The Problem With Piracy

[Sayne]

I had a big long post made about this but scrapped it because most have already said what's on my mind. What it boils down to is this:

Player retention is at an all time low because roleplay, in most cases, is an afterthought by many in the community. Most avid RPers do so within their own cliques, rarely involving outside individuals unless agreed upon outside of roleplay.

What's worse, is you have names like "Donald.Jimmyson" and "Freelancer2004" flying around with nothing being done about it despite it being against the rules to have a character name as such. You might say, "Well report it then." Sure, or the admins could pull these players aside when they see it and inform them it needs to change instead. These names only add to the appearance that this isn't a Roleplay community to those first starting to play, so they assume they can do so as well and the problem just propagates.

The piracy problem won't be solved by changing the player list, adding more rules, or anything like that. It comes down to this being yet another symptom of a lack of focus on roleplay and instead in maximizing credit income. With Discovery, you either have Space Truck Simulator or Ace Combat Space Edition and nothing much inbetween.

i agree and disagree with you mate:
Changing the playerlist WILL help, cuz it makes the game more immersive(realistic) and gives a thrill( i am playing on another fl server and it works there, trading feels completly different there)
That devs could also pull these players aside and telling them what wrong instead of reporting everything( we are not playing repotlancer, do we?)

Devs need to do:
Changing the Playerlist to Regions instead of showing systems.
Get rid of players who are harrassing other players(i know a lot of people who stopped playing cuz this players are still allowed on disco
Focus more on the actual content(balancing etc) instead of bringing out new stuff every patch or revive old content/systems)
Sit down and think about why discovery no longer has 200 players per day.....

Alright, sure. Let's say we change the player list to region or omit player locations all together. Now, you almost never see any one. Pirating is now even more difficult to accomplish because you don't know where others are. Sure, this makes it so that silent powertraders can't skirt a pirate waiting ahead of them, but it makes finding the traders annoying for the pirate.

Oh, and let's say that you actually do find a trader as a pirate. The same exact thing happens as it does now. They noRP engage, run away, and then hurl OORP insults at you as they fly away or after they die. So what did you accomplish with this change?

Nothing. You just made it harder for pirates to find traders and increased the likelihood of never finding another player when playing.

I (sort of) get the reasoning behind wanting to do this, but in practice it won't solve anything but make things worse.

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I've lost people who meant the world to me...and I'm still doing just fine.

I'm coming for everything they said I couldn't have.