Freelancer as I Saw It

[Warhawk]

but it appears to be another "This is how Discovery Freelancer dev ought be" thread,

Yes and no; I put it in general Freelancer Forum for a reason. My observations included things like Crossfire and Freeworlds as well, not to mention other games and mods I've run into over the years. This hypothetical design is just meandering through the philosophy behind it. By the time I'm done it isn't going to look anything like Discovery, or FL mods in general, and I'm fully anticipating a number of people responding here just to say that they hate it for that reason alone. Discovery is what it is; I had the delusion and the ego to think I could change it beaten out of me already, so no worries about that.

Discovery, as it exists now, is locked in a perpetual state of the players thinking they ought run the game, and the development team actually running it. This was to some degree always the state of things, but as the size of the community has dwindled and the ratio of casual to invested players has grown skewed in favor of the latter, it's become a lot more pronounced over the years.

I can see that. At the same time, it's been an inherited culture because the boundaries of authority weren't clearly defined to begin with, right? You can't be faulted for having that precedent set, but I don't envy your having to deal with the repercussions of it. My pointing out those issues does nothing to change what's already here, and I have great sympathy for you because of that. I understand that now.

So, does dev have a solid vision of what they are, and where they want to go with things? Yeah, we do.

Is that vision appreciated? Well, I'll leave that to the maelstrom of posts that are bound to show here.

God bless you, because I wouldn't want that job. It reminds me of Germany in WWI: "Shackled to a corpse," only in this case it's the mod's legacy and the "consensus" of "how things are done." I understand why devs, even the ones who meant only the best, were so reluctant to deviate from all those presumed notions. Instead of a community that was unified behind a vision from the get-go, or one that was pre-conditioned to welcome serious experimentation for the sake of improvements, you're forced to make only incremental changes on a system 10+ years old, with "vested" interests as you put it, and even those changes can only go so far.

Disco is what it is. You're a part of the development team? Then the game is yours, your decisions, your triumphs, not mine. And that's alright. Do what you think is best. I'm not here to stop you or to tear you down. If there's nothing you can take away from what I write here, then at least accept my gratitude for the work you've done, from one designer to another.

Thanks for the links. I mean that. Should help clear up some of the hearsay I've been exposed to regarding what happened since I left. I'll give 'em a listen.

---