Official Activity Q4 2025 - Printable Version

Singling down the issues we're experiencing is almost impossible. If anything, it is quite the tangled web of factors.

Age and niche: Discovery is old. Freelancer is old. Freelancer is also not easy to get your hands on, and not easy to get exposed to, and not easy to make people interested in, especially looking at games with a more polished look, more media coverage and a more streamlined design. Roleplay isn't exactly a thing for the masses, either. Space games aren't a thing for the masses, either. Discovery changed _a lot_ from vanilla Freelancer to appease the ever-increasing mentality of instant dopamine rushes as opposed to vanilla's slow progression, be it travel speeds or money making. Remember that the game's cruise speed used to be 300. Today, it is almost twice that for some ships.
Age of the playerbase: Most of us got exposed to Freelancer when they were at the perfect age for gaming - that sweet spot between of coming home from school, ditching homework and immediately hopping into the other world. That was 800 years ago. Most of us have jobs now, many of us have a partner, a lot of us have children, a few of us are occasionally deployed in other countries. The demands of real life are undeniable. Less time for gaming now than ever.
Change: Discovery has changed a lot over the course of history. There are plenty of people who still glorify game versions older than a decade, mourn for systems others haven't even heard about, and as for myself, are pretty turned off by radical changes to how playing certain ships feel. The handling of battleships, in my personal opinion, has never been this un-fun before, and knowing it was not un-fun before 5.0 really doesn't motivate me to log. Everyone here has an opinion on changes like these, and a lot of us are sour that their favourite ship class no longer plays the way it used to. Balance and gameplay are by far the most impactful factors, however changes to the game environment itself are undeniably affecting it as well.
Polarization: Discovery's wide range of factions, themes, roles and ships makes it very easy to pick favourites and focus on them, more often than not to the point of obsession, in the literal meaning of the word. While we should encourage people to find themselves roles for playing, ideally with a certain level of immersion, it often results in overshooting, to the point where looking at other roles, ships, factions and themes is out of the question. In a game with somewhat around 50 factions with all very unique history, roleplay styles, goals and motivations, a player who obsesses with their favourite things usually ends up denying themselves more than 90% of content of the game. Even worse, the polarization usually motivates people to further polarize, assume the worst about the enemy in the game, assume the worst about the players behind the enemy, making them the enemy. Competitive games are already attracting toxicity, and with a community this small, it is very difficult to find people who stay away from the polarized fronts and just play the game to enjoy the richness of content, the immersion of a handcrafted universe and feel of the setting.
Shift of efforts: Especially the past three years, the developers have put a lot of effort into expanding upon a key feature of Discovery as a mod - namely Player-owned Bases, short PoBs. What used to be a thing people can do, is now a fleshed out system that strongly rewards people for doing repetitive chores. While that sounds fun and neat at first, especially looking at all the new craftable items that are only available this way, this resulted in catering to and cultivating a different breed of Discovery players who, more often than not, play the game not for the roleplay, not to play a role, not to add to the immersion, not to contribute to the setting, but instead feed a glorified tamagotchi and have numbers rise up. A flooding of Player-owned Bases is the result, with some systems having as many PoBs as NPC bases. The feature used to be about a group effort, of people working together, about people using it as a roleplay platform, while now we have single players who operate multiple PoBs at once; a network of people who communicate out-of-roleplay with another to make as much money as possible, with the least amount of roleplay required.
Hunting activity: We really do a lot to encourage people to disencourage people from sticking to one ship with reputation. The Bounty Hunting system is outdated, making it easy for people to use it to punish people for logging into the game by, with the least bits of effort, painting them as target. A target that can be hunt down with merely two lines of roleplay, repeatedly. No effort in tracking, as the playerlist tells exactly where people are, how many there are, and by inference and deduction, what they are doing. The fluent border of doing things with in-role motivation and out-of-roleplay motivation gets only more fluent in this competitive and undeniably toxicity-breeding environment. Right now, we are offering a system that encourages people to make other people log off - people who otherwise could provide, at least, make the player count number rise up by one if left doing what they logged into the game for, as opposed to logging off either to prevent getting hunt down or as a result of having lost at combat - while the people logging in to hunt a target usually log off afterwards, too.

And those are just things that effortlessly come to my mind without brainstorming.

A lot of our current mechanics are outdated, simply never having been good, their flaws having been hidden behind a very nice facade of a high player count. We need to find ways to reward people for playing the same characters instead of making throwaway ships with singular purposes or to act as proxies. We also need to encourage people to make characters that aren't just of their favourite faction, with their favourite ships and favourite min-maxed ID lines.

We need to encourage people to work with another instead of against each other, and we need to encourage having this cooperation displayed within the roleplay environment. We need to encourage friendly rivalries instead of hate-inducing polarization. We need to reward people not for doing chores, not for clocking hours and hours of moneymaking.

The officialdom of most player factions means absolutely nothing, as does the loss of officialdom. Sure, some nice perks are gone. But when a faction maintained an inherited officialdom merely by logging into the game, doing mundane, non-interaction-cultivating tasks like feeding a PoB or farming PvE encounters, what quality was provided? What excellence rewarded?

I go on record for repeatedly praising Official Faction Quarterly Reports and advocate for a return of them. A simple template. Faction leaders take a few moments of their time to list what their faction did, list what forum comms got sent, what stories got published, what notable interaction have been had in the game. They also list what they would like to change in the future, without memes, without trolling, without forced comedy, but just genuine requests, wishes, encouragements. Transparent thoughts, transparent reflection and retrospection. For all the demands and complaints player faction leaders have, their expectations to the developers and staff and the game itself, they need to show their own willingness to be part of the improvement, part of the raised quality and part of the move to higher standards of behavior and interaction.

Forum roleplay is an integral part of Discovery. One which provides transparency, motivation, creates awe and admiration and cooperation. It can easily be what sparks enthusiasm for people to log into the game world, to play the game's primary layer or participate on the forum on the secondary layer, or to smith plans of cooperation on Discord as a third layer. The game happens on these three layers altogether, as another tangled web of interaction. We want interaction to be more visible, so everyone can see that we are alive. The player count is what worries so many of us every year, while so many of us sit with their groups of friends, waiting for something to happen. Something visible.

Our mechanics need to make things visible, and official faction reports would be a good step in that direction.

We may also need to find a solution to the playerlist controversy, to the glorification of blue messages popping up in the center of the screen, to the very low standards for bounty hunting as well as the ridiculousness of inherited official player factions, as we certainly demand a lot from upcoming groups while expecting nothing from OFs that do nothing to warrant the status.

We need to fix what doesn't work and reinforce what works, instead of glorifying what doesn't work and change what works.