All this discussion is complete nonsense, considering the fact that over 20 years, Discovery has accumulated so many problems that it's simply impossible to pinpoint any specific ones. If you guys have some kind of super-initiative, then show it and make it known. At least within your factions. You don't need a yellow, green, or orange nickname to change things for the better.
I mean, there are problems you can solve yourself, without any help or attention from the staff. You have no need to rush: sitting down for at least a day or a week at most to think about how to generate activity consistently and in one specific location isn't as difficult as it seems at first glance.
Discovery is a server of dreams. And I'm a big dreamer.
lol. Caps were not "murdered" for solo PvE. People including me easily run encounters in solo battleships, BCs, gunboats etc. As for solo PvP, well, caps are not meant to solo PvP. They are designed with interlocking weaknesses that are covered by other cap classes and snubs. This is the best admin team discovery has ever had, it is not their fault. It is simply the age of the game, people moving on and lack of new people to take their place because zoomers and younger haven't been coming to play a game from 2003 because they have their minecrafts and forkknifes and so on to play. It's fairly impressive as it is that the game still gets to 100+ people for events/large sieges etc. Some of the player loss is balance. You saw what happened with the Leeds VR event
Yes, its sad that these factions are no longer official but... what does officialdom really get you, anyway. A unique ID. A core 5 if you feel like roleplaying the usual boring pob RP of deliveries with shipping factions. They don't have terribly many perks, I do believe even normal players can now post blanket bounties, which used to be an only OF perk. Slowly chipping away at OF rights has caused them to dwindle in number. As others have said. You can find activity, we even have a handy dandy built in activity finder.
I just compare the game with 2022-2023 ish where I was one of the main drivers of mass activity on the server - making caps "realistic" with things like having to drop shields to be competitive, and having to be in a bigger fleet to be useful, and never knowing when you might get a huge sanction or ban if the voting staff decide to make an example out of you are why there isn't the will.
At the same time the RP community has been also decimated - folks use to just sit in a place and RP to no end, like Manhattan - I wasn't one of them really so can't comment on what happened there, but really the way the game is it feels like it's made for trading and big mixed fleet fights now
(01-04-2026, 04:30 PM)Culbrelai Wrote: lol. Caps were not "murdered" for solo PvE. People including me easily run encounters in solo battleships, BCs, gunboats etc. As for solo PvP, well, caps are not meant to solo PvP. They are designed with interlocking weaknesses that are covered by other cap classes and snubs. This is the best admin team discovery has ever had, it is not their fault. It is simply the age of the game, people moving on and lack of new people to take their place because zoomers and younger haven't been coming to play a game from 2003 because they have their minecrafts and forkknifes and so on to play. It's fairly impressive as it is that the game still gets to 100+ people for events/large sieges etc. Some of the player loss is balance. You saw what happened with the Leeds VR event
Yes, its sad that these factions are no longer official but... what does officialdom really get you, anyway. A unique ID. A core 5 if you feel like roleplaying the usual boring pob RP of deliveries with shipping factions. They don't have terribly many perks, I do believe even normal players can now post blanket bounties, which used to be an only OF perk. Slowly chipping away at OF rights has caused them to dwindle in number. As others have said. You can find activity, we even have a handy dandy built in activity finder.
Yeah caps used to be an arcade class that wasn't a total pain to move through tradelanes, was fun to take vs 5 snubs, and e.g. battleships could run missions vs max class cruisers. Just look at tracker and ratio of caps logging vs other classes and compare to pre oil in water changes - numbers don't lie.
I know folks tell me caps are MUCH better for complex fleet fights with multiple classes now, but without Barrier and frequent events that's not going to bring noobs like me who play to relax back in.
Balance tried to make the game better and more complex - but Freelancer was always an arcade pew pew game with epic story and world and RP opportunities, it just got lost when Haste took over
Writing walls of text stating problems that have been stated many times before without solving them won't do anything.
Although Luke was right about one thing, it's a two-way street indeed. Pointing fingers at each other isn't going to do any good.
Stating a singular POV about cap balance on a RP server and having main character syndrome isn't going to do any good either. Don't get me wrong, I love caps also but try to be more constructive instead of saying "caps suck." This isn't how I remember us teaching 1st new players how to act here.
Also, official factions lose officialdom because they don't log, simple as that. Who cares about the formatting.
(01-04-2026, 10:13 AM)Lemon Wrote: This is grim, so many factions lost, you don't even bother using proper formatting to announce their OF death, and there's a lot more non-OF who are under their requirement and should be removed too.
I'll finally have some time just to help my boys who still are around, but this is not good - caps were murdered for solo PvP and PvE, the heavy decision staff approach that lead to countless mistakes has driven a lot of people away, and it just looks bleak after losing the people who were holding the mod up with events that were needed after solo PvP and PvE play was butchered by balance.
I don't think this is about reworking OF system itself however much that'd help - like honestly if you are on staff: why should people come back now, why put so much effort into holding an OF, why should new folks join and stay with solo play at the all time hardest outside of hauling, and a loose sanction system that can make a public shameful example of you at any time if the votes align
This isn't the thread for this debate but, blaming staff for everything is absolutely insane. There's been times of inactivity, and times where mistakes have been made, but everyone on the team cares about Discovery and its players and suggesting otherwise is frankly just bitter at best.
