Dear reader, you're not probably gonna like the text below. So take it as a warning. Proceed further on own risk.
I was looking over the events which are happening around here, in both the game and on forum. Then i took a look through the time back when I just came on discovery and I've came to conclusion - Things are always change, but for sure not only towards the good.
And I'm going to dive into the history of the close past a little bit. I'll begin with me, back in 2005, playing on another server, let it be stay unnamed. It was just a small server with average online of 10-20 people. The minimal RP was applied, there were "pirates", "navy" and people who was trading. So we, pirates, were robbing traders for the symbolic amount of cash which was set in rules to be no more then 200k in 4 hour. Then navy arrives and we pewed each others for 10 hours until getting completely exhausted. No rules concerning pvp death were applied like we have it here so we could just pew and respawn for 1 million times. NO MATTER THE OUTCOME OF THE BATTLES - we had fun, we all were friends. It's like you having a billiards match with the friend of yours in a bar. When you loose you don't complain to him, whine, rage, etc. You simple say "Oh well, lets take a beer".
Then things changed, our old clan got spread around some random servers, some left the FL completely. I left FL for a year myself. And then, in 2009 summer, I decided to find myself a new server which happened to be the Discovery.
Why I told you about the previews server i was playing in? For comparation of those two. Old server, little RP ("bad guys" vs "good guys" vs "Very bad guys who shoot both"), the environment was tad simple. You pick a side and go around shooting stuff. But in Discovery I liked so much the fact that it offers a completely different, rich environment to DO THE SAME. By picking role we are taking the special environment of a faction we are joining to, we are taking all the RP sets for it which are dictated by the Rumors, ZOI, News, etc. All those things are set to us by the Development team, those brave man and probably woman put a lot of work into the development of the environment for factions we all can join as a player. And there is a plan, or maybe no plan concerning the faction's development. But the game mechanic do not allow us to enforce the RP sets for factions. The only limiting factors are Rules, ID Rules and You. You limit yourself when you join a faction. You set the limitations for yourself in form of Zoi, RP, etc and this is meant to be this way because we have no Game Masters to regulate things, they meant to be semi-regulated by the player base itself.
So what it is about?
It is about the fact that the only different between my old server and the disco is the "environment".
In my old server, you was not able to WIN something for your faction. It is unreal, players join the faction they want to join and if it could be possible to win something playerwise which could change something to the NPC faction some factions with no players, or with less players could be simple exterminated by factions with more players or with players at all.
Discovery - same story. You can't "win" here, you can have fun, spend your time well but you can't "win" or "loose" anything except the respect of the people you play with.
In both cases it does, COMPLETELY, no difference how many BS what player base can throw into the battlefield. Those numbers mean nothing, they can't change nothing simply because the Game can't regulate the limitations which ARE MEANT to be placed by players themselves.
You could be the "bad guy" on my old server, you can be a Lane Hacker on Discovery. Difference - The environment of the lane hacker faction. You take a ROLE of the LH with the ships, RP, Guns, Zoi and all the other limitation. SO YOU SIMPLY ACCEPT WHAT WAS GIVEN TO YOU BY THE DEVELOPMENT TEAM. It will change nothing if the LH playerbase will become two or more times bigger then then LN playerbase - they will remain a small pirate organization and they will, for sure, not be able to conquer Manhattan. It does not matter how many LN BS the HF will blow up, or how many HF BS the LN will blow up - both sides are loosing nothing and this change nothing in the environment of both.
This is all about the environment you can play in to have the more interesting interactions, to play the role you want. So as people say: GO AND PLAY THE DAMN GAME instead of arguing the **** out of forums about who win this and who win that.
Might be still unclear what was the reason for this post at all. I'll tell you a story, if you don't like the criticism you can skip this topic right now. You have been warned, once again.
I'm a pirate. Always liked to play this role in Freelancer, so I'm a pirate since 2005. my first character in the online freelacer was a pirate and when I arrived to the Disco the first faction I have joined was a Pirate Faction. The OPG. I liked Corsairs before the Disco, I like them now. The NPC faction. It's environment, it's limitations, it's RP. We were pewing, raiding, trading. We were loosing some battles, win some. But in the end of the day we were having fun. The set of RP rules for this faction was set by not even a Discovery Devteam, but mostly by the Vanilla. We were just getting into the game to play a Corsairs.
