Deleting systems poll UPDATE

[Sombs]

Oh no, Sombra posts in here, too, how dare they.

With the list that was posted in the OP listing more than ten systems, and a lot of them being Omicrons, and looking back at all the systems that have been removed since the end of the Gallic war, especially the ones with unique features like the Razgriz Black Hole, the Omicron Sigma Black Hole, Omicron Chi's completely alien misty and dangerous ambient, as well as all the other stuff that set the system apart from others by a long shot, it's not surprising that people couldn't give less of a damn about whatever possibly new things could be added, especially considering the new things that have been added in the past few patches, like that Attica Ultrafiasco or the implementation of Omicron Nu or the really strange decision to basically give the Corsairs an atmosphere system with a huge alien installation that is completely undefended and absolutely inconvenient for any defenders to reach. Not to mention the magical conjuration of Bretonian assets and some people going around with the mentality of Bretonia's fleet strength being on par with that of the other houses because of the numbers of Bretonian Battleships currently in the game. Whether it is true or not, who can tell, and secondly, who cares. Those intransparencies float around the community, hopping from Discord to Discord and every now and then even get thrown around the forum. They don't look good, and there is no surprise to the reaction of the community about it.

One thing should be clear: Discovery's community is getting increasingly smaller, but obviously it is never getting small enough to prevent anyone from leaking stuff to their buddies. Prime example would be a certain yellow name leaking DMs from a moderator, leading to three unrelated people posting those leaks in the Discovery Meme thread in an arbitraty move of two-wrongs-making-one-right. We can point finger at every single person here, or simply accept the fact that this is the internet, and this is Discovery, meaning people go at each other's throat over rumors, misinterpretations or blatant ill will. As long as Discovery is community-driven - which includes the developers, considering Discovery is not the mod of Igiss and Blodo and all the other oldies anymore, but a constantly changing, shapeless melting pot or salad bowl of various creative minds with various preferences and various interests and visions and even understandings of both vanilla lore and Discovery lore - you will always have various people in clash with each other, and since most of them seem eager to keep their conflicts and refuse to resolve them, things like leaks are inevitably unavoidable.

A good amount of people have voted here and commented, and this shows something. Ignore all the ad-hominems, conspirative assumptions and angry outbursts and you get a good idea of what people want. Exploration and transparency.

Transparency, what can be done about that? Other game developers release roadmaps for their games, some even have view-only channels to the public where developers communicate with each other in complete sets of arguments. The community can read it and react to it in other channels or with emotes. Other developers can, of course, control their employees and clients with contracts and prevent them from causing leaks - with questionable success. In Discovery, there is no control over that. Take from that what you want.

When it comes to exploration, one could say that speaks for itself. People want the aspect of Discovery in Discovery. They remember how big the map once looked, even without all those guard systems. The feeling of logging into the game and knowing that you can spend 100 hours of flying around and still not having visited certain systems, regardless of their quality, that is something that adds to the atmosphere. Not only that, but Discovery is a game of niches. Every single player here has a preference for ships, ship classes, factions, houses, systems and playstyle. Some are here for the RP, some for the PvP, some for PoB, some for just making money, some for powertrading, and most of the people managed to find themselves a balance among those extremes. Whenever a faction, a system, a station, a piece of lore disappears, that hurts someone. On one hand, that obviously makes development processes difficult, but on the other hand, most of the time such things get waved off as "yeah, f*** that person, anyway". Sadly, at some point, this mentality can no longer be applied. There are only so many players. And so many players are now facing the POSSIBLE deletion of more than ten listed systems. And some of those systems are not just important to a single one player, but quite many.

Of course it is only my personal opinion, but when it comes to the deletion of content, I always said that it should be the absolutely final straw - simply because that piece of content is important to someone, and may be something that adds to the atmosphere of a few others, simply for they know that there is something they haven't bothered with yet. Of course that can also be dismissed easily, but then again, looking at how many people are here for not just weeks and months but years and some even for a decade, this feeling of "I actually never went to that place" and "I actually never tried out that ship" and "I actually never read those rumors/infocards" is not to be underestimated.

The issue people take with some systems can always simply be solved by turning an otherwise "undesirable" system to a one-jump hole system. Stations and ships can fall apart, and it is such things that give people not only something to explore but also give it more lore opportunities rather than "Please consider this asset as if it has always been in the new system" or "This asset never existed, it has been retconned". Retcons have never been a satisfying solution, and whenever the developers change names, the opinions on what is to be considered retconned and what not change, too. From a development perspective, Discovery is not short of system files that can be utilized, and system files are not even big. Having those exploration-only systems, regardless of whether they are only reachable via a single jump hole or even just via blind jump, is always a win, and still better than outright removal, or this, in my opinion, horrible trend of merging systems and creating really awkward amalgamations both visually and lore-wise.

What I am most afraid of, though, is regardless of how many systems will get removed, is that there are quite a bunch of PoBs that will be affected, which get a completely brainless free location move ticket. I'm still surprised about the complete failure that is Nichols Trading Center, an SRP Core 5 PoB that has been for many, many years in the orbit of Gran Canaria (formerly in Omega-49), which has been magically moved to the other side of the Omegas, without any justification inRP, now sitting in Omicron Theta, a system that is way too small for this big station that was in painful detail designed to be in the outer orbit of Gran Canaria. Some player requested it, some admin(s) approved it, some developer did the development-side changes. Of course that is just a player base, but it has the exact same kind of feeling of awkward system amalgamations, regardless of whether they are NPC bases or PoBs.

I wish I could say I don't bother with it, but given I'm constantly exposed to the friends I made thanks to Discovery talking about these changes, and given that I have invested not a small amount of my life time into Discovery in various ways, it's kind of painful to see the latest trends and directions here. And for once I'm not referring to the otherwise easy to yell devtonia call-outs, but the general things that are probably all coming with the best intentions and ideas, but seem to either not care enough about the opinions of the people who actually play and keep this place alive or just haven't found out how to do things in more optimal ways than removing content - regardless of what may or may not get added as replacement.

Oh well. Looking forward to getting told to leave again.

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