Official Activity Q4 2025

[Don_Paco_Corleone]

OFFICIAL FACTION ACTIVITY
2025 Q4

[/indent]

Factions Stripped:
These factions were previously warned for failing the check in the last two quarters,
and failed this activity check.

Gas Miners Guild GMG| 5:50:30

[/indent]

Lejima in Sigma 13 will require removal from Core 5.

Edit: Factions losing "officialdom" due to inactivity really is what it is. Everyone has to abide by th4e same rules.

Enough back door lobbying & circle jerking exists as it is, the staff involved will never be held accountable nor will anything be done about it.

let this activity report be a stern reminder that everyone has to play by the same rules, not just get away with things because you have an admin/staff friend.

Mep doesn't have any friends.

I like Mep, he told me how to season a cast iron skillet once

Can you send me the recipe? A seasoned cast iron skillet sounds delicious.

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No Matter How Good You Are, Don't Ever Let Them See You Comming

[Nicolás Diego]

The main problems are:

People leaving the server cuz they dont like some changes (systems ships etc)
Rp gets not rewarded as back in the days, you get as answer if you ask for srp items: you have an advantage during fights, you cant rp it........
The people on THAT SPECIFFIC DISCORD SERVER ( they are thinking that they are controlling the server and they will decide what happened on Discovery, they also post siege declarations there before they are posting it in the siege declaration thread.
Get rid of your godcomplex......
Listen to the REAL community
and not to the elite group
lol
Get back to arcade and not more and more into e-sports.
Get rid of your personal hate against some factions( best example is DTR, where are they?
You have destroyed people's will to log in because these people were always only hunted down because they have THIS ONE SPECIAL TAG before their name.
And regarding ganking:

Keep the fights fair for both sides, and if one side has the majority, you can roleplay it so that two fighters (snubs) face off in a duel while the caps watch.

This naturally implies that one cap side loses, but since we have paper battleships these days, we even have to fear snubs (which is ridiculous).

But as i said above,
the players who are thinking they are controlling the server is THE MAIN PROBLEM atm-

Best example is xenon
He got hunted and sieged multiple times cuz the equipment he was selling was too expensive
and that is enough to hunt and siege pob from other people?
If you thuink somethink is too expensive
Dont buy it????
Easy at it is
And not sieging/hunting etc
........

[Groshyr]

Can you stop charades and tell us who is the evil mastermind behind all the vicious stuff?

[vladimir26]

The people on THAT SPECIFFIC DISCORD SERVER

Which specific server?

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[[MHS]]

OFFICIAL FACTION ACTIVITY
2025 Q4

[/indent]

Factions Stripped:
These factions were previously warned for failing the check in the last two quarters,
and failed this activity check.

Gas Miners Guild GMG| 5:50:30

[/indent]

Lejima in Sigma 13 will require removal from Core 5.

Edit: Factions losing "officialdom" due to inactivity really is what it is. Everyone has to abide by th4e same rules.

Enough back door lobbying & circle jerking exists as it is, the staff involved will never be held accountable nor will anything be done about it.

let this activity report be a stern reminder that everyone has to play by the same rules, not just get away with things because you have an admin/staff friend.

Mep doesn't have any friends.

