Experiment successful. Discovery is not a good place for newbies.

[Drakens]

It occurs to me that while the experiment was very interesting that you cannot count people that are actually newbies or 'lolwuts' (really dumb term) themselves to point out the mistake. I imagine the 22 people sample you built up is mostly comprised of those people which is sad in itself and an indicator of the same issue and others.

It might be more interesting to look at that actually, the sheer quantity of people that actually stick around despite not RPing and end up in the largest ships while somehow not violating the rules. I hail from a community on another gaming platform and we have similar issues but we call these people "script players". They obey the rules to the fullest and play to the law of the script that we use on the server. The same applies to the 'lolwuts' in capital ships. They play by the rules technically, they don't roleplay and they stick to what the mod tells them they can do.

These 'scriptplayers' or 'lolwuts', whatever you prefer, have a ripple effect. Much like on my roleplay server the people that tend to scriptplay end up being very well geared, cool looking. Here they have capital ships. So let’s say you're new to roleplay but you want to learn, you're new to Freelancer too perhaps. You join and you see people in capital ships and you think "Man, I want to be like that one day". It turns out that with a little research you work out its really not hard, you don’t need to RP and the allure of the awesome stuff has essentially dissolved that initial willingness to RP. By not putting RP as a requirement on these things this ripple effect is decidedly negative rather than positive. Let’s say instead you're not here to RP, you're new but you really want that awesome capital ship. Let’s also assume that instead of this system that you actually need to RP to get a capital ship or some such. Immediately you make a decision or you soon will "Do I stay and try this RP malarky out or do I just not bother and leave?" which is good in two ways. One, you may just make someone get into RP that wasn't previously even going to bother or two, that person that would likely have just been the subject of sanction after sanction decided it wasn't worth his time.

Naturally all this relies on people being communicative, more Angel support etcetera but even then, people do the research if they care enough and I think most of us can agree that you'd want them to find something that told them RP gets them somewhere. Right now I feel that the rewards from RPing well are not matching up to the rewards of just saying "screw it" and having a general blast, treating it like a PvP server with small barriers. You can argue that RP should be its own reward and that is true but not everyone will see it like that and some people need to be shown. Encourage them, give them incentives that work. Just some thoughts on what I feel is the real issue.