Deleting systems poll UPDATE

[Arnold]

FYI this is just my opinion, I'm not here to blame anyone for anything.

I loved CNS news back in the day. Sure some small stuff should be kept hidden and be able to discover yourself, but main diplomatic news and important faction events should be put back on CNS. Why? Because it made me feel like the world around me was alive and moving even without my presence. Just knowing that made me sometimes feel I want to check out stuff. It's like: "Oh, something is happening in System/Faction X! I should check that out!"

I'm one of those folks that only plays 3 characters actively, and my active ZOI is mainly Rheinland and Bretonia. The limited time I have makes me want to spend it mostly on RP and politics (includes shooting) in the areas I play most in instead of spending it on looking in a corner of Sirius where I have barely business with just for some information. It's like reading world news to me. You don't need to be there to know the main headliners.

TLDR while I have not much interest in going to certain parts in Sirius, I still enjoy reading news of it.

[Markam]

There have been many replies since my post that I am going to struggle to address appropriately.

Posting on the forums some heads up about upcoming Development (free of spoilers), posting CNS news articles (perhaps in an abbreviated form or made vague to encourage people to also read station news?) are both things that we can do to help with "transparency", but as evidenced by some of the replies to myself and other devs, in order for this to work people need to come to the table without prejudice.

A certain level of civility is needed or, as was the case with the Discovery Working Group (DWG) that I actively argued should be shut down after seeing countless devs burn out after engaging in lengthy discussions with players who in many cases were aggressive and caused massive time sinks that were rarely productive, this kind of transparency is not going to last long especially when you consider the amount of effort required to formulate things, so they are easy to understand.

Seeing my previous post, which was an earnest attempt to give everyone a frank explanation of what we are doing (without hiding hard truths) be responded to with a lot of anger, certainly does not however fill me with a great amount of confidence.

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Markam is evil

[Egon Bigmemes]

Seeing my previous post, which was an earnest attempt to give everyone a frank explanation of what we are doing (without hiding hard truths) be responded to with a lot of anger, certainly does not however fill me with a great amount of confidence.

i wonder if it's because a large number of people GREATLY disagree with what you are doing
almost like it was criticism
and the fact youre assuming it was just blind anger with no reasoning behind it is why people continue to remain angry whenever you try to lay out your reasons while ignoring the fact everyone disagrees with those reasons and decisions

[Prysin]

There have been many replies since my post that I am going to struggle to address appropriately.

Posting on the forums some heads up about upcoming Development (free of spoilers), posting CNS news articles (perhaps in an abbreviated form or made vague to encourage people to also read station news?) are both things that we can do to help with "transparency", but as evidenced by some of the replies to myself and other devs, in order for this to work people need to come to the table without prejudice.

A certain level of civility is needed or, as was the case with the Discovery Working Group (DWG) that I actively argued should be shut down after seeing countless devs burn out after engaging in lengthy discussions with players who in many cases were aggressive and caused massive time sinks that were rarely productive, this kind of transparency is not going to last long especially when you consider the amount of effort required to formulate things, so they are easy to understand.

Seeing my previous post, which was an earnest attempt to give everyone a frank explanation of what we are doing (without hiding hard truths) be responded to with a lot of anger, certainly does not however fill me with a great amount of confidence.

Adding roleplay elements ingame, such as the station news etc sounds like a good idea. Depending on the wording, it can allow a wide range of options for the devteam, whilst also giving months worth of notice to players.

I think such an effort should definetively be considered. It is a right step towards transparency.

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[pillow]

i wonder if it's because a large number of people GREATLY disagree with what you are doing
almost like it was criticism
and the fact youre assuming it was just blind anger with no reasoning behind it is why people continue to remain angry whenever you try to lay out your reasons while ignoring the fact everyone disagrees with those reasons

Calling the number "large" is a bit of a stretch.

