Our Feedback and Impressions to the game in the end is:
It's too much of a grind. Trading takes as much time as being an irl delivery driver to attain wealth in a way to be able to properly take part in player transactions.
For this coming relatively new into economy dev, this is something where convenience kills the economy. Taking my position in Galway, I have a collection of ships that are worth like 10mil in Galway that are the core workhorses of the faction. 10mil takes 4-5 hours to do, and majority of my time spent on this faction is complete here. This covers a 5ker, 3.6ker, Ceres Frigate, Gunboat and a snub.
I also have a Longhorn, and soon Bulwark and Archon all of which *are* expensive but are certainly not required to play the game. Galway also runs 2 shared ships of each of these, which basically allows anyone to use them even if they didn't buy them.
Player bases are expensive, and require time to maintain but honestly I have done these solo and if you have an active clan of like 3-4 people per day that do things for it, they can be very trivial infact.
Overall the result here is that, you can get everything for a faction like Weiss in terms of personal and shared ships within a very short space of time. This is arguably too short of a time, because a lot of people earn everything they ever want to in short order. The things that take time are luxuries or sidegrades, often though these are done quite quick as well. All you need to do is earn a few million a day over whatever activities you do and you end up rolling in it, a lot of the players that trade now are either new players or players that just want to earn more money than they actually need.
I bought 35mil+ worth of ships recently and I made that money back in a week of not really trying, what do I even spend this money on?
I'd be curious to know what you/Weiss was struggling with, maybe it is something I am not aware of.
The PVP level of those who play this game for decades are too high for those who want to try to fight.
I can see this being a problem, but I also haven't had this much of an experience with multiple different groups I have run with. I play with CDI whom have a lot of players that are certainly not considered ace stacked and we've had our fun here. Will it take a little? Sure, but I improved a fair bit in short order and now generally feel happy in Gunboat/Cruisers the most. Gunboats are pretty good to learn in for jack of all.
Are there going to be acestack groups? Sure, though, new approaches such as the anti gank warning recently are going to help with this as well. Can't always be perfectly balanced, but I have had a lot of fun over my time here being a relatively average player after returning.
Roleplay is "offloaded" to the forum mostly which on average contains fandom level writing of showing off who has the coolest OC.
I do agree that there is a popular skew to turn a lot of RP on the forums. I think that it's something that is a little outdated now, back when the mod came out it was popular. There is also quite a lot of concerning things here too.
Discovery is a PVP server, /1 /2 roleplay is encouraged.
I think this hugely depends who you face ingame and who you are with. In Bretonia we have CDI whom are largely well recieved and provide characters and interactions far beyond this. This sort of ties into the last one too, if you look for it there are people who do it. There are certainly things going around here, again it may just be that you are facing people who just don't care. Try looking around. Perhaps even come to Bretonia if you like the look of CDI.
This is our reason to quit the game. Maybe we progressed to fast, essentially getting tired of speedrunning all there is. Maybe we just weren't the right fit.
All I can say to this is keep at it, if what you had isn't working out for you perhaps try something else.
I don't post on the forums much if at all but I'd like to chime in on as a member for Weiss and would like to respond on your well thought out post in kind.
Surprisingly, I find myself getting quite emotional writing this so I would like to apologize beforehand if I start venting a bit while writing.
Disclaimer:
I don't claim myself to be a saint or be absolve of any self accountability.
I don't intend to start any drama but if anybody reading take any of this personally are more than invited to DM me.
These responses and what I say are from my own perspective and my opinion solely. My intention is to not call anyone out or start a dramafest and I wish to keep this as Civil as possible.
TLDR: We flew too close to the sun and got burned.
Our commodity was time. We offered in my opinion, to do the shittiest part of this entire game with a smile on our face. And we did it smiling.
And in return, we gained many connections that you cannot buy your way into.
Power trading fucking sucks. But Power trading and bullshitting with friends, RPing with a fellow that we happen to pass by, Albeit it being a very brief "Guten tag!". Having a good laugh as we watch 4 F4'd Rheinland Trains stuffing into a tradelane.
