Quote:Ok that is completely false, fortunately, especially the statement I highlighted in bold.
The reality is that pilots I've seen on the server for the most part do exactly as I have described ( trade to pay for a battleship, with little or no RPing in the process ). That's not purely a Discovery problem, any modded server with expensive ships has similar issues, but it's a matter of degree. In Discovery the already discussed issues of overly powerful transports, easy trade routes, etc, especially encourage trading. I have now about 80 hrs on the server, and in that time I haven't seen any battles ( even though battleships are common ); dueling is a rarity, and pirating is a rumor. No one has tried to recruit me for a faction; typically 2/3 of players do not have tags. I'm not trying to be critical, I'm just describing what happened. On the other hand, I was on Procyon yesterday for 30 minutes ( a vanilla Freelancer server ), and clan tags were the majority, pilots were fighting and dying etc.
Quote:High end missions yield up to 500,000 a mission
That's an understatement, if anything. The various cargo, pilots, guns, ammo, bots and nanos add up to a fair number of credits, especially if you are smart about where you take missions and sell the stuff. Smuggling, mining are also useful. But still, most people are just trading, or at least making most of their money by trading.
Quote:So what I am getting from you (and in ways it is a good idea, but I don't think it is right for whats happening here) is you want RP to be forced onto people who want a character with any capital class ships. Is that a correct assumption?
What you are calling "forcing" is in fact economics. No one is actually forced to do anything, but if you want something you have to work, perform some activity for that reward. Primarily, the activity is trading and the reward is ships. This is the basic economics of plain Freelancer; but just as the game itself can be modded so can the economics. A simple example is if the admins offer a bounty on a player -- they are introducing a new source of reward, which causes the players to alter their activities. Another example is changes to the mineable areas to increase the reward of the mining activity. A slightly more complex one is my suggestion of the admins funding the faction leaders directly, and those leaders rewarding RP with ships that they couldn't obtain otherwise. More complex ( devious?) would be funding a terrorist faction, or creating an imbalance between the two largest factions ( starting a war ).
Essentially, it's a matter of encouraging players to do the desired activity. If more RP is indeed the goal, then simply ensure that RP has the most reward.