To be honest, I got people screaming at me that I made some lasers go at 600-650 velocity when we first pushed the GUN update. People also consistently believe that Wardogs or Seekers or Rippers or Shredders are busted broken. If we listened to that we'd just go back to square one and have a one dimensional, stale balance system. I'm not going to pretend like I'm a complete and utter genius when it comes to balance and I don't want to look like a pretentious dork, but sometimes people just don't understand things. They don't understand that the lower the velocity a gun has, the more efficient it is, etcetera. And this is perfectly fine, can't expect everyone to spend their days burying themselves in shiparch.ini or weapon_equip.ini to see what the numbers do. The problem is when an opinion is set in stone regardless of how provenly wrong it is. I used to be like this before I started working with @Haste. I still make this mistake nowadays until I get Defeated by Facts and Logic. Nobody's perfect.

In this case, the thing people don't understand is that having a trillion systems is a bad thing. I was in the car with my dad a few days ago and I was talking to him about how we're working on a big patch and the first thing he told me is that he gets so bored from flying from A to B because there are too many systems so he just quits when he ends up docking somewhere. Pretty sure this is why he stopped playing back in 2012-2013, too, when the game had well over a hundred people online every day, not even counting peak times. Having 500 poorly designed and implemented systems does nothing good for the game. The only thing it does is give the impression of a plethora of content when you look at the complete map (I was utterly fooled by this exact thing when I joined in 4.86). You join the game for the first time, run around through systems that haven't seen a single soul for months or years once, then you never visit them again because there is no point. It's just bloat. Bloat that has to be updated and maintained. It's a waste of time. Systems like Virginia are not only prime examples of this but their assets have also been spawned in to make Liberty more Epic and more Stronger like 15 years ago, same with every other guard system. The KNF (Notice how nobody is saying anything about precious Okinawa?), Rheinland and Bretonia guard systems (along with many others, such as Rho and Epsilon, which, again, nobody is saying anything about) were removed ages ago, but nobody cared. Wonder why.

I'm fully aware that there are people who's main gameplay loop in Discovery is booting the game and flying around looking at the pretty systems, meaning that the more systems the game has, the better. Unfortunately, this directly contradicts with the whole "player interaction" thing that we have to encourage, and it's really hard to do that when every system has 500 connections to 500 other systems. I'm not even talking about people who "avoid interaction", because someone who doesn't want to be interacted with never will be regardless of system count, I'm talking about people who just launch up the game and fly around. It shouldn't take aeons for them to meet somebody. Having so many pathways to go from A to B makes it less and less likely they'll see another player. Even on a 255/255 population server. And no, just removing the connections doesn't work, because then you end up with systems lined up in a straight line which just looks artificial, and plays bad because it's a straight line of buffer systems that nobody cares about until they get to [insert vanilla house system].

People don't remember how empty the game was even back in the day because the playerlist on the forums was really long and ingame it said 234 when they pressed Y, so it didn't feel that bad when they were flying around through Kusari or Rheinland or Bretonia or the Omegas or the Taus and didn't see a single soul for the past 2 hours.

If we want to move forward at all and improve the game experience on a fundamental level we need to make sweeping changes, which inevitably means that [x] thing that [y] player likes will get cut. Discovery has been in a zombified state for too long because we were afraid of doing exactly this. We bled developers left and right because we were afraid of doing exactly this. As @Haste wonderfully puts it, even if we're incorrect in our "vision" for the game, at least we're confidently incorrect, where the end product is consistent. Being Compromise Central just leads to us making a game that nobody wants to play. Catering to everybody means catering to nobody.

[Egon Bigmemes]

In this case, the thing people don't understand is that having a trillion systems is a bad thing.

having 50 long system routes to do trade or get to places or whatever is bad, yes. lots of filler systems that are just there to make it longer to get places is bad, i agree.
having more dead end or alternate route systems is not bad, and never has been bad.

