Seriously, between the Halloween story and the INN stuff, I’ve come to realise this game is in dire need of some actual background, presented in game.
Right now, as far as most players are concerned, there is no background. There is no background on the ships, factions, or races. There is no information on anything, and the result is shockingly bland and generic.
Flavour text matters. It is a vital tool for connecting people to the game and tying events together into a single, cohesive whole. Plenty of instance-based games, from TF2 to WarFrame manage to express a narrative through the same kind of lobby-based play as Star Conflict uses.
The game provides plenty of room for narrative. The simplest, and one of the most effective, was the ship descriptions. Before they were removed for reasons nobody has bothered to explain, the ship tree told a story of three factions evolving and growing in strength; it told us of the Empire’s change from using stolen Direktorium equipment, to having to adapt to the advanced Jericho ships of the Third Bartle War, to the present era. We learned from the Jericho tree that they are divided into Houses, with a Family Council running everything. In the Federation tree we found that our ships were originally cargo transporters, racing craft or even pleasure ships, all hastily re-purposed and made fit for war.
All of that is gone, and now we are left with three generic factions, none of which have any reason to fight other than “because the other two are”, and all three are now fighting an alien race who are so two-dimensional that all of their motivation, goals and strategy could be written on the back of a postage stamp in size 16 font.
Put the background back into the game, and make the events of the game mean something within that narrative. “Aliens are attacking” is not narrative. “Pirates are stealing things” is not narrative. And most importantly, “it’ll all make sense when Dreadnoughts come out” is NOT an acceptable answer!
If you can’t write a narrative, find someone who can. I know for a fact there’s plenty of people within the community that would do it for free, so you have no excuse. Get it done.