and radical example would be to remove strafe),
Consider the removal of Nanobots and adjust balance accordingly,
Rework capital ships to shorten the time to kill (Cruiser rework in the works),
Make more cool things
Some explanation for the “Extreme & Radical” example: One of the greatest tools currently in use to avoid taking damage in almost all PvP is strafing. Although the removal of it will have major consequences, it would in theory allow newer players to deal more damage to better players, but also means more can be dealt to them. Testing with it may produce better results..
Systems Specific:
You should know the drill by now!
Systems need to encourage exploration,
Removal / rework of systems has removed good aspects of the game,
Systems reduction of systems is catering to the PvP’ers,
Need better jump connections,
Takes too long to get around.
A lot of what has been complained about for systems leans on opinion; certain camps of players do not like to see many systems they need to fly through to find people. Likewise others want more systems to explore instead of having the same ones over and over again but perhaps invaded by assets from a different system to boot. It’s difficult to see a way to appease both sides, but perhaps there is one. Here are the suggestions:
More details, nicer compositions, and more environmental story-telling,
Orientate towards the use of highways and ‘system clusters’ to develop exploration but allow for quick travel along the ‘main’ routes,
Following on from above, use the highway junctions as chokepoints for trade flow,
Shrink the size of some of the more egregious system sizes,
Stop the removal or merging of systems.
Exploration always comes from the discovery of something new. While this does not really require a new system to explore, we are missing out on a large part of what a space game is if we spite the idea because of travel times. Travel times could be addressed by approaching the layout of certain systems to allow for quicker travel on the ‘highways’ and the further you proceed from them the more frontier-like the systems become. This does already exist to some extent but systems are not clustered and the addition of more systems with the current style leads to warping of connections.
Economy Specific:
This section shares overlap with gameplay.
Better money sinks are needed (this was mentioned -a lot-),
Economy is stagnant,
Smuggling is high risk, low reward,
Too few things left to trade or mine,
The majority of the complaints for the economy centered around two points. The first one being a lack of money sinks and the second one is that it is stagnant. By stagnant it is meant that there is little change of worth that makes the economy more dynamic, thereby making the route more boring. Here are the suggestions:
The use of cosmetic changes to ships and gun effects to create money sinks,
Perhaps allow OFs to purchase unique ships/equipment with cosmetic changes for their factionlines (not every OF gets its own cosmetic variant),
Rotate a boost to commodity routes to the same level or exceed the level of ore to add something different,
Make smuggling more profitable.
Ore currently dominates the money-making scene, and there are a lot of them to choose from. I would argue a lot of the problems with the economy is discovery comes from the reliance on ores as the most reliable way of making big bucks. Ores themselves rarely change location, rarely require you to use different routes and more or less encourage the same back and forth as a trader. This is both good and bad as it makes you more predictable for a pirate but it means you mostly see the same scenery over and over again.
I feel it best to do some explaining here as to the current situation with the Discovery hierarchy as it is now compared to how it was before. Once upon a time the server arguably had two figures at the top, Durandal and Xalrok. Certain decisions under their leadership were very controversial and mired the story for years. They both left, giving the reigns to Lanakov (who was an active serviceman in the French military.). For about a year the one guy with the authority and responsibility over Disco was absent due to irl, Disco carried on under the guidance of the Head Admin & Devs which it continues to do today. To explain a little more, the Head Admin along with the Head Devs currently operate as council of leadership for Discovery Freelancer, and they have been doing so in the absence of Lanakov as well.
What does this have to do with vision? You may wonder. When people responded to the survey and opted to choose 'Vision' it came in two forms: Firstly and most commonly 'Having a vision' was expressed. Secondly, 'Singular vision' was also listed. The difference between comes to who has the authority and responsibility for Discovery, but both are really asking for what is the direction we are going. For those that never saw, > here < is Lanakov's address to the community.
So what do we do?
Currently the leadership of Discovery is not good at communicating to the community what they want to do, or want to try to do. You could go as far as to say the team doesn't work cohesively, but that would be mostly speculation on my part. So long as an agreed direction among those with authority is followed and the community can see this I believe this can resolve the vision issue.
If you have spoken to me before about this, I have said Discovery needs a leader. The recent examples have not been very good at showing to the community this is a good idea, but in almost every project I can fathom that has not stagnated itself to death, there has always been a singular person where the buck stops. Having a bad choice can be equally or even more so damaging to the community in the same stride as having one could take Discovery out of its rut.