Having 500 poorly designed and implemented systems does nothing good for the game.

i really feel like people are missing the whole thing being that these systems are being deleted to make way for new ones, if markam is to be believed. which means instead of just blessing the existing systems that people want to keep with your golden touch, youre just going to delete them and make new ones no one will be invested in, just like Nu.

whats the point?
why make new ones that may or may not be popular (unless you force them to exist between current system routes, making them popular by the fact you HAVE to fly through them) when you can fix whats already in the game?

[Shimamori]

In this case, the thing people don't understand is that having a trillion systems is a bad thing. I was in the car with my dad a few days ago and I was talking to him about how we're working on a big patch and the first thing he told me is that he gets so bored from flying from A to B because there are too many systems so he just quits when he ends up docking somewhere.

That is a valid point. However, this points persists even with not many systems around. One can log in in New York, fly to Colorado, get bored because nothing is going on or the activities that are taking place are not to his liking or these activities are somewhere in the Omicrons above the plane so that nobody can listen to the conversation, and they log off. It's not inherently the number of systems that is the problem here. It has been suggested multiple times - make the edge systems one connection only so that they do not obstruct the "bottlenecks" that we keep being fed. Look at Baffin. Does it bother someone? No. Do some people RP there? Yes. So what's the problem with this system? Why not give the fracture of players that are already few and far between something they enjoy?

Another issue, I re-iterate, is that removing certain systems simply breaks the narrative. As a player who values story on grandeur and not a personal level, that's a blow. Especially when after the retcons the story becomes even more inconsistent and not attractive to follow or RP around.

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[Karst]

I'd like to comment on the "number of systems" debate (and not any of the other topics that popped up in this thread).

The high point in 4.86, I think everyone can agree, was excessive. The Savoies and Quebecs of the world never would have contributed anything to the game, even if they had been developed beyond having a single base and jump hole. Ever since then, the number of systems has been decreasing. Often to my chagrin, there's a lot of them that I miss dearly: Lambda, 92, even weird ones like Dundee. The list goes on.

I think there's a sweet spot there somewhere, which is definitely lower than the number in 86, and also isn't actually that dependent on player numbers/density. Even at its peak, the 225/225 wouldn't really "fill" more than 20 or so systems, which is less than even vanilla.
If I were generous, I'd wager we're at that sweet spot right around now. More realistically, I think we've already surpassed it, and further reductions will just reduce the appeal of the game. The sheer sense of scale, the number of hidden, rarely-visited corners of the universe, are after all a cornerstone of the Discovery experience. And I don't buy into the quality over quantity argument either: If we drop say, twenty systems, even if every remaining system is as developed as Skorak's Pennsylvania, the game will be worse for it.

I guess that's not an outlook that's shared by many of the developers but as this thread clearly shows, it seems to be a very common opinion among players.

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[Corile]

were removed ages ago, but nobody cared

so anyway i took that personally

I wasn't around when guard systems were buyable, I think very few people were, but when I joined Disco I thought they were quite neat. I don't think it was a good idea to just nuke them completely because instead they could be converted into something more interesting.

One example I had in mind was to make guard systems belonging to local unlawfuls "shortcut systems" so that there was a practical gameplay benefit to playing Rogues instead of Outcasts in Liberty. One could turn Guard IFFs completely hostile to everything but their unguarded faction. Then place very strong Guard IFFed NPC weapon platforms at the entrance to the guard system so that it is practically impossible to enter for anyone but the faction owning the system. Add jump holes that connect some specific points of interest to the guard system, all but one of which are accessible only non-transport ships.

That way you make piracy as Rogues and Xenos more interesting than Outcasts in Liberty, because currently if you're going to pirate, you might as well pick the ID that has the widest IFF.

But that doesn't matter at this point anyway since the guard systems are removed.

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[Stewgar]

I'm too burnt out to provide substance to the current topic, but the fact that devs are now active participants in the conversation is a swing in the right direction. Kudos.

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It ain't about what you are capable of, it's about what you're willing to do.