(11-15-2016, 02:12 PM)Benoit Wrote: What will happen if the playerbase is not big enough?
...
I kindly but firmly ask the dev to take in account what I'm writing because it is the plain truth. Make a Rheinland active with only Rheinland internal stuff has been tried since more than a year now, and it doesn't take a genius to notice that this thinking has proven to be flawed. Kusari is an other great example of what isolationism does to a house faction.
This is a bit of a ramble, so I apologize if ideas don't get resolved in this or what have you.
To answer you in a personal matter rather than as a representative of the dev team, I'm of the opinion that Discovery is about twice or three times as big as it could possibly be with the amount of players that we have. There are regions, factions, and entire storylines that are being neglected because there is no interest, and it has less to do with how stories or sectors are designed and more to do with the fact that Discovery is essentially a shotgun blast of content and only so much of it can be covered by the players we have at this point.
Transitions are being made, but the external threats available to place Rheinland on a war footing with are very limited. Another war with Liberty in my mind is simply infeasible; and, on top of that, would likely do little to fix the problem of activity. The war was shelved, in part, because of a decline in interest over the course of the last year of 4.87. On top of that, it is very difficult to write a compelling narrative and simultaneously place Rheinland into another big war, and I don't honestly think that another house war would do anything meaningful in the long-term for Rheinland's player base.
So, to answer your question: Internal conflicts haven't done much for activity in Rheinland, that I will agree on, but at the same time I see little in the realm of external conflicts that Rheinland can both reasonably engage in and would actually benefit the activity of the house. I would argue that the activity issues exist primarily from a lack of new players and a blurry direction in development; transparency is still an issue, although it's certainly improved over the past year, and tenfold of that over the past few. I think that, without an official source to purchase or acquire Freelancer, it's difficult to foresee any large scale improvement in the quantity of the Discovery player base, and that at this point our only option is to lower the quantity and improve the quality of the content available, both on a small-scale in Rheinland and on a larger scale in the mod as a whole.
As a side note, polls of the community's opinion are always welcome, but there is a bit of nuance to this situation. Again, I can't speak for the dev team as a whole, but I can say that my approach to the situation would be a continuation of pairing down systems, and perhaps even factions should it come to it, in an effort to compact and compress what options are available. Discovery's breadth of content has always been its strong suit, but it might also be its Achilles' heel, insofar that we are likely in a situation where the sheer quantity of content available outstrips the capabilities of the player base.
