Quote:What I'm sick of, and what a lot of people are sick of, is that instead of expanding on the actual vanilla factions which make this geriatric game interesting. People have instead chosen to maneuver themselves into the positions necessary, create their own blends of fan-fiction and thereby destroy carefully crafted niches and be proud about it.
Excuse me, but not even half of factions in vanilla were created so good to alive long-time progression and not just be good background for your SP campaign gameplay (for that short period of time convience much more achievable). Quarter of century inRP its alot of time, not much movement, not much regimes live so long tbh. Where i agree with you, that HOW it was performed below any good and evil catergories.
Quote:That just adds a layer of bureaucracy to a system which already functions on your social status within the closed circle. It's a rubber stamp, it means nothing and amounts to nothing. Your requests vanish behind a locked door and the promise of a guarantee. But we all know what the real factors of consideration are.
That why real improvement which can make it work - TRANSPARENCY. We should now discuss not about hilarious things like pixel money requirements, or how it was in old time, when freelancer community and not only discovery was alive yet, and trees were greener, girls younger and boner harder.
We should think how enforce transparency on this. How explain to devs, that if they want any positive result from formalised process, transparency required.
Being a dev never meant doing things in passion. Being a dev of Discovery means trying to progress the mod in a way that doesn't piss off literally everyone, which is impossibly, given there is nothing that can be done in a system of 50+ factions that doesn't piss off at least one involved party.
Being a dev (except in two cases) means you always do stuff that someone else either expects you to do or demands you to do, be it with or without the right to do so. This system is literally just ensuring that every player of this game has an equal way to access this aspect, while in the past there was no such way there. People either PM you on Discord and get progressively more and more aggressive about literally anything or are busy on forum complaining about people doing that.
Meanwhile we had a past of awkward stuff going on just very suddenly. In Reeves' case for example a liberty battleship getting attached to a Xeno base, or the Olympia disaster at Aland or certain infocards suddenly containing the names of player characters who went down in the ingame history as glorified heroes that way. I rather have people do all of that the same way as everyone else and pay for stroking their pixel egos than secretly lobbying/pestering or people not being aware of what they can request in regular faction/player requests.
You too much romantize vanilla. Factions in it werent designed to be convient during progression on years scale. It was designed to be convient during your singleplayer campaign. Here already passed 26 years since vanilla events. From IRL history we know that not every movement, regime, state, exist even so long. So i dont see real problems in fact that factions changes, dying, merging, etc.
But i agree with you that when those changes were done, they werent done about right.
(12-15-2019, 07:52 AM)The Milk of Auzari Wrote: Meanwhile we had a past of awkward stuff going on just very suddenly. In Reeves' case for example a liberty battleship getting attached to a Xeno base
As opposed to actually being able to openly fly one, considering the ID is by itself incapable of even accessing gunboats openly. It's good bait, but if that's the only thing you're capable of responding with, then it's a good indicator of the weakness of your argument. At least the physical asset by itself predates factions like Harmony and their sudden acquisition of an entire shipyard, functional warships and entrenched front-line with economic sustainability.
So as much as you'd like to make it seem like an attempt at trying to bloat a faction beyond its proportions, please be reminded of the years of nothing which precede the actual mooring of a derelict. Which, I must repeat myself, predates the meteoric rise of factions in the neighborhood by a long-shot.
The game worked for the longest time because it had more than the same fifty people in four different coalitions jerking each other raw.
A decade ago when the game was at 200/200 for the better part of the whole day and there were factions with more members than the entire community has at this point, it just worked and we all had fun because we were just playing the game and writing our own stories. Now everyone wants their own shinies and, due to the continuing population decline, the chances to get new and improved types of shinies have gone up exponentially. If you gave Igiss or Cannon the idea of being able to throw a billion credits and a couple pages of roleplay posts at the dev team along with a CMP, a SUR, and a [Ship] entry, and you'd get it returned to you if you were friends with the right people, they'd recommend that you go stuff your idea somewhere uncomfortable (like the back of a Volkswagen).
Then the community started declining and to keep people interested, more and more terribly-implemented hackjobs came together. First the cost of SRPs was halved, then the PoB system and cloaks were added. The community halved in size again and they added new ID and IFF stuff and jump drives and docking modules (maybe cloaks were added at this time too, I can't remember). Then things got worse and they added hyperspace beacons and unique ships to keep people interested. Then things got even worse, and they added FCRs. Now they've added... this.
One of the core problems with all of these things is that they didn't make the community any better or stave off its decline. They did the exact opposite, as the only way to reliably get any of them completed was what back in the day we called Skypefriends.
