(07-25-2016, 04:22 PM)Omicega Wrote: I find it funny that we have so many people saying the devs are replacable when we also have so many - and no doubt more than a few people fall into both categories - who wouldn't shut up about just how irreplaceable the administration is.
If the current dev team were to be entirely replaced tomorrow with a fresh crop of enthusiastic newcomers, I would be very surprised if Discovery ever got its hands on a meaningful update of even passable quality ever again. Development work requires more technical knowledge than I think a lot of you realise, not just good intentions and a vague desire to help.
This is what I wrote couple of years ago: development does not only consist of coding , which current... well, not current, the team from 2 years ago was very good at. It also consists of developing the lore, which is completely secondary for RTS games, or FPS games, but crucial for the online Roleplaying community. In addition to that, it also consists of managing in-game live environment in case of Discovery server, managing activity hubs.
I came here by the December 2010, when the Disco's playerbase was at it's peak activity. I remember waiting for 10 minutes to be able to log in to server in prime time during Winter 2011, even when player limit was pushed above 200.
Then, by the... I think March 2011? somebody didn't like how edit: Dublin (...that's the Molly/Bretonia mining system name, right?)was too much of a troublemaker Activity Hub, and they killed it, together with Dublin gold route. Redone the mining system in general, made people spread over the Sirius, this is the moment where activity started to go down. Practically instantly Disco lost around 10-15+ online in prime time, you never needed to wait in server lobby attempting to join the overloaded server anymore.
Then somebody thought killing Corsair Outcasts raids of Alpha/Gamma was a good thing, and "their activity needs to be moved into neutral grounds in Sigmas", and system route got redone. Guess what happened? Nobody moved to Sigmas, OC-Corsair conflict died, together with it factions lost ALOT of indies. At least OCies had Tau-23 and IMG to fight with.
An unimaginable amount of time and resources was spent on adding Gallia, while at same time killing Kusari-Bretonia conflict. Goodbye Kusari activity, welcome empty Gallia. To be fair, Gallic activity was later increased during the siege of Leeds, but the Gallia itself remained empty.
Then, by the time I was leaving, Liberty-Rheinland conflict was coming to a halt. Don't know if the war fully ended, but if it did, I can imagine what happened to faction indie activity in Rheinland at least.
Then there was a bunch of smaller things I can't even recall about.
That DevTeam 2 years ago (again, don't know jack about what's going on on Disco for last 1-1.5 years) sure had great technical knowledge. But when it came to activity/community management, they had their... shortcomings.
Since you're a much older veteran of the community than me, I guess you should remember it as well.