There was a time when Discovery had a lot of players. Many, including yourself probably remember it. This offset a lot of underlying issues such as the aforementioned lack of "things to do" because player interaction was the core driver of...well, activity. It's what led to the proverbial world spinning and people logging to see what would happen that day. Factions however good or bad, thrived, RP'd and attracted people to join their cause. Over time, that golden age died out. There is no doubt that some have been driven away by changes they do not like, pleasing everyone is very difficult after all, but failing to recognise any other reasons is incredibly disingenuous. The game is old, people grew up and life took over, there's a lot of games to play, the modern generation don't want to engage with a forum and a genre like RP that requires more attention to detail and conduct. The decrease in players causes a spiralling effect where the game just becomes less fun because there's less to do as a result of less players.
But instead of acknowledging the many external reasons for the games decline, instead you choose to blame devs for not working fast enough to compensate with a plethora of ways to entertain the playerbase when they too have lives and do this for free on the side, with an engine that can only do so much without a metric ton of work. You choose to blame staff for utilising a public sanction system that has been in place since the inception of the mod and had zero effect on the player numbers for many, many years. A product of an older, more stoic time perhaps and yet you'll complain all the same if action is taken privately because you didn't see your report get explicitly actioned. You choose to blame us all for OFs getting bored and slowing down, meanwhile there's many people using various Discord servers to slander each other and create huge rifts in the real world that demotivate each other from playing, or logging simply to spite others and ruin their time in the game.
If you ever wonder why some feedback is not taken seriously, I'd honestly suggest taking a good look at how its presented. Even I, as someone who prides myself on finding something valid to take onboard amidst seas of unproductive word-salad and slander, find it hard to be motivated when every decision is met with backlash without anything constructive, no solutions and no care for the fact that we too are players and want the best for the mod as much as you do.
The current staff team is, at least in my eyes, the most fair and balanced in terms of opinions and discussion that's been seen for a while now. Boiling everything down to the fault of authority is indicative of blindness. There's been mistakes, missteps and ill-fated decisions. There's been apologies and situations that could have been avoided. There's been accountability for that. We are not and will never be perfect. But it's a two-way street. Always.
I came well after any Golden age, and the reason and 20+ people who I flew with don't play are
1) Caps are very solo and small group play unfriendly
2) There is a loose sanction system that picks on people selectively and then makes them examples
3) Event organisers are gone.
The game experience was made actively worse by balance - caps log times have been obliterated by making them slow unfun bricks that are more relistic and balancing the game around large mixed composition fleet fights. This all crumbles as server numbers get even lower and you lose Barrier and others willing to make events.
Balance killed off solo mission farming too - it's just, sad and bleak and I don't see any way out of this for the very large group who used to fly caps without big fleet fights.
The staff approach where an error after error are made with the arbitrary sanction system don't help, but honestly the broken mechanics are the main issue, devs are just detached and want to move from the arcade freelancer that was well...fun and why recreational players played in the first place.
External factors are one thing - but sadly the game is made actively worse and decline supported by staff making the wrong decisions. You can burry the head in the sand, but look at the tracker, see where caps are now and where they used to be a couple years back in relation to other ships - this and low confidence in staff are why tens if not hundreds of players aren't here.
You need to find a new barrier, or someone like him, fast, and treat guys like MHS like gold because the balance is made for a full server and large numbers and hostile to solo play and fun experience.
I see you are utterly pointless to argue with and would rather sit in your own bubble with these beliefs born of an echo-chamber, ignoring anything that you are told because you want to believe your own agenda instead.
I've lost count of the amount of times that I or someone else has said "people that break rules more often, get sanctioned more often". If you know all these people like you claim, then maybe you happen to hang with the crowd that enjoys pushing boundaries or causing trouble for others. Not much to be done here, those that are sanctioned are those that have breached the rules. It's really that simple. The list of sanctions over the past year alone speaks for itself in debunking this stoic belief that the same people get sanctioned and all because staff don't like them. There's no evil cabal in the staff team, no decision-affecting bias and no will to make any particular person miserable. You just think there is, because your friends keep being sanctioned for valid reasons. It's clearly impossible to change your mind on this, because you'd rather believe their side of the story rather than any evidence. That's fine, you are perfectly entitled to game with whoever you wish, but genuine friends hold their companions accountable for their own mistakes rather than blindly defending them.
As for balance, as much as it would perhaps make sense to balance for smaller numbers instead, if the server were ever to climb once more, suddenly that philosophy is outdated too and requires yet further work to reverse and rebalance for more players again. The devs fight an uphill battle and acknowledge that there's much to be done with the current state of affairs, but people like yourself make it far less desirable with this unshakeable will to blame volunteers for trying their best, and who likely have much better knowledge than you do.
We have a new event dev, I'm sure they'll take the time to come up with ideas in the near future. Perhaps try to be nicer to them than you have been to just about any other member of staff in recent memory, failing to read a single word and responding with a convoluted "nope, i'm right".
You are set in your ways so I have no desire to continue this discussion, but then one has to wonder why you're still here if it's really that bad. You clearly aren't willing to listen to the other side, much like those you adamantly claim are so cast aside by us. Funny how that works.
some of this, is more because of some player behaviour ... it is new ... "let's do it" ..." yeah great" ... "you don't like me" ... "no fun" ..." goodbye i'm going to another faction" so it is not all blame of the staff. the staff also has some blame, some changes and restrictions let down many players that don't see their effort recognized and even rewarded, quite the opposite, and that let many people demotivated.
also why is so hard to get some things to be done? It could be easier and not have to wait so much, and to be so hard, for the judgment of others
also ... for example ... why two official factions of the same faction? why those 2 liberty navy are not together? why people don't join together for the same goal?
(01-04-2026, 04:56 PM)Enkidu Wrote: The key part here is to play the game.
It really is that simple.
That would solve half of today's problems, actually. There are things to do and if you don't see any - make them up and people will go to you to do things. The only difficulty is to decide for yourself that you are going to play the game and leave raidlog mentality behind.
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