My opinion on why the game has constantly been losing players

[Sol]

Disco is utterly boring to explore in. What will you find in all those dozens of empty systems?

There are no quests you can find, the missions are the same everywhere. No interesting lore or stories worth reading, the amount of worthwhile text in game is low for a community full of people who like to write a lot of nonsense for the sake of writing. The NPC are all static same faces in same uniforms that have empty dialogue markers over their heads. No wrecks are worth your hours to search for, the worthwhile code drops are already known. No matter how much you try to pretty up the systems, it will never be good enough to make you want to explore more than once (for me, less than once). And there are other, a lot more prettier games focusing on exploration which freelancer is completely bland compared to.

Just because the mod has discovery in its name makes people somehow assume the game is good for discovering interesting things. It’s not.

The gameplay itself is not good enough in any aspect. It is the interaction between players that kept everything going so far and that should be the main focus. It is the players who give you ‘quests’,interesting information and a dynamic, engaging environment, making this game a lot more fun than it could ever be. The game itself should even be made less interesting to enhance interaction between players, like reducing the amount of viable trading routes, focusing the main gameplay area to a smaller amount of systems while keeping empty discovery systems out of the main routes, increasing ZoI for most factions and allowing them to roam closer to activity zones, setting up lore and stories for them to help this increased ZoI make sense.

For those who want to explore, keep those systems but do not use them as buffer just to make traveling longer between activity zones. Randomizing the contents of wreck drops after each restart could help a lot, even I would stop by a random wreck on my travel route to try my luck and see if it will drop a shiny code gun this time. I do not know if it is possible, how easy or hard it could be to code such.