What matters most to you about Discovery?

[pillow]

Population and the gameplay loop that came with it. Everything else is irrelevant.(I mean as long as you have pop you can do everything on that list but have more fun doing it)

Back in 86 when I joined people did just fine with the ugly looking models, lack of gun variety (such as the house civ guns), flhook plugins, restarts, etc. I'd stop caring about what war is happening where or what dumb faction got turned into an NPC faction if I could just log into the game on a Rogue, fly to a lane and make bank/have fun rp and pvp by pirating traders and getting engaged my lawfuls. The day transports became too strong for a lone snub (vhf) to be able to scare them into submission and pay them is the day disco started its decline. Couple ass-ups later like the buffer systems that killed Alpha/Gamma raids and the pobs blocking jumpholes that also killed raids and lagged the server plus some other stuff that I can't remember right now, and you have players that got sick and tired of the game actively trying to stop them from having fun and they up and left.

The Trader > Pirate > Lawful loop has been broken for years and it really doesn't seem like it will ever be fixed, so even if Discovery suddenly got put to steam and 300+ people flooded in; they'd leave pretty quick when they realize that they've nothing to do.

The game relied on being alive to stay alive.