Let's Talk Fuel

[Perfect Gentleman]

Merely playing the game will now require a monetary and attentional investment. This can be offset by boosting the profit of existing money-makers and tinkering with fuel capacity.

That is, increasing the cost of ammunition is so difficult, but developing a completely new mechanic and spending several months (if not six months+) on it, so that later you also have to correct all the errors and shortcomings... It's just not worth it. I mean, it's not worth it at all.

Imagine you have about 50 players in space, all of whom have launched a cloaking device at the same time. While I'm no expert on Discovery's server side, I imagine the server would feel a bit uneasy.

Now imagine the entire server is online and always under the strain of endlessly calculating player fuel consumption, not to mention the endless amount of other nuances. How will you develop this? How will you implement this? Have you thought about the fact that this will definitely affect the server ping? How much time would you spend just trying to figure out the fuel consumption for each ship?

Why don't you just take the easy way out and change a couple of numbers instead of adding a whole new (and time-consuming to implement) plugin?

Running out of fuel may prematurely end your game session. There are many solutions here besides the obvious (just plan ahead lol), which may not be obvious to new players.

You know, right, that a new player, coming to the game and having an interest in it, will not fly to do RP first of all, but will thoughtlessly rush to the edge of Sirius? That is, you offer him, right from the start, without any training or explanation (which Discovery does not have), to teach him the mechanics of using fuel, which can instantly break his gaming experience at the wrong time and place?

I will be interested to see the faces of the entire team of developers + administration + community, who will process more than a dozen questions from newcomers per a day (and those ones we'll know about) about why their ship suddenly stopped in the middle of space. Would you be curious to know how many of them will say "Screw it!" and go do something else besides Discovery?

Running out of fuel in a fight will likely result in a very unpleasant death. This can be solved by judiciously using fleet oilers, ships which are meant to refuel fleets before they go into combat.

I don't even know what it will be like for balance-devs who, not only create such a ship, but also manage to rebuild the entire balance around it (or manage to force it into the existing balance, it doesn't matter). The point is that it clearly won't take 1-2 days.

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The idea is good. Game detailing and adding new mechanics have always been a breath of fresh air for the average Freelancer player. But don't forget that there is a concept of the game and mechanics that are built around this concept.

It has been said here and more than once that excessive detailing of mechanics is a bad thing, not a good thing for Discovery. There are things that should be added (cloaking devices, jump drives, player bases, rewards for killing NPCs), and there are things that should not be there at all, and the idea with fuel is one of them.

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Discovery is a server of dreams.
And I'm a big dreamer.