After joining up I literally had more credits than I really ever fucking needed. Got familiarized with navigating a vast majority of sirius without having to consult the online navmap. "We need X Commodity" And I knew more or less where to find it for the cheapest or nearest. indie player. Who, at most, am happy with nothing bigger than a LABC and stock guns you can buy from Conn.
Weiss' initial premise was that it was a Chill and laid back trading faction.
It was until it started not to. Orders came in, we had deadlines, We had PoBs to feed. We had extremely high value cargo that other Players' time invested into it that they trusted us to move.
---------------------
Quote:
"Player bases are expensive, and require time to maintain but honestly I have done these solo and if you have an active clan of like 3-4 people per day that do things for it, they can be very trivial infact."
1&2IC Were maintaining 3 pobs as the foundation of Weiss. Maintaining it at our manpower was NOT trivial for them. On top of managing multiple clients- It was a massive time sink for both of them. And they were mainly using it to help others get stuff they wanted to build. And to acquire shit that would entice other players to want to play an RGS Corpo Faction.
---------------------
Quote:
Overall the result here is that [...] because a lot of people earn everything they ever want to in short order."
I disagree. I remember I would spend weeks powertrading not only for a snub/cap, but Also the ARMOR UPGRADES that costed just as much if not more than the ship. That. Fucking. Sucked. Where now, I can mine Helium in Pennsylvania (Or whatever mining it got patched to now) for like 30 minutes and have a snub and hardware that's competitive where my only limitation is my skill. I much prefer the way acquiring ships are now compared to how it used to be.
---------------------
Quote:
a lot of the players that trade now are either new players or players that just want to earn more money than they actually need.
Absolutely. Being in Weiss got me fuck you money that I would just just roll back into the faction bank because I really couldn't give a damn about the money. I personally had all the ships I wanted and didnt care for anything bigger nor expensive. MAYBE getting a Jump Drive/cloak. So that begs the question: "What gameplay can being in Weiss offer that I can't do as an indie?"
My answer: Nothing. Everything you can do in Weiss you can do as an indie. You can AFK zonerzonering Copper and Iridium and make more money. BUT you can do it friends. Or something more tangible/valuable, Connections. Which we were making a LOT of.
"but trading is BOOORING"
Yes. Yes it is. But we tried to make it fun. And for me, It was. Yeah, were there times where I was the only one gathering Super Alloy and Hull Panels for a PoB Construction? Yeah, It sucked. But I felt that would have paid off later. Maybe even setting the groundwork to dropping the cost of entry for say, a Hailfire or Dual Railgun. We could go "Oh you want some Dual Railguns? Help aquire/Haul the mats to XX Station. We'll help you."
As in going:
"Hey, I see you want X. Invest your time with us to gather needed materials and We can craft it. If you don't want to haul for it then we can work out a deal."
And for those gathering mats for it We'd be in /g chat with em making it less shitty and COMPLAINING "HOW MUCH THIS SUCKS TO DOO UUGGGH" (Together<3) knowing that you aren't alone in the grind. and that you dont have to spend a bunch of money and we can make your codes together.
This could have been a possible future I would have liked to make down the line. Now I'll never know.
---------------------
Quote:
"I'd be curious to know what you/Weiss was struggling with, maybe it is something I am not aware of."
I'd like to go back to Weiss' initial premise was that it was a Chill and laid back trading faction. It was until it started not to be. Where I believe we fucked up in this regard was a general belief of "I'm doing X amount and you aren't." Which COMPLETELY flies against what "Chill and laid back" is. We took on too much responsibility with limited manpower and vastly different dedication levels devoted to it. Which is what caused an internal divide. To self report myself, I fell in that belief and was fully aware of what I just mentioned about it flying against "Chill and Laid back".
Getting blown up was just the catalyst for bottled up animosity to bear its fangs.
---------------------
Quote:
"popular skew to turn a lot of RP on the forums. I think that it's something that is a little outdated now, back when the mod came out it was popular. There is also quite a lot of concerning things here too."
As demonstrated by my post/threadcount here. I find forumlancing and BBCodes to not be my strength nor do I find it fun to write a book on BBCodes. I use the forum as bare minimum to advance whatever activity I intend to do and do whatever RP ingame, keep it there, and advance it in game. LARP if you will. This is merely a difference of RP style. And I don't think you're falsely concerned about this remark. I think what you're extrapolating may very much be in the ballpark that contributes to this divide I mentioned.
