Let's Talk Fuel

[The_Godslayer]

Outside of niche roleplay moments, this would be an overall detriment. Making fuel any kind of mandatory necessity will put Disco into a single step off from being a significantly worse Eve Online, with that single step being microtransactions.

One of Freelancer's primary draws in the past was that it was an arcade shooter, not a simulator. Every patch we take another step closer to simulator. There are plenty of space simulators, hell there are even arcade space sims. I'd like to ask the dev team to kindly remember that the server is a roleplaying server for an arcade shooter game. Even powertrading was a secondary mechanic in vanilla, and powertrading in vanilla would still throw the main arcade shooter gameplay at you with trade lanes and pirate NPCs with cruise disruptors. Even Space Truck Simulator™ isn't a primary Freelancer function, even though it is a primary Discovery function.

If the development direction is to keep forcing the game towards the simulator genre and away from the arcade genre, at least add the fun things about simulators like being able to fly to planet's surfaces or dynamic asteroid fields that knock you around in fighters but capships just shove around BEFORE you add the pain in the ass unfun things like fuel economy and management, and power cell economy and management. Munition management already sucks most of the times you have to deal with it, and whoever had the bright idea to balance bomber weapons around docking modules (which are effectively codenames with a three times as annoying commodity requirement) needs to be put on an interpol watchlist expeditiously.

Finally, with the sole exception of niche, and would likely also be exceedingly rare, roleplay, what actual fun do you expect to generate from adding a literal chore to the game? This question should have been asked when PoBs were added, but they weren't and here we are STILL trying and failing to justify them and balance the justifications. If anyone here wants to do chores in game, please go clean your room. Go get a job. Get a second job, you'll have more money for actually interesting things. Getting off work, coming home, and getting on a game to go play going to work is crazy. Having nothing to do and getting on the game to roleplay work is actually insane behavior observed in caged animals.

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I'll do something about my superiority complex when I cease to be superior.

"Whatever happened to catchin' a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whoopin and gettin' your shoes, coat, and your hat tooken?"