True and i totally agree, BUT what i believe you fail to see is that administrating a computer network is LEVELS below administrating a company.

Now to put this into your perspective: if your network fails -and :rabble: ensues from your coworkers - and you fix it in 1hour, it's ok, people were happy with 1 hour break. If you fix it in 1 day, people go home happy for a day off. If you fix it in a week, hell breaks loose, your job is threatened and company is probably taking a serious economic hit by it. if you fail to fix it in a month, you probably won't get a computer related job anywhere for the rest of your life.

AC is taking x-month long sweet time in doing something to get a larger amount of customers to STAY subscribed for more than a couple of months in a game not yet 12 months old. Do you really fail to see the relevance of that?

Syndic posted very good points about the player base crazy volume  oscillation. That kind of oscillation in customer volume would get any high managment fired in another company. Now AC is young and learning, but they need to be adapting MUCH faster if their childgame is to survive.

Now i understand your portrait choice - it fits

again, I'm not making an analogy between networks and customers, but maybe I should be.

Everyone that has a stake in something, regardless of the venue, thinks they know what is best. But as you point out, it's not the user's job/company that is on the line if I can't get the network back up. Listening to the user's experinces gives me clues to where I can start to look for the problem, but seriously if I another user tells me we should be using DSL because it's super fast at their house, I'm going to throttle thier bandwidth down to DSL speeds!!

hmm an interesting site syndic.

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ?

Eve was horrible for a long time after release, but it was the only working sandbox at the time.  You can't compare their subscription sequence to that of Perpetuum.  And the influx of Eve players to Perpetuum should have no bearing in any argument about subscription numbers and their relation to game content.

From experience, I can tell you what a  huge deal Eve made out of their exploration implementation.  Eon Magazine had an entire issue with pages and pages of pictures and stories and faqs about the new system.  It took years for Eve to put that into the game, and it took months to iron it out and balance it.  Perpetuum added it as a small update.

Every nugget of content the game adds is a good thing in many ways:  it adds content for all players, it draws in new players, and new players add new opportunities for all players.  Beacons are awesome and seemingly simple.  If they can continue to add content like this, it is a win/win for everyone. 

The games progression should not be judged by a contrast to another game and certainly not by a sub ratio.  The game's progression should be judged by just that -- the games progression.  Content added can be judged independently of the game itself; however, in this case, I think the judgment’s outcome will be great.

@segreto:

nice words, but we did not point out that this game's sub acquisition curve was not the same as EVE's, rather that it was unable to hold a serious percentage of subs for a long"er" amount of time.

Also the point was not where those subs came from, but that the game did experience a new-player-influx which the game was unable to absorb. The fact that in certain amount of time that influx was actually eve exodus player base is thus mere irrelevant coincidence. A player is a player. We do not discriminate between wow, linage, eve, swg, .... players. (tho we make fun of wow players often )

You're comparing George Lucas (owner of a global franchise with a multi-million following that's going for 30+ years) and AC (hungarian students that made an EVE-like game that has less then 2,500 people following it)...

No, I don't understand. George Lucas can slap Star Wars on anything and it'll magically turn into gold, AC can maybe buy a loaf of bread after they slap Perpetuum on something. Probably not even a bag of paprika.

Like Trig and me summed up; there are two sources of information that SOMETHING is wrong in Perpetuum. First source, is the two MASSIVE drops in player-base on release and after the EVE exodus arrived. Second source, is the mmodata which puts the subscription base on a massive thumbs-down.

Why is 70-80% of players quitting after a month or two?
What is wrong with current development priorities, are they influencing this consistent drop of new player subscriptions?
Which features were promised and never delivered, did this contribute to drop of player population?

Ofcourse, we can just ignore the uncomfortable questions and just pretend everything's hunky-dory. Works for me.

REMOTE MINE ACTIVATION.

This thread is now totally off-topic.
Beacon drop rate is perfectly fine in my opinion.
Thus this is down to the devs and not us weak mortals.

Beacons are a nice fresh way to PVE, and thank you for them.  They do add spice to one phase of the game.  I think drop rates are fine but this thread has brought up the same old issues.  Active players and new subs.

Until elite (high EP players have a reason to use Beta full time, we will not retain long term players)  Fix Beta, let it be customized into a place worth fighting for and you will attract players and retain long term subs.

TL/DR
Beacons are a fun new toy, no more time on those please, focus on what is needed...Build Beta/new islands..."Build it and they will come..."

lol..

The point wasn't to compare AC to George, but to compare "insert player" to the random guy.

Its not so much that the Dev's can't and don't make mistakes, but the comparison of a guy that watches alot of movies that's going to tell a director what they did wrong. And sure, GL probably did have a lot of help when he was first starting out, but you can be damn sure it wasn't from some random dude off the street.

What I'm defending is the idea that the development team is working without a plan, simply because part of the MMO genere is about NOT sharing the plan with the players. And conversely, its the life's work of some players to 'skip to the end'.

Maybe the plan sucks and the game fails. Its not unheard of, that's why we make SUGGESTIONS about what may or may not fix it, because for the most part we are invested and want the game to succeed. To tie this back to the random dude, no player can or should know the entire plan for the game, so they can't possibly determine what features/mechanics will or won't 'save the game'.

And sort of back on topic, this means that they devs spend thier time doing what they can, when they can, to improve the game in the ways that they feel will be most beneficial in the short and long term.

Are they right? Only time can tell. Are they sticking too closely to "Nia is a harsh world" when players simply want to be heros? Perpetuum isn't a 'casual' game, you basically have to commit to hours online, as opposed to 'login' 'battle' 'win/lose' 'logoff' in 15 minutes.

I'm not necessarily even disagreeing with anyone personally on what will help, just that its unproductive to whip the devs for not implementing any one particular feature before another based on conjecture.

The ability to build a base/POS/Island is what I think will make this game, but I'm not aware of the technical and minute game mechanics that have to be addressed in order for it to be added to the game; Empire building FTW.

don't like T4+ idea, make the game wow-like, but well, at least it give high interest in those beacons, giving objectives to players is never a bad idea, but abusing of this kind of easy-made objective will make T9+ on wowpetuum.

btw never found any indus beacons, do they drop from artifact ?

I've a theory.

When developing at some point they may have said to themselves;

"This project still needs 12-18 months worth of development before its ready, but rather than wait this long to release it, we'll release it now but with very little market presence to deliberately keep player numbers low.   That way we have 12 months worth of feedback from a live environment"

So, their focus is not to develop with the purpose of trying to retain subscriptions because officially, the game isnt released yet and there is zero pressure on them to attract subscribers.

When we point out that they are failing and sub numbers are dropping, they dont care about that.  They are not interesting in developing features with the sole purpose of attracting or even retaining players.

Its like going to the bank and saying "Im going to open this business in 3 years"... but opening it 2 years early, you have the funds and no demands to perform and can do what you like.

In their eyes, they are not failing even if they only had one player, it doesn't matter.

I've many years of experience in business, and this is the only situation I can come up with that would explain their apparent total lack of interest in player numbers or subscribers.

At the moment, its just an experiment, a test server, a 'not-for-profit' project.