Deleting systems poll UPDATE

[pillow]

i wonder if it's because a large number of people GREATLY disagree with what you are doing
almost like it was criticism
and the fact youre assuming it was just blind anger with no reasoning behind it is why people continue to remain angry whenever you try to lay out your reasons while ignoring the fact everyone disagrees with those reasons

Calling the number "large" is a bit of a stretch.

To be honest, I got people screaming at me that I made some lasers go at 600-650 velocity when we first pushed the GUN update. People also consistently believe that Wardogs or Seekers or Rippers or Shredders are busted broken. If we listened to that we'd just go back to square one and have a one dimensional, stale balance system. I'm not going to pretend like I'm a complete and utter genius when it comes to balance and I don't want to look like a pretentious dork, but sometimes people just don't understand things. They don't understand that the lower the velocity a gun has, the more efficient it is, etcetera. And this is perfectly fine, can't expect everyone to spend their days burying themselves in shiparch.ini or weapon_equip.ini to see what the numbers do. The problem is when an opinion is set in stone regardless of how provenly wrong it is. I used to be like this before I started working with @Haste. I still make this mistake nowadays until I get Defeated by Facts and Logic. Nobody's perfect.

In this case, the thing people don't understand is that having a trillion systems is a bad thing. I was in the car with my dad a few days ago and I was talking to him about how we're working on a big patch and the first thing he told me is that he gets so bored from flying from A to B because there are too many systems so he just quits when he ends up docking somewhere. Pretty sure this is why he stopped playing back in 2012-2013, too, when the game had well over a hundred people online every day, not even counting peak times. Having 500 poorly designed and implemented systems does nothing good for the game. The only thing it does is give the impression of a plethora of content when you look at the complete map (I was utterly fooled by this exact thing when I joined in 4.86). You join the game for the first time, run around through systems that haven't seen a single soul for months or years once, then you never visit them again because there is no point. It's just bloat. Bloat that has to be updated and maintained. It's a waste of time. Systems like Virginia are not only prime examples of this but their assets have also been spawned in to make Liberty more Epic and more Stronger like 15 years ago, same with every other guard system. The KNF (Notice how nobody is saying anything about precious Okinawa?), Rheinland and Bretonia guard systems (along with many others, such as Rho and Epsilon, which, again, nobody is saying anything about) were removed ages ago, but nobody cared. Wonder why.

I'm fully aware that there are people who's main gameplay loop in Discovery is booting the game and flying around looking at the pretty systems, meaning that the more systems the game has, the better. Unfortunately, this directly contradicts with the whole "player interaction" thing that we have to encourage, and it's really hard to do that when every system has 500 connections to 500 other systems. I'm not even talking about people who "avoid interaction", because someone who doesn't want to be interacted with never will be regardless of system count, I'm talking about people who just launch up the game and fly around. It shouldn't take aeons for them to meet somebody. Having so many pathways to go from A to B makes it less and less likely they'll see another player. Even on a 255/255 population server. And no, just removing the connections doesn't work, because then you end up with systems lined up in a straight line which just looks artificial, and plays bad because it's a straight line of buffer systems that nobody cares about until they get to [insert vanilla house system].

People don't remember how empty the game was even back in the day because the playerlist on the forums was really long and ingame it said 234 when they pressed Y, so it didn't feel that bad when they were flying around through Kusari or Rheinland or Bretonia or the Omegas or the Taus and didn't see a single soul for the past 2 hours.

If we want to move forward at all and improve the game experience on a fundamental level we need to make sweeping changes, which inevitably means that [x] thing that [y] player likes will get cut. Discovery has been in a zombified state for too long because we were afraid of doing exactly this. We bled developers left and right because we were afraid of doing exactly this. As @Haste wonderfully puts it, even if we're incorrect in our "vision" for the game, at least we're confidently incorrect, where the end product is consistent. Being Compromise Central just leads to us making a game that nobody wants to play. Catering to everybody means catering to nobody.