I LIKE MISSILES

I believe it's just a simple MySQL database, no idea of the version.

This is how I fear it's going to go down:
1) Perpetuum releases on steam
2) Horde of people join the game
3) Servers flip out and ruins the experience
4) Crushing defeat

This has happened before but replace point 1 with "People get sick of EVE" or "Game is released"

Blame the German translators for that one.. *Tut*

Ow, Anni! Your cynicism almost took me eye out! Watch where you swing it..

Overall it's a major shame that such a data loss happened. Lesson learnt. Yet more "I wish they didn't have to refund it like this but you can't put a price on emotional damage".

It's hard to enjoy a persistent world when things like this happen but it's happened and all water under the bridge.

The next round of Greenlighting is today. As it's all done on US time I expect in the next few hours it'll appear somewhere on here:
http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight/

After that it's all down to the devs and the Valve people to get the files hosted, pages set-up and the like.

Keep in mind terminal and fitting window are two different things.

The terminal interior design is bad and the current one is nice (Please add games in terminal like snake and pacman because why not?).

The fitting windows looks different and very nice. Tune the colours back to the current UI design and maybe some of the text scale could be tweaked but this fitting window was far superior.

Coming Winter 2013...

The native live on Nia has been struck by a deadly virus and you're now running (And shooting) for your lives!

Strange mutated robot life forms are now randomly appearing all over the world and only you, hero, can save them!

To the Devs:
Zoom, wasn't there a tool added in-game where players could run a trace route and automatically save/send the data?

This would be useful as it's been stated that running your own traces/pings never reflects the same 'lag' you see in game.

If there is a way to do this could you please document a nice way for players to do it? It might be that you'll get more consistant reports and every time someone gets some bad lag they can quickly type in a few game commands and have a nice trace log output that they can paste in the forums.

To the players:
It is important that everyone also understands how connections work and that there are many type of 'lag'.
1) If the destination servers processing capabilities are strained then there will be a delay between the responses to each packet. This can also result in packet loss if the 'time to live' of a packet is reached before it is processed.

2) If any server between yourself and the destination is struggling to deal with a large load of packets at any given time this can result in a dropped packet or longer than normal delays.

3) If your connection between your computer and your ISPs network is not configured correctly or there are issues at your local exchange this can result in a very small amount of players (So, just you) being effected by terrible connection issues.

4) Corruptions in data transmission/retransmission somewhere between your computer and the destination machine. Because science is crazy and could result in weird things happening to signals.

Now only the first point can be monitor and controlled by the destination server owners. It's very easy to go "I can't connect to your game, fix it as it must be your fault" because this is very often not the case.

Troubleshooting for players:
Pinging an IP address will quickly tell you the overall performance of your connection. Tracing the route of a packet will tell you each machine that the packet visits and the time it takes to then reach the next location.

When looking at the results of a trace route you need to keep an eye out for any large spikes or if the connection is generally quite bad you'll see a high response time from the first exchange. Under 100ms is very good for any communication. For things like FPS games or games that require fast reactions anything above 100ms will be noticeable if the system is not developed in a way to deal with this.

For example a wired internet connection (Wired directly from your machine to the socket on the wall) will be around a 0 to 1ms travel time. A wireless connection is often around 5ms+. If you're seeing values higher than 20ms before you even reach the first 'hop' there is likely something wrong with your connection or you're very unfortunate.

Most routers will be addressed as per their owner E.g. xxxx.yyyy.adatpark.hu helps indicate the owner of the server. If your getting a high value or a spiking value from a router owners by your ISP you can often contact them to report this however most ISP will monitor these machines. (You can sometimes get money off your bill for being provided a poor service if you're lucky so it's worth reporting if there really is a problem)

The main issue is unless the packet loss or high response times are at the destination or source machines there is nothing yourselves or the destination machine owners can do.

Annoying but, sadly, true.

TL;DR Lags sucks and most of the time you can't do anything about it so instead of whining and complaining try and find where the fault is and then do the best you can do resolve the issue by contracting the right people. It's better than complaining at other people who also can't do anything to resolve it.

Are there still connection issues? I logged in for a while, stomped around and explored. I had a solid good ping of around 60ms and a stable 60FPS (V-Synced) with the same settings I've always had.

If you want to start thinking about why new players don't stick around in very high numbers you need to include contact, community and motivation.

The new player experience doesn't shown off any of the larger robots, many of the team based game mechanics aren't covered and for a game that's so 'sandbox' the tutorial is very disjointed. You start to get an idea of how the web of information thrown at you fits together.

It's certainly not bad but throwing a new player into Perpetuum requires a lot of hand holding. Unless you friend tells you to play Perpetuum you are really disadvantaged and likely lack the motivation to keep playing once the bitter-vets get their hooks into you.

P.S. Fix the economy/make it more fun to create things and then you might see people throwing assets at each other for fun rather than digging holes to guard their stashes.