I imagine a lot of people have been pretty interested to see what people have to say about the Story, and I suppose most already have a good idea about what has been said. Due to the overlap with the ‘Story Team’ that would normally be in the Dev Team section, it will instead be addressed here. Anyway, here is what people said about the Story (ordered by most common):
The Story is bad,
The Story is stagnant,
Team is incompetent,
No consequence in the story,
Nothing happens unless its war,
Lacks direction,
Too biased towards Houses and major factions,
Team doesn’t have a point of contact and responsibility for requests relating to story or the team,
Not everyone needs a fleet,
Factions should not be balanced with each other.
For those that remember, the story team has been made up of a variety of people over the past two years. Perhaps the most consistent part of the story is the inconsistency with its team. Here is what we suggest:
Story quality was one of the most asked for improvements. Generally having a plan, the willingness to carry it out and less democratising of creativity ought to improve the quality (the Dev Plan system helps with this),
Permit the development of imbalance between the houses and factions, potentially allowing one faction to lose out heavily,
Replace the temporary Story Lead with an actual Story Lead. Give them the authority and autonomy to direct and lead the team. (may conflict with the current Dev Plan approval system),
Replacing faction does A,B, C with this NPC of said faction does A, B, C instead. This shifts the responsibility of the consequence to an NPC instead of the faction as a whole. It further allows for deviancy and better explains things going wrong or right due to the virtues of the NPC.
This one seems relatively straight forward. The major problem is that being an OF is not worth it and they are only required to ‘exist’ in game for 3 days a quarter which does not contribute much to the overall quality of the RP environment. However these are not the only problems identified by the community. Here is what else was said (listed by most commonly mentioned):
Official Factions have too much control,
Maintaining officialdom does not encourage quality,
OFs look down on or disregard their indies,
Pointless to be a OF.
OFs are one of those aspects that gets a mixed bag. Certain players want them to have more control and more stuff while others want them to have less and see them as something bad. Both sides however seem to agree the current OF situation is bad, and it should be improved. I believe this is something that might deserve its own thread or discussion about. Either way, here is what people suggested:
Revamp the OF system by introducing more tangible benefits and rewards that encourage certain behaviour / interaction,
Give OFs unique access to cosmetically different ships for their faction ships.
Remove the activity requirement from OFs, and replace it with a subjective RP requirement instead,
Require that the RP be done in-game as opposed to on the forums. Activity tracker at the moment seems to be used as a substitute for in-game RP by those who oversee officialdom.
Hold OFs to a higher RP standard,
Radical left-turn - Delete OFs - This may also address the point of OFs ignoring or disregarding the actions of indies, and only taking other OFs seriously.
When going over the text responses to the Server Rules it became evident that the responses conflicted with each other. While one side does not like rules and likely wants more of them removed to allow greater dynamical RP to take place, it also encourages poorer standards and even worse behaviour. On the flip side having more rules would raise the standard through 'punishment', but it also makes the rules generally longer and perhaps more complex. I do not believe anyone wishes to make RP in Freelancer difficult to access, rather they would prefer it if the rules 'pushed up' the benchmark. Here is what people said (ordered by most common):
Rules do not encourage RP,
Rules interfere with RP dynamic,
Not good enough / cover only noob mistakes,
Hard to understand / vague,
Walls of text,
Doesn’t promote activity.
There are few people who are satisfied with the way things are currently, and many people point to different reasons for it. Server Rules ought to be considered as both the reason for the current status quo and a way to improve it. Here is the general gist of what people wanted:
Encourage RP
Uphold the Lore
‘Be better’ (This didn't really come with suggestions, but was frequently implied.)
One of the rules I have brought up frequently is the introduction of the Player Death Rule. The rule is different as it considered Player Death different from Character Death, which Player Death being as what happens now and Character Death being the character actually dies. This however goes further in that if you suffer a Player Death then your character does not retain the memory of events that lead up to the ship being destroyed, meaning that the “power-gaming/metagaming that sees itself appear in MDs after they die” situation we currently have does not happen..