But since then the things have changed a long way. People don't want to simple play the game, they want to WIN, to Destroy another factions, to gain something. And what they don't want to understand - They can't have it all.
The argument "We have so many BS omg, wtf we can win anything now give us this give us that, etc" is rising and rising again and again. No one gives a **** that game do not limits you in getting BSes in any way possible. Nor by cash (Which you just /drawcash from your trader\miner which most likely far from being a Corsair one), nor by people you need to get on board as crew (since you don't actually required to have a crew, nor anyone counts how many people died in battles to reflect it in the RP set of the faction somehow). Ask you a question - how much cash did you pirated, smuggled, etc on a Corsair? Zero because you sit in gamma? Around 100 millions because you pirate some time? How you got your ship?
/restart Corsair
/drawcash BMM-Derp over9000 SC?
The only guy who was playing a Pirate Corsair was a Mentira (Ivan) and he pirated over the 1 billion.
He was not sitting in gamma and he was flying a pirate transport. He got the cash by playing the role. And you, to buy your precious Legates, got it, excuse my curiosity, how? Mined the **** out of the fields with BMM or Kruger? Or IMG? Traded like mad with Samura or RepEx?
Anytime you will call that stupid BS swarm "AN RP ADVANTAGE" I'm gonna roll around laughing my lungs out.
AND THIS IS WHY: Your in game actions will not change your RP set for a faction you're playing in or against. Live with it. Deal with it. Don't deal with it and quit the server\faction. Your choice.
Upd: Ach, mentira, the cau8 pt coming to omega-11 and trying to pirate our hessian miners. So much fun. I remember one time we caught him and since it was a transport, we had to think of demand real fast. He had gold ore onboard. "Drop your cargo hurr durr". ":trollface: Here, see you later 8))".
' Wrote:So what it is about?
Discovery - same story. You can't "win" here, you can have fun, spend your time well but you can't "win" or "loose" anything except the respect of the people you play with.
But since then the things have changed a long way. People don't want to simple play the game, they want to WIN, to Destroy another factions, to gain something. And what they don't want to understand - They can't have it all.
The only guy who was playing a Pirate Corsair was a Mentira (Ivan) and he pirated over the 1 billion.
He was not sitting in gamma and he was flying a pirate transport. He got the cash by playing the role.
Very true story. I remember a week ago when I set uped my bounty hunter character that I met completely new player and he asked me how is possible to buy battleship with bounty hunter char since the missions give only 30k, when I explained to him about /givecash he said that it is not in RP to have this command.
Sadly you are right- every third pirated miner with my Corsair asks me not to pirate him because he is saving for Legate, Mentira was really nice example- I followed and made like 2-3 B from Piracy, then some by bounty hunting. I never had big trading ship, tried both mining and trading- but they does not work for me well, however this is not the problem. Greg made 2 bil only with the False.Miner. People have 20 battleships with cau8 after barge powertrading- ok let them have it I cannot care less.
The real problem is "I win" way of thinking- ganking, using all possible ugly tricks in game to gain advantage, constant forum wars and flaming, better tech /tech mixes or whatever- people witch are hostile in forum to each other because in RP you are hostile...
This make me really sad. When we started Mollys we recieved 50-60 pages negative feedback because it happened to have 2-3 good pilots in faction and we collected some blue msgs. There was whining just about everything- how we does not RP , how we mix tech, how we does not deserve to become official faction-we were "metagamers" and "powergamers" because Blodo and Greg met in space and made some agreement and we received 4 Odins for it.
I find this really annoying- 2/3 of the players here are so hypocrite that cannot even make difference between what is realistic and what they want.
And this deserves a pin.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
A very good point, and brilliant written. Permit a slight, but not necessarily opposing, rebuttal.
I agree wholeheartedly with the 'winning-no-ground' point, in as much as LH will always be a small pirate group in game, even if they wind up with 10x as many players and characters than the LN. And players do need to get that into their heads that RP fights, conflicts and ship counts don't take into account the lores and such, and in some cases become completely OORP.
Or this can be taken as a petition for administration stuff. We can't regulate and limit ourselves so we need to be regulated. Of cause this mean we need a Game Master to handle the situation or we need all the removed rules back.
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