I like Mep, he told me how to season a cast iron skillet once

Friends have shared a variety of perspectives, which is appreciated and commendable.
Based on how the discussion has developed, I’d like to offer a few suggestions aimed at increasing engagement, purpose, and overall motivation within the game:
1) One of the positive additions has been the introduction of Encounters and Battlezones.
Encounters provide tangible rewards such as codenames and blueprints, which is a solid and valuable concept.
However, on the other hand, what is the actual incentive behind Battlezones?
I’ve tested most of them; their number and design are good, but in practice they feel like a time sink with no real added value for players.
As many will remember, older BZs such as Munich / Vespucci / Lorraine created significant faction activity. For example, when 5x Corsairs were active in Munich, RM would ping and respond, creating a dynamic loop that extended to other BZs as well.
My suggestion is to significantly increase the NPC bounty rewards in Battlezones (for example, 10x the current value) so these areas become meaningful locations for both income and activity/PVP.
2) Introduce rewards for PvP engagements.
For example:
Official faction members receive 500k per confirmed kill
Indie players receive 250k.......like you do it in events.
Additionally, for combat docking, a reward/penalty system could be applied:
For instance, 300k is deducted from the combat-docking player and paid to the opponent
This approach would be far healthier than endless arguments, sanctions, or informal blacklists.
3) Implement activity-based rewards for factions.
For example, all official factions are required to complete 3 days of activity per cycle.
If a faction reaches 5 days of activity, a reward such as 20 million credits could be deposited into that faction’s bank account then they can decide to share or what to do with that themselves.
Importantly, rewards should not be limited only to the top 3 most active factions, as that would centralize players into a few groups and gradually kill off smaller or developing factions.
4) The Jump Drive rework itself is logical and understandable, but the battery costs are extremely high, resulting in very limited usage.
This is clearly visible in-game: OC and Corsair operations across systems have significantly decreased, and factions like Liberty effectively face no serious external threats anymore.
My suggestion is to:
Limit jump range to 5 systems
Reduce battery costs to 1 or 2$
This would restore strategic mobility without returning to excessive abuse.
For now, these are the points that came to mind

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[GN] GALLIC NAVY COMBINED FLEET: OVERVIEW / RECRUITMENT / MESSAGE DUMP / GENDARMERIE / SECURITY BUREAU / FORT LUNE / FEEDBACK

[Sombs]

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?

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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.

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Uncharted System Stories: 18 | 32 | 34 | 37 | 38 | 85

Templates: Character | Transmissions

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[Egon Bigmemes]

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.

unless youre a pob empire builder or an AFK NPC farmer maintaining a faction has become more and more of a chore as people refuse to interact more and more. traders are usually of the power variety, and usually involved in supplying a POB and do NOT want anything to do with your pirate or even your lawful, as you either directly slow down their profit/POB upgrade/POB equipment because you dared to interact with/pirate them, or indirectly wasting their time because theyre going to wait for you to go off scanners so you dont find their pob.
for those who slap a tag on/already have an official trader, this would be simple, sure. for literally anyone else, particularly pvp oriented factions, this just becomes existential dread, as your already limited interaction prospects are now being used to judge if your faction is worthy of existing or not.

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

im not gonna sugar coat it

to the very low standards for bounty hunting

i'd agree with this but on the other hand, any more standards would make it functionally impossible to bounty hunt.

as well as the ridiculousness of inherited official player factions

besides some trading/zoner factions are there any inherited factions left? everyones of old has pretty much gone unOF at this point. or become irrelevant.

biggest agree, however.

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.

caps being a knockoff world of warships with zero of the mechanics, fun, or firepower but with an added gimmick (turn off your shields/fly slower/use your useless and intrusive rear facing turret!) in the name of making caps less likely to give you carpal tunnel from the keyboard gymnastics you had to do (and actually just exasperating it to the point you lose 100% of the time if you dont partake) had to of been the funniest (worst) design choice i've seen.

[StellarViss]

as well as the ridiculousness of inherited official player factions

besides some trading/zoner factions are there any inherited factions left? everyones of old has pretty much gone unOF at this point. or become irrelevant.

Funnily enough I inherited my membership in IMG| from my dad but the leadership was given to me as I was the only one who wanted to lead the faction. I'd say it has been fun and I plan to keep it fun for me and the faction.

[Nicolás Diego]

The people on THAT SPECIFFIC DISCORD SERVER

Which specific server?

You know exactly what i mean mate
you are also on that server
dont try to fool me.......
And change your signature xD
Leaving DTR but still having it as signature xD
clown

[vladimir26]

The people on THAT SPECIFFIC DISCORD SERVER

Which specific server?

You know exactly what i mean mate
you are also on that server
dont try to fool me.......
And change your signature xD
Leaving DTR but still having it as signature xD
clown

I can't fool you more than you are brother. I asked cuz I wasn't sure you mean our server, cheers for the good advertising! However, we have plenty of ex and active staff in it, so I'd say they are the first to learn before something happens, if it happens.

Oh, and I'll change my signature when @Groshyr will make me a new one.

Naxos Fried Chicken

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