My personal RP style in regards to the forum is that if it doesn't lead to actionable things to do in-game, I don't need to post about it. Any Flavor RP is mainly to bounce to players who have specifically contacted me for it.
---------------------
Quote:
"I think this hugely depends who you face ingame and who you are with. In Bretonia [...] who just don't care. Try looking around. Perhaps even come to Bretonia if you like the look of CDI."
I'ma get a lil unhinged here and a bit VENTY. so skip because this is going to be nothing that you Haven't read or heard of before.
This is a factor ENTIRELY outside of our control. Nobody has any control over anyone looking at the Playerlist and see Weiss]X3 in Omicron Delta and deciding to log something to shoot it.
In fact, we intentionally chose to run the Omicrons because it was fucking cool and was a very true and very high stakes smuggling feeling that running Cardimine to Manhattan will NEVER amount to. Lawful, Reverse Smuggling. Pretty cool if you think of it like that yeah? Imagine running 6m worth of Prototype components from Liberty to O-Delta with a buddy. Now do it twice. Protect/participate an XR mining op who's quota is 80k XRs. Now run 60 of them to Sigma-13. the XR's was UNFUN but we had hired an indie zoner to help out and we had some good chats and bullshitted which made the run enjoyable/bearable.
IIRC there is an admin posting about Player list telling players along the line of: "Act as if you didn't use it. Just don't." But we all know you/they did. I do it. You do it. It would be naive to think that nobody does any bit of this metagaming when playing.
Apparently there are also discord bots that check playerlists and locations and have parameters to ping the server once certain conditions are met. And don't tell me that there aren't those that will ping e-chats for a log saying "Hey, XXXX in Y System, Here's his Cargo scan, and shiptype" "Well, of course I know him, he's me."
:Thinking: "That's CrAAAaazyyy! What a coincidence!" /s/
We ran 5kers for Diamond mining. Got hit HARD by Hessians. Realized that we needed more firepower. Shiiit, we were seriously considering making our diamond haulers Hegemons for that Firepower and STYLE B). We started making gunboats to potentially crutch the skill gap for snubs and be able to deal with caps. Lookin at you Hessian Hel players! xD. Needed more speed AND firepower because no TL's So we started running Peregrines. Honestly, It was very fun looking into trying to be a threat within Imperial Shipping ID Restrictions of no Cruiser+. So we settled on Peregrines and Pimped out Condors. Hell, we Even managed to squeeze out a Bustard!!!!!
The intention, I thought. From the example set by 1IC was to be a faction that can both RP and Pew with anyone. We don't choose when and where our fights will be. That is entirely up to whoever decides to look at the player list and to that I say, "Let them come. We'll take you on. That's what insurance is for!"
Or if we're running Omicrons we can just straight up get /1/2'd on and we do regularly and it's allowed inRP and within the rules for the Common ID's with their respective lines in those areas as we are mainly running VERY desirable/"Controlled" materials or just straight up drop lines on us. This doesn't have to; nor will be changed. Weiss was to be a faction that Refuses demands from pirates. And will not go down without a fight. That was the ideal, but of course there's nuance and situational advantages as to not do this. At least... as a group I thought it was understood that even if we get entirely rolled. We don't go down without putting up a fight.
This was also a vastly different opinion held between members.
---------------------
Quote:
"All I can say to this is keep at it, if what you had isn't working out for you perhaps try something else."
1&2 IC Came into this together and pretty much left together. Without them, Weiss ceases to function. They're done with this and I don't expect them to come back.
Stacks were cool. But it was to get us toys and fly cool shit as friends.
It was the friends we made along the way but It seems that disco as it does brought the worst out of me more than it has the best.
Now If you'll excuse me, I'm going to carry out some final requests from Catto and think about what to do in the meantime.
Honestly, I think it's better this way. Burnout was real and was getting very concerning. It was a fun ride to be a part of.
Thanks for reading to the end if you did.
P.S. Fuck this is long. Edited as I proofread more after posting
I read it all and i'll reply to a few things here. Rather than going quote by quote though i'll just say something that covers a few different things.