Ending note:
If the number of responses are to be believed then there is over 100 people who are willing to take a survey on Discovery Freelancer and coincidentally to become reinvested into the server. I believe it's fair to say that Discovery has potential but people wish to see if it is truly worth their investment of time. Of course this also runs into two sides who disagree about one important element that the server advertises itself on, RP. The current climate and expectation of RP on Discovery are fairly low, with very little to no moderation unless someone reports it on the forums and even then this could potentially take months to resolve. Additionally, the minimal RP oversight sets the tone that the server merely parades itself as an RP server, but never takes itself seriously enough to be one. It becomes understandable that the path of least resistance keeps being taken, to not even bother with the game.
To conclude, there are a number of suggestions that are included in this thread that could improve Discovery overall without changing anything dramatically, although I doubt superficial changes would really do much to reverse the decline. It is now up to the community, staff included, to maintain the status quo or to push on and perhaps give Discovery another huzzah, preferably one lasting more than a COVID lockdown.
Lastly, this thread covers the most prominent responses but not all. So feel free to post alternative suggestions below if you have them.
Spectacular work with this, Hokan! It did take a while, but it was definitely worth it.
Thanks for the survey, going through all the answers and compiling this exhaustive summary - now as you say, those suggestions should be carefully considered and changes made where possible, and this includes us the players as well.
One note about the community - it's been noted in the other topics as well, it's well known by most players, it's the major sore spot that needs addressing and it's also one where rules can only go so far.
Taking a clear stance against toxicity and offensive behaviour via rules is good and all, but ideally there shouldn't be need of sanctions, and to get there us the players ourselves must be the first to treat your fellow player with more respect and consideration.
As aptly stated in the summary, 'there can be conflict without being assholes to one another', and there can be criticism without tearing someone apart; conversely, honest praise and kind words are always welcome, so don't be afraid to give them!
Basically, when it comes to things like communities, if you sincerely want to make them a better place to be in - you have to be the change you want to see, if you'll excuse the trite (though true, I feel) expression.
tl;dr: be excellent to each other and party on, dudes.
(06-06-2021, 12:14 AM)Hokan Wrote: [*]Actual matchmaking - Again, I am not sure of the feasibility of this. We all see everyone loitering in Conn, often dueling their friends and not really wanting to spar with newer or less experienced people too frequently. Perhaps there may be a way to set-up two teams automatically for a fight in conn away from the rest of the players. A regular 4v4 that people can jump into, to better their skills without the need to duel or concerns of RP might go a long way to reduce the skill gap. This has the added problem of encouraging more people to stay in conn, and get group fights this way instead of looking to RP and see one develop.
[*]Consider the removal of Nanobots and adjust balance accordingly,
Some explanation for the “Extreme & Radical” example: One of the greatest tools currently in use to avoid taking damage in almost all PvP is strafing. Although the removal of it will have major consequences, it would in theory allow newer players to deal more damage to better players, but also means more can be dealt to them. Testing with it may produce better results..
The fact that the results and conclusions of the survey presented in this thread are not discussed apart and flamed over seems to me like the best indication that nobody really cares anymore. Back in the day those sorts of threads would rack up 15 pages of replies in a day, now it's mere three posts. I certainly don't care much anymore, but I will try to muster up a spark of interest to share some outside observations. I haven't played this game much in the last three years mostly being busy with irl, but also because it's definitely taken a turn for the worse in a grand scheme of things (it's better than when Durandal was around, but definitely worse than a year-two before that).
I should mention my reasons for still playing this game: the practice in speed typing that rping in game gives me, the ability to practice my English both in terms of writing stories, worldbuilding content and in game rp, the ability to develop a character through player interaction. I stopped giving much of a damn about PvP, which is why I retired or will soon retire most of my PvP-centered chars (bounty hunters, warriors, etc). The reasons for that I will explain later down.
Anyway, let's talk about this.
Quote:The community should be nicer to each other,
The community should stop bullying other members,
The community should stop circle-jerking,
The community should stop taking an exclusionary attitude,
The community thinks everyone else but themselves are stupid,
The community should be more willing to change its attitude,
Quote:More frequent punishment for bad behaviour,
Punishments to stretch across all of the official Discovery Freelancer platforms. The Forum, the Discord, and the Game.
This is all the same thing and basically means "boo hoo people are mean".
Yeah. Welcome to the internet.
How do you solve it? Encourage anon gameplay. People change their attitude if they know who is behind a character. Keeping anonymity is really tough long-term, it should be encouraged. It can only really happen if some conventions are adjusted in the community as a whole but it probably can be done. It's difficult on discord, because you can't anonymously message the owner of another character, but I don't know of a platform that would allow you to do that. Maybe IRC, but good luck getting people to use IRC. We need more factions like the LH~.
