My opinion on why the game has constantly been losing players

[Shouri]

Yes. What's the point of this thread though?

I thought it'd be an interesting and possibly useful brainstorm, though perhaps I worded it badly and it sounds more like whining.

Add the fact that NPCs in a game like this were a key-feature. They populated all systems and they gave good entertainment when they haven't been nerfed; NPC convoys were funny to destroy for example and all NPCs had good cargo "rewards". Today you can approach to an enemy station without any single danger if there isn't any player in a system; now NPCs are useless, weak and they risk even to not spawn! Yesterday I mapped an entire HOSTILE House space without any problem or obstacle since it was desert. Ok, I was in a camera ship but no trade lance disruptions, no patrolling snubs, no battleship spams into the House capital that can damage you, no CDs to stop you. It was completely boring!

P.S. for Ingame Server feedback I don't think it's the right place to post.

I both agree and disagree, I agree because I remember when going through Omega-55 used to be scary due to the wild npcs and especially gunboats, now, without cruise disruptors it's pretty much safe everywhere in sirius, aside from a few cap spawns which you can go around very easily.
On the other hand, I remember NPCs influencing small scale fights when they spawned in droves, though perhaps you'd consider this a good thing aswell.

I really rather have the people who aren't interested in providing anything to the RP environment sitting in Conn and have fun with other people and provide training targets than having them sitting around in the RP environment, memeing or giving the cheapest RP lines (Beep. Boop.) and emptying one system after another. Finding raid targets or enemies to fight is not a problem at all, really.

While it's true that the standard of RP was atrocious back in the day, due to lolwuts like me, those filler players also made the game universe meaningful by providing interaction, as cheap as it was. Besides, there's a start to everything, I'm sure there's people that can RP properly now but were completely useless in the past and as for memeing, I believe most people did that in groups anyway, since even in the past, people frowned upon being openly and continually OORP in local.
If finding raid targets were that easy though, why doesn't it happen anymore? Why do people just stay docked or just overall do nothing more than base supplying or trading? Imo it's why we need events, because nobody does anything otherwise.

Thank you, i was always thinking why people don't play Discovery. I don't agree with you about your second point, there are a lot of people who would like to play Freelancer again, and they actually payed millions of dollars to do it, kickstarting Star Citizen.
If i remember correctly i read here somewhere there are a lot of new players every month, who install Discovery, and start the game, but they don't stay around too much. And you summed it up nicely, this isn't Freelancer anymore, it's something else, something different that doesn't feel like a continuation of the game they just finished in single player.
That feeling of arriving in Omicron Alpha, seeing the wreck of the Hispania and then docking on Malta, that doesn't feel important anymore in Discovery, who are Outcasts anyway, they are not the dangerous foes they used to be, they are nobody. The Omicrons overall, do they still feel like that far away place?
It's very hard to capture a feeling in a game, and no matter how good the devs are they can't compete with the level of quality that Freelancer had, after all, it was a high level production, financed by Microsoft.

Oh and the RP standard, it alienates people a lot. Think about it, you want me to play a space shooter without shooting stuff, and i also have to write stories? Ok, bye.

I don't think Star Citizen is quite as arcadey as Freelancer, it's more along the lines of Wing Commander games but with an open world, kind of like Privateer (though I might be wrong, I didn't play SC and I've only seen it on yt) and I also don't know about how many people do log in and try disco out, but unless they played freelancer before, I don't think they'll stick around anyway because they'll be at a loss as to what to do, since there's no in-game tutorial and this is not a themepark MMO.
The feeling of meaningfulness was probably killed by restarts, because although endlessly convenient, they make investing in a single character not worth it, unless you specifically want to, as you can just restart and try out the other factions at will and delete if it doesn't suit your liking, completely avoiding having to buy bribes for your characters because you thought shooting those depots up was a good idea.
I'd actually give the devs more credit, they did some things right which the original creators did wrong, like making the universe more like a real world situation, with houses being on par with eachother technologically, whereas in vanilla it was stated in rumors that Liberty allocated enough resources to fight 2 houses at once, yet they were the weakest in terms of weapons and ships, maxing out at class 6 weapons while all other houses had better equipment at their disposal, or making mining a worthy activity in game, which it was not in vanilla, balancing missions with trade, because in vanilla trading was always better until you got to alpha/gamma and had an eagle with nom tech on it, at which point running missions was clearly more profitable.
Removing the nomad weapons which made absolutely no sense since nomads dropped them, of all things, and were completely overpowered since they had no damage type, so they did 100% damage to everything while at the same time having the highest dps and used 0 energy. It made no sense for them to just "drop" from nomad ships who'd have no need to carry such weapons adapted to human ships, let alone to have a freelancer which is basically a civillian be equipped with weapons more powerful than those manufactured in house space.
Good things could also be said about making capital ships intimidating while they were target practice in vanilla, or continuing the storyline in a believable manner while the original devs didn't do much besides small fixes after the game's release.