Overall, you need to adjust some play I think to what factors you have. One thing I would ask, why did you have 3 PoBs if the PoBs were getting unreasonable for your play? And what did you even use three PoBs for? Galway has literally two, one of which was only made because of the unique circumstances regarding the Dublin embargo (we can't sell gold to the public in Dublin). With the shipyard release we maybe would've made a new PoB for it but it still leaves us with two. Was this regarding multiple mining zones?
Furthermore, doing all the 'boring' things does factor with friends for sure. Playing convoys with GF and doing other things is far more interesting when we're roleplaying with eachother or other people along the way or just generally chilling with people. This leads me onto what you said about why does this faction matter compared to others? Well there are actually a few things.
A faction has a fair few things that indies don't. You got faction roleplay, you have a group that looks out for eachother, does things for eachother. Friends can play together and do things for eachother too, but factions overall help bring people together doing this. Again going back to Galway as it's the best thing I can reference, Galway works to build a reputation for reliability, if you want to order ship parts from us for instance then you should know you will get that order in good time, with quick responses over the forums etc. Indies can possibly run these sort of operations but then it's basically just a faction of one. There are a lot of things that a group like Weiss or Galway gets that are not true benefits like extra money per hour but soft factors that add up to make something real. I think factions like this get some of the best RP on the server.
As for economy side, it's a tangent but when things take no time at all you end up not getting a lot of people doing economy things. I do want to make more people engage with the economy because it can be one of the driving factors for the server. Having conflict. Having economy ships threatened, police/millitary responding after with pings or ingame patrols, this was one of the main activity drives of age past. Now a lot of people don't want to spend their time getting to pirate one ship per hour.
Are other factors at play here? Sure. Should it be hard to get something like a snub? No. But there does need to be more things to engage with in the economy, and part of that is to either slow down income or raise expenses to make things happen. This then ties into where factions shine, because they can help eachother with money.
Finally though, the combat and the issues around that. When Galway moves its ship components we are doing so often with rather hardened convoys, we use Longhorns, frigates, smaller transports and more. Often we'll have a gunboat in the mix too. Suddenly tackling this convoy requires atleast 3-4 people to expect to get anywhere, and even then the convoy is never a huge distance away from being able to just dock nearby.
Traveling in a secure convoy is very safe if you just avoid using 5kers, if you bring a 5k to the mix you need to understand the risk/reward factor and accept that you'll die more often to combat (or just have to accept the toll). This changes when you go far out from any bases, if you are a long distance from a base somewhere, usually out of house trading then it's riskier certainly. But this is also why, trading with frigates, longhorns etc shines best. Yes the Longhorn is Liberty made but eventually there are going to be more Longhorns, Bulwarks etc that go around to cover these harder to kill transports.
Overall it depends where you are, but in legal areas you can do quite a lot to defend this. You can fly a scout ahead of the pack, like 1 TL ahead, 15k cruise ahead, etc and use that as a warning. Smaller ships cruise at combat ship speeds, so its actually really hard to set up a trap for these unless you outright lock down the entire system and there are no safe docking areas within. Groups with escorts are actually very resilient if played right.
And that goes down to player list. Player list does happen, and it's something you can't really avoid. If player list was removed, player interaction would be even worse shape. You just have to go with it, and if you see a lot of pirates in a group get together and come nearby then you should just plan accordingly. Just the way it is really, but honestly, for a large convoy especially if you avoid using 5ks, these are hard nuts to crack and only subject to limited attacks.
![[Image: RrJ0WDv.jpeg]](https://i.imgur.com/RrJ0WDv.jpeg)
![[Image: 2aD52st.png]](https://iili.io/2aD52st.png)
![[Image: fDEojdf.png]](https://i.imgur.com/fDEojdf.png)
![[Image: tlaRLQa.png]](https://i.imgur.com/tlaRLQa.png)
![[Image: PVArGCT.png]](https://i.imgur.com/PVArGCT.png)
![[Image: jkSFTZg.png]](https://i.imgur.com/jkSFTZg.png)
![[Image: WzphgU7.png]](https://i.imgur.com/WzphgU7.png)
![[Image: bKbNn6R.png]](https://i.imgur.com/bKbNn6R.png)