+1 Alex

Thanks to the OP for the input and prompting Alex to respond with something I think could help the beginning game play for new players.

When I first started, I never even bothered with the tutorial missions until someone told me you could get your free bot at the end of it.

Agree with Alex's suggestion.

Charox, are you still around? Any new observations after another weekend of play?

Devs are continually working to improve the game, and there are new Islands due out soon, which is going to shake things up for a little while.

Not sure if anyone mentioned that the Navigation extension under Robot control helps you move faster, which cuts down a little on travel times. Also, its one of the skills that you can't go wrong by increasing while you determine what role you want to do in game.

GL!

I have been tinkering with the game now for a few days and as I was creating my avatar I got really stoked about using missiles as a primary source of damage. You start out with a single gun turret (which is not a problem). I did a few starter quests and got enough NIC to buy a missile launcher from the market only to find out that I couldn't actually buy it. I presume that eventually I could kill something that would drop a missile launcher but I'd much rather test it out before my 15 days expired to see if missiles was what I actually wanted to go with instead of lasers or guns or w/e and before I put too many points into the related extensions.

Maybe they could introduce some sort of sandbox mech you could create just to try out various weapon types and see what the equipment can do.

Also, for anyone who has never played and MMO but loves the Mechwarrior games this game does a very bad job of explaining anything in the beginning. A lot of people who have never touched an MMO probably won't stick around. I am going to give it a few more days before I decide if I'm going to fork over $10 for a month on a full account (which in all respects could totally win me over with the game).

I do like that they are pushing out big content updates in the way of doubling the land mass. Sadly there is a lot of running and the OP has a major point in regards to that.

So true.

Also running green transport missions out of TMA awards missles; ones you can't make

Some corps will front you ammo, sometimes generous players do too.  I gave 3k volcano laser ammo to some random guy on trial a few days ago, I'm sure other players do too.

I've written some caustic posts in the past about the game but truth is the longer you're in the better it gets, the first 30 to 45 days were the hardest for me, always feeling gimped no matter what I did. 

I got killed 13 times total (including a few npcs deaths but mostly getting ganked in pvp) before I got a my first kill (solo) and it's been worth it and I expect that it will just continue to get better as I gain EP and personal experience in game.

The Devs are solid, they clearly enjoy their work and while still their choice for server location is a bad one from a latency perspective the actual servers themselves have been stable.

The learning curve and character development curve are definitely steeper time and patience wise than what I'm used to (even as an old school pen and paper roleplayer) but I think I'll likely be around awhile.

As far as the guy talking about depth, a lot of that comes with learning player politics, player history and engaging in 'meta-gaming' to some extent; at least in my opinion.

The community here, despite some of their trolling and whatnot is pretty good and definitely well above your average theme park MMO.

People willing to put together tournaments and races, people doing podcasts, people posting videos, people going out of their way to promote the game in other venues so we can get more targe... err players ;D 

All of these things add to the immersion for me even if I'm not always an active participant myself.

I should also point out you can get a steep discount in sub prices by buying multi-month codes instead of month to month.  It's basically half off if you buy a year, which as my original 90 days + 15 day trial are running out on my first account I'm seriously considering.

.. but, but Perpetuum is an MMO not a 3rd person shooter, and you spent a lot of time on making the world good looking, its natural they want to view it.

If the UI control developer was sitting around idle, I'd say add this, but I doubt its a dedicated programmer, so ignore this and keep working on POS.

I wanted to give a +1 to point 3 to the OP.  Today was my first day and I can't stand the camera controls.

How do you guys PVP without being able to look around while you're heading in a certain direction?  Say I wanted to run away from someone but wanted to look behind me while I ran.  Can't do it with the current controls because a camera look isn't built in.

I don't understand the big issue either.  Make left click still do what it does, but have drag left click move the camera freely.  This is very hard to adjust to considering every other MMO I've ever played operates this way and this just doesn't feel... natural.

i would say - if you rely in pvp on AUTORUN and only mousecontrols, your almost deemed to die anyway.

you can fully control the camera while navigating with WASD or using "aproach" on a groundtile (doubleclicking on ground)

That wasn't really what I meant, but take this example:

I'm being chased by 2 players.  While I'm running away from them, I'm holding W and I want to look behind me.  This simple act isn't possible unless I hold another key to free rotate the camera.  This requires two of my fingers to be occupied while they could do something else, like enable an ability, strafe, etc.

I'm not a clicker at all, I only use the mouse to camera view and to get the initial target.  The more available my fingers are the better.  Something as simple as running one direction and looking in the other direction, using only 1 key pressed, should be a no brainer.

Im new as well, and just subscribed.  I barely did, and nearly didn't... and honestly, it was that first 15 minutes of play.  I know they say that the first few minutes a player decides whether to continue or not - I've usually slugged it out but I got really frustrated during the tutorial and I quit several times.

First, I was starting in a really ugly place, and I didn't like looking at it.  And then I was getting hopelessly lost in this ugly place.  Things weren't going well.

I didn't understand how to do anything except WASD which I didn't need to be instructed on... but did on just about everything else, and while the tutorial DID help, it took a long time doing so and it was complicated just the same.  I learned how to mine, and forgot how to mine!

I didn't understand how to lock targets very well until midway in the first 10 basic missions, and actually understood mining in the first 10. 

The best part about the tutorial was that it introduced me to this very complicated UI.  I've never played with a UI like this before, and it's a bit bizarre and data laden.  I'm not an MMO newbie, but I am to this type of 'spreadsheet' MMO.  The areas where the tutorial helped me to understand were the best part of the tutorial process.

Ultimately, the reason I subscribed was because of the 1) the GM who helped get me set up (whos name I unfortunately do not recall) but mostly the HELP channel. 

There are a few players in there who are absolutely sterling about explaining simple things without sarcasm or commentary that is ungentle.  All three of them took the time to answer HOURS (4 hours? It was a lot of asking questinos) of questions, give options if not suggestions.  I remember Carillons and Drahkars names that also had M2S, but Im sorry I am forgetting the player whos name starts with a J and has only 4 or 5 letters, but also has a NOFEAR next to it.

Anyways, out of the days I spent reading and typing in that channel, those guys are just exemplifying decency and kindness, and I felt if there were players like this in the game putting that kind of time and effort into helping new people without even once trying to recruit them, well - it had to be worth sticking around for.  Let's hope that's how it turns out!!!