What is keeping you from playing?

[Username removed]

What is keeping you from playing the game?

TL;DR inactive factions, balance decisions and anti-social behavior from some people.

I'll explain below:

I was being vilified over a lot of stuff in the region, but now that I've stepped back I've still seen nothing change in the area at all. Interest there is pretty much kaputt.

I used to be part of a pirate faction called Rorry's Renegades and we experienced the same thing. We used to kick around Rheinland way back in 4.85 and 4.86 days parting people from their credits or cargo and we used to get a lot of grief from some parts of the community to the point where our faction leader was getting personally harassed by some people outside of the game/forums and he eventually quit.

I don't know where power traders got the idea that unlawful factions must step aside for their convenience of running repetitive tasks in afk mode while they turn their lives into a grinding factory for astronomical amounts of magic space moneys in a role play based environment but oh man did I have some experiences on here.

One particular player got so mad at me for blowing up his transport that he's been insulting me over different skype and discord channels for months after the fact.

There are so many people that have complained about development in the game and then have rooted themselves in it fighting over change like it's the end of the world rather than just playing the game.

When you devote years of your real life time and effort to get good at certain mechanics of the game and then those mechanics are arbitrarily changed to suit a particular demographic of players it comes off as quite insulting. Made me feel like the people in charge of applying those decisions aren't actually interested in running a public server and would rather turn Discovery into their own little private club custom tailored to their own personal game style.

The game isn't on a 100% level playing field

Neither should it be. This egalitarian direction that the mod has taken is counter productive to the role play environment.

If a certain faction is technologically superior lore-wise, their tech should reflect that in practice. Other factions may compensate by upgrading their own tech to match the superior faction, also called technological development. I feel that the balance teams of Discovery have a historical inclination towards nerfing well-established stuff instead of buffing more rarely-used stuff.

I'm actually thinking of popping back into the game to check things out but I don't make any promises.