Social Survey: Why people are loosing interest to Discovery?

[Jeuge]

Forums.

[Enkidu]

I've realised if I ignore the negativity it doesn't impact me. You can choose to not engage in it, and by not engaging in it, you combat it. People who expect negative feedback will behave oorply aggressively right out of the gate, but if you respond with kindness they'll think 'oh, err, well, I guess I can de-escalate then'.

I used to think everyone was being tribalistic and mean, but then I realised... none of it matters. Have fun, know when the fun stops, and you'll have fun here without any of the 'discovery baggage'.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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(Links pending redevelopment).

[Traxit]

Tl;dr

Toxic community

Thank you for joining my Ted Talk.


But in all seriousness,
I see a reoccurring theme of Disco being their teenage hobby and/or their first digital family. I resonate with this greatly, and it is because of said family I haven't chosen to leave disco. I think we've all grown past being offended by others, while at the same time, in my opinion, the toxicity has dropped substantially.

I am subscribed to the notion that Discovery is at a great turning point as of now. The departure of Durandal and his assailants, combined with a bigger staff team than ever before, and the surge of passionate developers, be they veterans of Discovery or not. Does give hope that maybe, just maybe, the dreaded final nail is farther than we thought.

The only thing left to do is to be nice, a simple concept that fundamentally allows communities to endure and maybe in our case - flourish.

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The best Video Game OST
Just Got Better

[Vendetta]

Much of my time here was spent fighting to keep a faction alive that nobody at the time liked or wanted to exist. Fighting behind the scenes with people to justify our right to keep doing what we were doing. Eventually after like... I don't know like three years of stupid shit back and forth from members of the community and members of the staff at the time, coupled with a total loss of motivation from my peers during this period, I eventually gave up. Couldn't keep treading water while everyone else tried to drag me below the waves. Along with a slow development cycle and a lot of dumb drama, it left a sour taste in my mouth.

Every year a thread like this pops up somewhere, and every year people come to the same conclusions. Nothing changes. The community continues to shrink and consume itself. What little nostalgia I had for this game burnt out, and I can always satisfy that itch if it ever returned, by plowing through the singleplayer campaign in a couple of hours and uninstalling the game. There's little incentive to play here. Little progression to justify any amount of effort. Few people to justify time and dedication to organizing an event that most people won't be interested in participating in anyway.

Combine that with the abhorrent, two-faced nature of a lot of the people here and you're left with a recipe for disaster and a slow, painful death that probably won't conclude for another two to three years, save the six people that'll be like "yeah we're still here the community is alive!!1!"

Anyway, back to battlefront 2 for me

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Currently unable to consistently be present in the Community due to life constraints.

Youtube

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[PRJKTLRD]

Majority of people lost interest after the introduction of 4.86

No need to explain more.

I would try to explain over and over what exact differences between 4.85 and 4.86 in the mod are to blame for this, but few people even remember it. It was a drastic and swift change in the economy and system layout that resulted in changing player behavior. For some time after this, there was still 200/200, but the place was becoming less and less fun as people were adopting the new patterns.

Over the years, the population was dwindling, the story progressed, bugs were fixed, imports replaced, flame wars over insignificant things were waged, but this problem was largely unattended because it didn't touch INSERT_FACTION particular interests, and instead subtly but relentlessly affected things on a larger scale.

It became increasingly harder to get the same amount of interaction per unit of time as before with a single character based in a certain area (while total pop was still around the same).

Around that time, I mostly played outcasts, but I can safely claim that the following factors affected other factions, too:

• abundance of newly introduced trade commodities and routes (+NPC farming to some extent). This made money-makers scatter across more systems, but, what's worse, made their behavior less stable and predictable. While it would be enough to have a single bomber docked in a right place to PVP/pirate active trader groups and lawfuls protecting them (piracy was a thing and one of the activity drivers back then) in 4.85, later you would have to have a few different characters belonging to a few different factions to even come close to the old amount of action
  
  
  I would add POB introduction as a semi-separate factor. The way POB economy works, it just adds to that "scattered and hard to predict" activity which does little (compared to what you would see prior) for any meaningful player-to-player interaction.
  
  
• introduction of "buffer systems" between hostile factions in areas of heated conflicts and frequent raids. One of the best-known examples is the replacement of Omicron-Eta (a system that was a popular battleground and passageway for outcast-corsair raids) with a different, longer and less familiar connection line. These changes were partially reverted in favor of less travel times much later.
  
  
  system layout and connections, in general, were sometimes purposefully changed to separate groups of players from one another. A recent example is driving the nomad farmers away from previously more popular Omicron-Delta.
  
  
• Connecticut access via the /conn command. Albeit a handy and useful feature, it didn't come without a conceivable negative impact (which most people didn't recognize).
  Conn is mainly a place for socializing and PVP training. Before /conn existed, people trained and socialized in RP areas, like Omicron Alpha and Gamma, some capitol planets, populated mining areas, etc. Group activity such as raids or trade convoys often started spontaneously, because you often had people with the same ID randomly chilling in one place.
  
  
  /conn (among other factors, such as players spending more time in Skype/Discord instead of the game, which, in turn, is partially caused by problems with finding activity) also had some impact on disco social dynamics. Where before you had more friendships and connections associated with certain ID/faction/region, now it's more shifted towards what some would call "ooRP circlejerks", being groups of players playing different factions and fighting other groups of players, as opposed to more "factions vs faction" oriented social structure of the past.

He said what would I say as well.

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<"From Darkness, lead me to Light. From Ignorance, to Truth. From Death, to Immortality.">

Jared Nomak ||  The rise of the Overlord || The Commune

[puppytaste]

Seems to be the same discussion as just before I left 7 years ago.

People are always going to lose interest in things. As soon as a player come here, the clock starts to tick. Then they leave. The issue should not be trying to retain that player who got board of this but to replace that person. No different then any other population. We are born to die, and once that happens if we haven't made anyone to replace us, the population goes down.

I have been hearing that Disco needs to be saved for years. I've never seen Disco promoted anywhere. If the community is serious about maintaining or even growing, we need to have staff roles that focus on promoting the server and recruiting new people.

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[Ruairi]

Casper the Friendly Nomad here.

I haven't played here in quite a long time, but damn do I feel sad seeing the population shrink gradually like this. I've recently found a new game to get attached to (SCP: Secret Laboratory), and have had the honor of becoming part of the Game Design team for them.

Interest always burns out over time, that's human nature. The fact a 2003 game still has its small community kicking like this is statistically a miracle. Even though everything will come to an end eventually, you all can brag about how long you lasted. A MOD of a NICHE game having a consistent player base for a decade and a half is something to be proud of.

I was going to go into big depth all about why I think this mod is losing players, but like, it's pointless. There's 12 pages of comments that have already said everything there is to say. Oh well.

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