People aren't going to change much and if you try to impose it, they will just leave or circlejerk more in external discord servers.
Nothing interesting ever happens on the official Discovery Discord. Nothing interesting ever is going to happen if you tighten the rules on what people want to say. Sometimes we want to argue just to argue. People rarely if ever answer new player questions on the discord anyway, especially those that require more than 2 lines of invested writing.
Maybe we should bring back the Angels.
Quote:The community believe PvP Aces ruin engagements,
Quote:Community prides itself on stomping on newer or less skilled players,
Community doesn’t try to balance sides,
Quote:People log to PvP instead of RP’ing,
Quote:Skill gap in PvP too large,
Quote:Tech cells are bad,
Bomber rework is bad / Bomber rework is good (around equal measure),
Balance decisions orientate around the few not the many,
Ships feel too similar,
PvP takes too long,
Make more cool things,
Make it easier for newer players to contribute to fights.
Quote:Balance instead for the many, not the few (Disco focus should be on RP, not the competitive scene. An extreme and radical example would be to remove strafe),
Consider the removal of Nanobots and adjust balance accordingly,
I've said it before an I'll say it again: the balance changes and their consequences within the last five years have been a disaster for discovery freelancer. The core of the problem is that some people watched the extracredits video on "perfect imbalance" and thought it would be a good idea to implement league of legends mechanics into a 2003 arcade shooter. The golden age of snub discovery PvP has been Kusari in early 2015 when everyone flew basically the same heavy fighter, there were nukes and instakills possible, and everything was very skillful, dynamic, engaging and fun.
The changes to make snub pvp first more skillful (reduction of the role of mines, nerfing fast-firing weapons in favour of shotguns/4.00s, ), then more varied (aux slots), then more balanced (removal of aux slots and instakill possibilities, averaging of gun efficiencies efficiencies, ammo reductions) and finally less skillful (weapons for idiots like missiles that discourage solo gameplay, wardogs which are literally a nail in the coffin for anyone who doesn't want to fly shotgun, balancing different loadouts against each other) demonstrate no long-term vision and ultimately encourage circlejerking. Flattening of the learning curve of pvp only means that the people who able to log more people are going to win the engagements. Sure, a part of it is etiquette, but at this point there really is no reason to log if you see that you don't have equal numbers. It's a prisoner's dilemma and the winning move is not to play.
Also the fact that there is interaction between capital ships and snubs is nonsensical. Vhfs should not be able to kill caps, caps should not be able to kill vhfs. The only touchpoint between these classes should be bombers, which after the rework are and should be underdogs against both and that actually seems really nice. Just remove solaris turrets and we're practically there.
Quote:Smuggling is high risk, low reward
It isn't unless you're going to Manhattan. Especially for factions which can often apply for licenses on contraband goods and these are almost always granted. The rewards should be higher though, especially for destinations which have a larger player base (New York).
Anyway, on the broader point of economy, I've suggested a solution which has worked wonders on HHC and has never been properly implemented or even considered on Discovery, and that is webmissions/clanmissions. A description of clanmissions is here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid1616777
Web missions worked the same in that you docked on a base and were presented with a random list of destinations and commodities. Delivering the commodities successfully gained a percentage boost to income, but the catch was that when you started a web mission the entire server got a hook message that you started a mission and with which commodity, so they could get ready to intercept.
There also were a set of stock missions (I think one of the most popular was taking VIPs from Manhattan to Unknown Gamma, but that also had the added complexity of PvE danger, there were other ones though, like hauling Gold from Dublin or Fertilizers from Hamburg to Crete) that always had a set commodity, starting point and destination which yielded more but were also easier to intercept.
Quote:Perhaps allow OFs to purchase unique ships/equipment with cosmetic changes for their factionlines
if i can get white and gold titans for Custodi i might start caring about this place a little bit more
Quote:The Story is bad,
The Story is stagnant,
Team is incompetent,
No consequence in the story,
Nothing happens unless its war,
Lacks direction,
Too biased towards Houses and major factions,
Team doesn’t have a point of contact and responsibility for requests relating to story or the team,
Not everyone needs a fleet,
Factions should not be balanced with each other.
It seems to me like everyone who's ever touched the story is in the same headspace and as such nothing original has ever happened. We are stuck with the same factions fighting the same other factions and everything is stuck. And when a story arc finishes the changes are either inconsequential or the consequences are drawn out so badly that most people are upset.
