(09-17-2023, 02:40 PM)Pinko Wrote: I never was good at this game, and it felt frustrating. Hours of PvP training didn't do much to help, and I have a motor deficiency in my hands so I felt like I just plateau'd while everyone else were still finding new techs to use in a fight. It was bad enough that most transports could shoot down my bombers, and that the only way I could help in any PvP fight was to dual torp everything I faced for the funny 5+ blues in furballs. I even had gotten down the moment I needed to shield bot to survive the act.
The quality of roleplay also always has felt... slightly off to me. I'm unsure why, some of the best roleplayers I've met were from this community. Maybe part of it was a disconnect in my brain that, in a universe where slavery, death and whatnot were just daily bread, that saying anything fiercer than 'frick' could get you in trouble.
At least back when I played, player events and actions had very little impact on the Dev side of things, which admittedly can be understandable - back during the Kusari-Bretonia war, Bretonia often had the upper hand in conflicts, yet were pushed back storyline wise time after time. The one time they finally brought the fight back to them in the Taus, there was a fakeout event to decide the fate of the war, which ended up introducing Gallia, causing both Kusari and Bretonia to stop their fighting and ally, only to get decimated by Gallia's forces.
Gallia's introduction back then was a mixed bag, especially since Igiss left immediately after introducing it. It was bad enough that the rumor back then was that Igiss was trying to kill the server by adding Gallia to it, which is nonsense, but that's how the playerbase felt. It didn't help that, even when this server had 200/200 players nearly 24/7, Gallia's size was still ridiculously too large for the server.
I got a job. Before I had one, it was okay for me to log on and try to meet folks in a system I wanted for several hours. With that much less free time, I had to weigh the pros and cons of logging on. A lot of my characters were in Kusari, which was sorta hit or miss with its activity: either everyone was logged in it, or it was empty. Freelancer, by concept, lacks a 'hub' system that many multiplayer games have, where you can just chill and RP. A Red Hessian can't just come to Manhattan to roleplay his socialist views, and when they tried to do that with Radio Free Hessian (roleplayed as an illegal broadcast satellite, just a starflier 20k off the plane) or whatever it was called, no one really cared about that and it was disheartening.
Cliques. Cliques were SO BAD back then. They might still be, Iunno, but it was bad enough that you -had- to pick your circle of friends or be shunned by everyone. I'd say I was on the luckier end, able to be everyone's friend, but it still very much was black and white 'If you are Tenacity's friend, you cannot be my friend', etc.
There's more, but that covers the bigger issue for me.
