Question to the community

[Omi]

Much lower server population across the board has shifted the fight culture more towards pre-arranged events, which were never as fun for me as organic interactions were back in the day. These days everyone knows everyone and there's an implicit explanation that everyone should 'spread out' to balance fights, and every faction has crossbred with one another to such a degree that it all ends up feeling artificial anyway when you do get around to a proper groupfight. There's nowhere near the same sense of camaraderie any longer -- while I think I can still find more than enough friends to fly around with (still love some of you guys!! xoxo), the old sense of flying around as a cohesive faction or group is long gone now that many people feel obliged to swap wholesale to the other side just to prop them up. At that point, any sense of characterisation or roleplay pretence to the fights themselves is gone; you're just fighting throwaway Firstname.Lastname ships that sprung up like glorified NPCs for you to click on. I get that this is just the reality of a PvP scene trying to keep itself alive without wiping out all the newer blood before they can get invested, but to me it ends up feeling pointless. Playing with people you enjoy shouldn't feel like an unattainable goal half the time.

I have next to no interest in flying anything larger than a bomber, so a large portion of gameplay has been locked out for me for a number of years now, too. I'm sure flying caps is very rewarding once you get into it, but it's not something that I think is likely to change. I'm told that mixed fights (caps and snubs in the same battle) are a lot more palatable for snub players now, and while I admit I haven't tried them firsthand since any of these changes were implemented, I still feel like they're going to boil down to the same boring box-and-shoot scenario with extra steps no matter how you slice it. I've never ever been excited to shoot Dunkirks in my Lynx, not since 2014, and I don't think that's ever going to change either. Bombers, likewise, have just been a pain to fly ever since the SNAC change. I think instakills were unfairly demonised and identified as something that had to be removed due to an incompatibility with our server rules, rather than adjusting the rules to suit the gameplay.

On that note, the new-age snub gameplay is much less appealing to me than it used to be. I don't have a ton of experience with it, as I quit not long after the first wave of changes were being slotted in, but I have sensed the general trend that the new development paradigm revolves around trying to push a certain style of fighting (especially in fighter combat) as the 'ideal' way to play the game, rather than allowing an established meta to evolve on its own, like with SNAC bombers becoming effective (if unreliable) generalists in larger-scale groupfights a few years ago. There is an obsession with balance now that almost feels artificial, and that has led to a degradation in how unique certain aspects of the game are allowed to feel when you actually sit down and play with them.

My interest in terms of factions to play has been relatively niche for years, too, so finding the organic interactions I mentioned earlier has felt next to impossible for me for a long time. It feels like you need throwaway ships spread all across Sirius to really guarantee yourself the ability to log consistently and actually find anyone to talk to or shoot at, which is pretty destructive to focusing a lot of effort into your actual character. You need a wide spread of ships anyway to participate in the myriad of different, copy-paste events that constitute the bulk of group PvP in recent years now, too.

Otherwise ngl PvP in this game has never felt that rewarding to me (at least in terms of effort vs what you get out of it) compared to games like Smash or Titanfall. For me, I really enjoy PvP in games where you can do some cool shit, share the clip with people and it's fairly easy to appreciate what is going on even to someone with only surface-level knowledge of the game. Interestingly, when I've tried to do that with clips from Disco (both mine and other people's) 3rd party observers struggle to get a grasp of what's actually going on, and often it just doesn't look very cool or interesting and the result is bland. In essence THIS GAME HAS NO SAUCE.

For me PvP was more of like a means to an end. It's only those moments that created permanent memories like the Ranseur Megazord with the Teamspeak Squad back in the day or the insane Core vs the Universe Delta rumble where you had to coordinate a lot of people effectively against crazy odds to win in order to release dopamine. The bragging rights for surviving that were sweet too.

Far too often I'd just have PvP experiences, die, and look at my screen and think "I could have spent those couple hours doing something else".

Lyth pretty much nails it too. It was about the overall experience of playing with friends rather than the actual mechanics of the fight for me, and that sense of building a little squad of your own and setting out to fight for your common roleplay cause is essentially gone. Half your Discord will swap sides for balancing reasons now when you're still 2 jumps out, and then you'll get to experience another bland, obsessively balanced fight with no real stakes or soul behind it whatsoever.

---