I have been playing for a mere two days now and want to give some first feedback. As a disclaimer I did play EVE Online in the past. My secret love has always been industry, but as I played right from launch I had enough skillpoints to also be good in the combat niches I specialized in. I was part of a small 0.0 alliance that basically had the only region open for the public running, and I turned away from EVE because the level of metagaming and foul play for the sake of winning (even when people would win by sheer numbers anyways) turned me off. Loosing our region wasn't a problem to me. Things like enemy players coming to our Teamspeak to sing and yell during combat ops was.

So, well, a lot of people seem to be complaining about Perp having a small comunity. Right now that doesn't bother me much. 2000 vs 2000 server crashfests were never my cup of tea. In addition you can earn a reputation in a smaller community more easily. From what I gather the economy has problems due to the player numbers, but I take the approach someone suggested on this board: we are the pioneers at the frontier. But to actually have an educated opinion I need to play longer first.

I love that I can actually manually move my little fellas around unlike in EVE. Great plus for me. I also love the graphics. Having played SWTOR, a 300 million dollar monster with low-res textures recently I really can't see any reason to complain in that department. Unlike other people I especially like the flora.

As I mentioned industry/crafting has always been my big love in MMOs. Unfortunately most games take a totally boring, casual approach of 'everyone can craft everything and everything is the same (plus crafted stuff is normally useless)'. The concept of reverse engineering, prototyping and manufacturing is great. The added layer of research via kernels is original and fun.
Probing for resources reminds me of Star Wars Galaxies (pre-CU), which was my all time favorite regarding crafting. From what I gather mineral positions are static - here I'd prefer that stuff spawns elsewhere after depletion to keep people (me) probing. Do plants actually seed and grow in new spots?

Today I tried artifact hunting, and that's really something that can keep me occupied for a long while I guess. The element of uncertainty what you'll find keeps me going.

What I don't like is the fact that assignments are static. Having to go to the exact same spot over and over again feels grindy. And that's a bad thing by default

Can't say much about combat yet as my trusty Yagel with it's original crapfit(tm) isn't really any good for it. Same for PvP obviously.

Wall of text over - I just thought I'd add some positive feedback to this board or else interested players might think this is not even worth trying, which would be a shame. If you are sick of themepark MMOs that all just clone WoW anyways, give Perp a shot. I think it has a lot of potential, and if I am allowed one last time EVE comparison: that game started with a very small community, too, and people were prophesizing it's doom. Not everything always went smoothly there, but the fans and Devs stuck with it and made it a success. The original feature set of EVE wasn't great, and it took some years to grow to what it is now. I hope Perp gets that chance, too