(01-28-2021, 09:19 PM)Ilya Wrote: What does cause a decline in players is that the game is not attractive. There are many things that make discovery unattractive and I won't go into all of them, but one thing is that people are forced to spread their chars over many different factions and many different IDs, and that ends up with throw-away characters and throw-away RP that people do because they have to do it so the are able to do X, not because they like it.
Too many factions, means too few interactions between peoples , with factions having only 1 or two people active routinely at any time barring large events. I know it goes against the grain, but it may be logical now to consider faction mergers, to reduce factions operating, like merging mollies and rogues, or like the 5 corporate factions in liberty RP "Business mergers" to reduce them to 2 as examples, and yes i expect large deep breaths.
Let's face it Freelancer / Disco is ancient in Internet years. At this point it's almost closer to the electronic arcades of the 70s than any "modern" genre.
Also, you won't get kids people to "interact" more if you put them into a 5 by 5 square meter sandbox. They'll just step on each other's toes, get into a fight, then go cry into their corners when they get a slap on the wrist by the GMs. The "power" of ruining a person's day by going "well actually the rules say you can't do X" is too much to resist for many people with a sociopathic streak that seem to dwell in these parts.
The main problem of Disco is that it lacks focus. It's basically a sandbox game, but a very strictly controlled sandbox. It's more of Petri dish experiment than a true "do whatever you want" sandbox. There's weird rules. Cringy RP requirements. The pixel power grabbing and endless circlejerking. And it's all measured by some subjective arpee quality rules where things get decided on a whim of a closed clique.
The events provide focus. And the few of them that (seemingly) have an impact on the state of the game / state of your chars provide incentive for participation. That's the "interesting" gameplay loop. But the "regular" one is boring as hell. Trade 100 000 units of Ore on the couple of routes that are not camped by pirates / too long so you can afford a "powerful" battleship that will just get stomped into the ground by somebody who traded 900 000 units of Ore and mined 5000 Sci-data then spent the rest of his Disco time dueling in Conn with a couple of friends.
All of that puts off any potential new players from joining sticking around.
The current state of Disco is, too many "filler" systems, too many "special" factions and a total lack of an interface for any decent coordination between players... or even interface for feedback on what the hell is going on. Any newbie who pisses somebody off isn't gonna bother reading hundreds of pages of lore, laws, rules when his a__ gets blasted by some "lawful vigilante" for flying a "wrong" ship in a "wrong" place. Or getting slapped by 150 mil fine for not obeying a request to halt (seriously wtf ?)
I don't claim to know how to "fix" Disco. But slimming it down and giving people more "focused" gameplay and tools for team-oriented (f)actions seems to be a good idea for a start.