This is a game that puts historical nations into space. Why not put historical events into space? Gallia was defeated by a revolution, why don't we have a Napoleon? Bretonia is a monarchy, why don't we have a succession crisis (space france and space england, seems a perfect place for trying to institute a personal union)? Liberty has an insurgency, why don't we have a secession? (Although in this case slavery might be a touchy subject but maybe legalisation of cardamine?)
Unfortunately the strive for originality in Discovery doesn't work because of the lack of leadership everything is eeeeeeeeeeeeh, not very consistent. But if you have a historical template to work from you don't really need much vision because the vision is already there, you just need to make it fit the universe and there is a lot of room for creativity there.
Quote:Revamp the OF system by introducing more tangible benefits and rewards that encourage certain behaviour / interaction,
Give OFs unique access to cosmetically different ships for their faction ships.
Remove the activity requirement from OFs, and replace it with a subjective RP requirement instead,
Require that the RP be done in-game as opposed to on the forums. Activity tracker at the moment seems to be used as a substitute for in-game RP by those who oversee officialdom.
There are certain IDs that don't offer much in-game benefit but would work great as a party to RP with on the forums. It might be a good idea to start treating the forums as an integral part of the game because this is, by your own admission, where a lot of the good RP happens.
Ok anyway, i spent more time than I intended to on this poast, hope you take something from it and use it to make disco better :tm:. I know you won't.
Posts: 829
Threads: 67
Joined: May 2020
Staff roles: Story Developer
Very nice survey summary and I agree with most of the points. In my opinion, the lack of interesting encounters ingame is what most people drives away. Discovery is labeled as RP server, yet it's quite difficult to develop one's character purely ingame - it's mostly done on forums and that gives less reasons to spend too much time ingame.
Myself, unless I play some generic ID - in which case I'm mostly ignored - I find ingame encounters predictable in 90% of times and most factions just feel that all they do is to exist. I don't think it's needed to add some complex game mechanism to remedy that, but just state faction's current objectives and make some adjustments ingame to reflect that - like offline Rochester like Xenos pulled off. Just some stuff to talk about inRP. Save for few examples, Sirius feels stale.
And when speaking about stale Sirius - I find factions' relations to be too inflexible and they take too long to change. I understand that we want to stick close to the vanilla's lore whenever possible, but even inRL allegiances change quickly depending on the geopolitical situation and I think that something like that could bring some fresh air. After all, in order to not be 'red', factions don't have to be inline 100% with each other's philosophies - they don't even need to change them if they can't for various reasons - all they need to do is to shift their priorities to much more pressing matters.
And I've noticed from other more RP oriented players, that Bounty Boards ruin the game for them. I personally don't have issues with them and I don't think that bounty boards are themselves a bad idea to their core, but what about changing them a little - removing blanket bounties for whole faction save for individual bounties for actual witnessed crimes? Maybe that would bring some more variety ingame in actual need to witness the crime (like piracy or any other act of aggression) while alloying milder/fresh 'reds' to not get hunted just because of their ID/tag?
I dunno, probably not the most realistic idea, but it could serve as a compromise between those two groups + it could add reasons for ingame patrols/scouts. And could be flavored by things like crimes for actual bounties can only be reported by ship which witnessed them and survived.
I think that anything that could allow players/groups/factions to have more control over their 'story' without needing an actual SRPs could be a good move when done properly.
This response to the survey is one that gives me hope for Discovery Freelancer. This is the last of the Freelancer servers I believe, other than a few with no population.
I don't want to see this game go away. I've played it for years and started playing here about 10 years ago, although I made this forum account about 8 years ago.
I don't assume to know what needs to be changed, but this response was very exhaustive and well worth the read.
Thanks for doing this, @Hokan. It looks like a good health check for the community as well as the leadership team to me.
THE IMBALANCE OF POWERis a construct ofTHE MINDsystemic to the reactions between the subjects of the system.POWERis given by those who acknowledge such power.REFUSALto acknowledge power removes that power forTHE REBEL; however, it produces anomalies in interactions throughout the system. TheseANOMOLIEScause theUNPREDICTABLEnature of the system that all usersCRAVE.
Thanks @Hokan for all the effort you put into the survey and compiling the results. It's nice to see that there's still a sizable number of community members who seem to care about the mod. Here's hoping that staff takes the results to heart and we see some improvements.