I'm new and decided to stick it out after my free trial was up, but I can think of a few things that seemed kind of weird as I was starting out:

• I assume this is well-known already, but the broken mining tutorial mission (suggesting area charges instead of directional, and giving players the impression they are supposed to search at a specific spot when there may or may not actually be ore there) totally baffled me and in the past couple of weeks I've probably seen dozens of new players get caught up on it. Some of them go straight to /help and get sorted, other spend an hour scanning and getting angry before hitting the chat channels, some threaten to ragequit, and I assume there are more that just give up quietly. I know this probably seems like a super small thing when you're worried about corp wars and gamma expansion, but it really sucks to have one of the first things you do in-game be so blatantly broken. Not only because it's no fun, but because it makes the game look badly put together, etc. etc. etc.

• Along the same lines, missions could really use some cleaning up. I realize that a lot of pvp-oriented players either never did them or stopped early on, but they're going to be an obvious starting place for players coming from less sandbox-y games. And right off the bat, seeing daily missions with garbled placeholder titles really doesn't instill confidence in the game's pve potential.

• Mission-wise, there also seem to be serious issues with balancing - I've gotten ~250k for super a super easy L4, then ~180k for an L3 that takes 3-4 times as long, and was then offered ~220k for an L4 that was so much harder than either of the others that I had to drop it (ending in a beacon spawning 5 demobbing hero npcs in an area too small to kite them). I realize I'm spoiled by Eve (where you can look up each mission to figure out whether it's do-able with what you're flying), but at the very least there should be some indication of what general bot type each mission is balanced for, as well as rewards proportionate to its difficulty.

• While we're at it, the "you can only do any one mission 6 times out of 10" thing doesn't seem to be explained anywhere. I know it's not that complicated, but Perpetuum's mission system is even more oddball than Eve's so it wouldn't hurt to break it down in small words for new players or ones coming from other games.

• Same goes for the way squad missions "work." I'm putting that in quotes because they don't really seem to work, at least when I've tried them - the end result is that you might as well just both do the same mission separately side by side, except that when we did them as a squad we each got like 10% less than the half rewards we were expecting for reasons that were never clear. Again, this isn't a big thing but if you're trying to retain players coming from games where sharing quests is a common thing, it probably shouldn't be broken and/or confusing. It would also be great to reward players for working together instead of punishing them with lower rewards and non-credited kills.

Aside from all that, there are a couple of more general things that struck me as weird:

• NPCs' super-fast respawn rates. This initially confused the hell out of me (since I was mentally comparing it to every other game/MMO I'd played), and I'm still kind of stumped as to the design intention behind it. It seems like instead of making NPCs non-aggressive it would make more sense to just...make them stay dead a little longer after you kill them, so that people could temporarily clear areas where they wanted to mine, harvest, loot, do mission stuff, whatever? Not saying this is game-breaking in any way, but it definitely contributed to my initial sense of "wait, is this bugged? I guess not? WTF is up with this game?!" impression starting out.

• The market can definitely be weird sometimes, although maybe that's just how things have to be. For instance, it was kind of frustrating when I, as a budding young TM pilot, had to shlep 2 islands over to buy light shields even though they're ostensibly a common fitting for Green bots.

• Artifact hunting. Whenever it comes up in chat it seems like people are overwhelmingly using a third-party program that isn't supported and has all kinds of installation bugs. This seems like a pretty big red flag that the game interface could use some work. I found it especially frustrating because mining/scanning is relatively user-friendly (and has cool graphics), and then you get to artifacts and it feels like you're doing math homework on an old DOS machine.

Anyhow, TL;DR. Game is fun.