Discovery advertisement campaign - step 1

[Omi]

then maybe the factions that are low on players should sponsor new players to join them

Sure, if factions were handing out substantial benefits like that for joining, that'd be great. I know a few do, or did - I got a free Vache when I signed up for IDF a couple of years ago - but the fact is, the cost of even a basic VHF is a lot for a new player to foot the bill for. Armour upgrades should be sunk already, at least for snubs.

In any case, you won't see me handing free stuff out to people on a regular basis. Making money on Discovery, to me, is an absolute chore. Trading is mind-numbingly repetitive and boring, and mining only marginally less so. I can barely stomach making enough credits to keep my own characters ticking over, let alone sponsoring new GRN| recruits, for example.

The point is, new players come here having heard good things about the quality of roleplay, or whatever it is that brought them here (I advertised it as roleplay-centric, given that the gameplay is nothing to write home about) but there is no way to really start roleplaying right off the bat. Yes, in theory all you need is any ship at all and a keyboard, but it's hard to RP a military pilot/bloodthirsty pirate/whatever if you don't have the ooRP cash to kick the character into gear. To get that cash, you need to make a character completely unrelated to what you actually want to do, and spend hours upon hours clicking on things and pressing F3.

I'm only speaking from personal experience here, mind. All 5ish people I tried to introduce to Discovery fell out with it because of the somewhat grindy nature of funding new characters, even with me giving them a wad of cash to go buy a BWT or something with for the purposes of kickstarting their "funds character". That, and they found the community "elitist", but that's something too deep-rooted to have a go at fixing, eh?

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