Topic: How to Retain New Members Without Depending on Players
Only about half the new players decide to join a corp before they have some experience with the game. Alpha content needs the most attention. Beta could use a bit but for the most part they will get used more as more people live on alpha and find they need stuff from beta eventually. Fix the missions ,make a contract system, allow players to reverse engineer non prototype modules for a far inferior ct. A proto ct requires about 10x the materials and also the research. If a non proto item was reverse engineered only give it 5-10 runs worth. Just a few ideas to give new industrialists, mission runners and pvpers a way to get established without depending on the absolute trash market. Also, cut the t1 module drop from ratting down to .25 of its current rate. Even .1 wouldn't be all bad. Keep the rare drops the same.
There are stories of huge engagements and when assaults t3 fit were rare and roaming was guarunteed to get you engagements quickly because gamma wasn't out. More islands isn't going to fix the problem. More islands with the same broken content or lack of content is going to continue to plague this game.
In other sandbox MMOs there are many ways a player can be solo with only one account and enjoy the game long enough to feed the market and add their own little footprint to the game. In perpetuum your choices to be solo are missioning the same three missions or mine the same infinite resources. You can get more content by joining active corporations but even that has its limits. I will try to find the statistic from Ccp on how much of their active playerbase stays in dangerous areas and how many actually prefer safer areas and carebear activities. They made up ~80% of the player population. The big fights and player driven content is what draws in New players but the actual content in the game is what retains these newcomers.
In perpetuum I don't know what the actual numbers are but I would say the percentages are the other way around with the 80% being the population of players preferring dangerous areas and only using alpha when they need alpha materials or market and the 20% being people who would exclusively live on alpha just because that is what they enjoy. This tells me that there is a major lack of content for the players wishing to play a different style of game than what the mechanics were intended for. Adding gamma didn't increase the actual population of the game did it? Was just shiny until people figured out the rest was ***.
TL;DR
Allow for reverse engineering of regular mods for far inferior CT's - allows for low level industrials
add contracts - support sale of all CT's and also package deals
reduce t1 drops - gives a market for low level industrials
10x more missions - this will actually retain the new people that are drawn by the awesome concepts the devs have created
*** gamma - says itself