Alternative Options

[Blodo]

There are some fine points of OP I agree with, such as bureaucracy (which I sorely believe needs to cut down on the time limits for a start, it should not take 3 months to validate a faction for officialdom for example). SRPs and whatnot should be encouraged, etc. But there are other points that are debatable.

For example take the hardwired RP. This is a case of I think misunderstanding intentions behind the rule. Nobody is going to get sanctioned for 1.7 because they didn't respect an NFZ, I'd say that would be a ridiculous sanction and guy who submitted that would likely get warned himself for malicious reporting and wasting admins time. I'm not sure what precisely the issue there might be, other than amount of info to be consumed if one wants to be aware of all house laws. But this to me is both unfortunate and a bit of a boon. Unfortunate in the respect that, just like real life law, the majority of people do not understand house law universally, and this is fine because the only thing it impacts is their RP and definitely will not get them sanctioned. Maybe blown up at worst. And a boon because, just like in real life, it gives cops something to do other than shoot unlawfuls only. So as I said I'm not sure where the problem is.

Second one is mod systems. Yes, a lot of those are useless and already have been decided to be deleted by next version. But for example you mentioned Omega-9, specifically that it just increases the amount of time it takes to travel in Omega systems. Seems like you hit the nail on the head, because that's precisely why that system was added: to funnel trade traffic away from the jump holes of deep Omega systems back onto the lanes. AFAIK it was successful, so that's the purpose of it, we just need to figure out what else to do with it. There's a couple of other systems like that spread around here and there. They could be removed completely, but coincidentally they are a fix for vanilla connections that have not been very well balanced in regards to the trade system for example.

IDs have already been mentioned, but I'll just add my two cents: I can't think of a better way to sort them out right now. Permissive IDs (like the trader ID back in the day for example) are not vessels to "great rp", they just get taken by everyone as an inevitable "path of least resistance" option. Factions like CR or SCRA no longer get made not because of ID rules, but because the stigma instantly attached to any non canon faction attempt no matter whether hat faction found an ID that would suit them or not, and this is a community issue not a rules issue. The SRP ID still exists, but yes that returns us to the point about bureaucracy.

Then there's the tech chart. It's not really been instituted as a way to stifle people's RP, that would be kind of senseless. The reason why it's here in the first place is for balance reasons. We used to have a fairly free ability to mix and match guns a couple of versions ago, and that of course resulted in the vast majority of players min-maxing their equipment with their ship to get the most OP combination possible. So tech chart was instituted to improve on balance without admins having to chase up OORP equipment setups. The middle ground here is that if you really want a particular set up because you think it will improve your RP, you can submit an SRP for it, and yes its bureaucracy and it could be processed faster and less painfully, but still the option is there and the RP can come from ingame if so needed.

Finally there's the grinding. The only thing right now in Disco that is worth grinding for are caps (unfortunately), unless you get involved in factions then you grind for faction expenses or whatever. If you have a fighter/bomber/gunboat and a 100 mil, you probably wont need to grind for a month unless you spend time ingame 24/7 dying all the time or something. A 100 mil is 4-5 long range trade runs, give or take 3-4 hours of trading. It's not a lot in the grand scheme of things, if you only fund your characters. POB grinding is another matter altogether, but those need to be rebalanced/redesigned regardless.

End of the day most of the problems raised here, they are either not really problems, they rather show other problems or they are imperfect solutions to past problems. Some of these are real however and I'd like to discuss those more. For example I'd like to hear what else we could do to improve the SRP submission system and faction creation submission system so that it's more streamlined, easier to access, and faster in general.