We Perpetuum lovers like to pretend this game is completely different and in no way comparable to Eve, but I’ll pick up on what you said and do so anyways.

In Eve online even manual piloting can be done simply by pointing and clicking at entities in the landmarks window (or the overview as CCP calls it). While traveling, you can keep busy by sifting through any menu open in almost full screen. All you need, is to keep that margin of a landmark (overview) menu accessible.

Can you get around P.O. simply by using the landmark window? Only exceptionally is the answer. Merely getting around requires almost as much attention as combat itself (without being nearly as stimulating off course).

If you close the assignment window, devilering missions is faster.

Proceed as follows.

Enter the outpost where you must deliver your transport mission.
Open the assignment window.
Bring up all your accomplished missions BUT DON'T turn them in.
Close the assignment window
Turn in the missions.

In the first month of the game you may think that you know what you're doing but in fact you don't so just don't train extensions beyond lvl 5

Account trading will probably happen “under the table”, until there is some or other “official” mechanism that permits one to reach similar ends.

I understand why this isn’t a priority currently for the Devs.

You put your finger on it. The first moments of the game feel like driving through the trafic to get to your pillow stuffing day job. I ranted on that as well when I joined.  http://forums.perpetuum-online.com/post/20383/#p20383

In a sandbox game, things such as traveling and grinding are a bit inevitable. It’s also impossible to write a novel quest line long enough for players that play for hours during several years.

These are all ugly truths that need not be thrown at a new player’s face on day one.

What we need to is a quest line long enough to be impossible to clear during the trial period (of the average gamer), that gives the new player a sense of evolution, a sort of goal. During said period he’ll settle in the community and find a corporation, acquire the impulsive syndrome of “I need the next shinier robot” and maybe even get a of blood in pvp.

As far as the traveling time is concerned, anything that could compress it, would have a significant impact on the rate at which money is earned and pvp is done. Basically the entire balance of the game would be upset.

They’re free to do other things but it will pay less and be more dangerous and involve even more mind numbing traveling.

Have you thought of teaming up with some friends? Look at Cobalt's rant about him being a fighter and not wanting to aquire industry skills. Send him an invite next time you go artifact hunting.

Good point in favor of a system with long traveling times.

Your flare idea isn’t bad. We could also have the mining/combat time of the mission increased to offset a travel time decrease.

There are several approaches in my opinion which could address this issue. All have advantages and disadvantages which can be discussed.

Possibility one.
Allow players to “teleport” between active robots in different locations. There’s the balancing issue which needs to be considered. How many active robots could one have? Wouldn’t this overly facilitate “call to arms” when defending or attacking Beta etc… This option would decrease the traveling time between your Alpha carebearing cash grinding bot and your combat pvp bot on Beta, but not so much the travel time in missions. To reduce the actual travel time between a station and a mission zone we could imagine the implementation of structures (player or built or not) which act like miniature stations. Which’s sole purpose is to allow you to dock up your robot so you can teleport to it later. Let’s call these structures “garages”. These could be spread out around the map or built by players closer to mission zones.
So a typical mission would run as follows.
A Pick up mission in station (as we do now).
B Teleport to garage with combat robot that is closer to mission zone than the station.
C Do mission and return to garage
D Teleport to station to turn in the mission.
Unfortunately this system doesn’t help at all though to perform “destroy and recover” mission types. Garages if player built would have to be destructible by npcs to prevent them from being built too close to spawns.

Possibility two.
Waypoints as mentioned in this thread.
http://forums.perpetuum-online.com/topi … el-paths/”
We place waypoints as we travel along, create a pathway with the waypoints. Select the pathway way we want and click go! Off course what to do with all the plants? Honestly would it bear dire consequences if all plants were ethereal? Though this would help gold farmers as mentioned. To resolves this problem, this mechanism could be functional only in Beta, but then again who really travels afk in a full pvp zone?

Possibilty three.
Let us build highways. Burn the ground, bring down the hills, fill up the valleys and pour the tar! Traveling from a common place to another becomes as simple as putting your bot in the right direction and hitting move lock. What will happen though in the longer term is that we’ll have terraformed all the islands into plant less poll tables.

Possibility four.
Speed bonus for pvp flagging.