PoBs: two to three 5Kers a day just to keep the lights on, most of which would never end up counting for faction time for most factions. often supplied through OORP means (skypefriends)
Cloaks: reliant on PoBs and the awful supply chain thereof, does nothing but encourages silent powertrading AND results in people being able to stealth out of encounters. often constructed through OORP means (skypefriends)
Docking modules: same as cloaks, with the "avoid encounters" replaced by "server doesn't work right"
Jump drives: same as cloaks, but with teleporting around the universe and avoiding tons of encounters AND a period of time where you could teleport half the server in 5Kers in a single go. often constructed through OORP means (skypefriends)
Hyperspace beacons: in theory encourages people to fly scout ships with beacons. in practice, too expensive for anyone to use on anything other than a capital ship. also helps kill interaction. often constructed through OORP means (skypefriends)
Unique ships: in theory really cool, in practice a lot of submissions are trash and the ones that do end up making it through either involve so much RP that you honestly feel dead after doing it and have wasted a year of your life, or you managed to get it all done and passed through because you know the right people (skypefriends)
FCR: in theory you become a part of the game. in practice the dev team forgets and you're praying they still like you enough to not punish your faction and dump all your hard work in the trash (skypefriends). plus afterwards they own your faction's lore and you get to hope like hell they like you enough that they won't screw it all up (skypefriends)
RCR: pay a billion credits, maybe get your zoner X wild ERP canonized, or maybe get a station taken over, it all depends on whether or not the dev team likes it and likes you (skypefriends)
Expect factions that have enough pull to get things passed prior to the implementation of this to now get them passed through these new "official" channels, using money they generated on completely different, unrelated ships, probably en masse in the dead of the night when no one's around, or when they've let their friends know not to screw with their trade routes, and with just enough RP to make it look good for the purposes of "transparency" and "fairness" and other things you'll see in bold yellow text when someone calls out something blatantly skypefriends-ed.
(12-15-2019, 08:14 AM)The Milk of Auzari Wrote: You are mixing up two different subjects. The scam jab was directed at ONE developer. This doesn't change the unhealthy attitude displayed by most people here about a positive progress in terms of structural organisation. Plus Anton's point on transparency.
Likely because I've been awake for about two hours longer than I typically am, high on adrenaline and am feeling the crash. I do not consider an increasingly bureaucratic method like this to be a positive one, at the very least due to the again, arbitrary time investment in the form of a credit fee numbering 1 billion. There are many issues with the document from a technical standpoint, such as a lacking definition for what exactly is an RCR-worthy item (Examples, etc.), as well as, much like Reeves noted, and how Kazinsal notes, that it's a game of social standing more than merit.
I am not certain that we can include transparency as something we can argue, considering the developers have demonstrated at least some tendency to abscond with details at convenient points. See, yet again, XA officialdom. You can't necessarily have people in charge to be honest without exercising some kind of force, and the only force the community would have would be collective bargaining, a la trade unions, and boycotting. Which, might not even work, if the devs are ultimately apathetic to the state of the game's population numbers, as implied by the lack of passion motivating them.
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Well, even if they would show progress of requests, and tell reasons why it was rejected, or why it was approved, and show it openly (only if its doesnt contain some stroy spoilers, tho imo even in this case you can choose words to show why so), this is already will be major move forward.
(12-14-2019, 09:04 PM)Xalrok Wrote: While the intent of Discovery Freelance RP 24/7 was never the canonization of player roleplay
This little statement has helped me realize that this mod is basically already dead. The basis of this game was not to have a player-base, it was to make the devs feel good. I didn't actually know this before. Thanks for the eye opener.
This has always been the case. The idea of canonizing RP wasn't a thing until the third or fourth shot of adrenaline wore off and the acute heart failure patient started shutting down again. For years the policy on writing lore was "never include anything players caused". That's why the mod has no acknowledgement of major player encounters that left their mark on community lore, like the eight-way war in Omega-3, or the battles of Tau-23, or the Hogosha-Junker wars, or the Libertonian terrorist and his seven dwarves in a Kusari Explorer.
The dubious nature of the Player Request system and the Faction Perks system were the first thing players ever got to try to change that. But how those really work internally was never actually given to the community, and the usage of them suffered. The only people who ever managed to consistently get everything they could out of them were the people who were either part of the dev and/or admin teams, or had faction 2iCs/3iCs who were. Then we got FCRs, which... no one really knows how they work. Because no one's ever managed to pass one yet. Now we've got these, which are so ill-documented and yet another thing being operated as a "pay money, maybe get a thing in an indeterminate amount of time" scheme that I genuinely expected it to have its price in United States dollars instead of Sirian credits.
It's like Star Citizen, except instead of paying real money for the privilege of funding a game that may never come out, you're playing a dying game to make money in it to pay that back to the game for the privilege of maybe having your name in it.
(12-15-2019, 08:34 AM)Kazinsal Wrote: Then we got FCRs, which... no one really knows how they work. Because no one's ever managed to pass one yet. Now we've got these, which are so ill-documented and yet another thing being operated as a "pay money, maybe get a thing in an indeterminate amount of time" scheme that I genuinely expected it to have its price in United States dollars instead of Sirian credits.