OH NO PERPE IS DYING!

When i came back i first posted on the forum in the corporation section to get myself updated on who were still around etc. I also entertained some offers to join corps and tried to make good relations with everyone i talked to and eventually decided on joining with the guy/corp who explained a set of mind and style of play that sounded exactly like what i wanted to have.

And a few days into the game again i have had a blast the entire time. Yes,watching miners mine is a blast because we keep it fun on TS and sometimes i gotta mute that *** to catch my breath lol.

Also ICS-Alpha is no longer the center of the market universe. On alpha if you want a market its on "Tellesis" thats where you will find stuff. But join a corp my friend, and you will find everything except maybe good NPC spawns im still having trouble finding a good nice fat yellow one as a green bot (that is in a place i would like to go).

I would agree, that a slight increase in number of npc spawns would be nice. For comparison it was too much on alpha before, I would like to see the number it was on "old" Novastrov - there was a few types of spawn, but not as cluttered and overfilled like alpha was.

Here's a couple hints for you:

Sadly, market has been recently reset due to new patch, which partially explain the emptyness, and the rare people still alive seems to enjoy running around to buy couple of overpriced modules. We'll need some change on this, I proposed a couple in the balancing section.

New Island, it's a lot more clear now despite that you theoretically have to run more. I say theoretically, because now teleport beacons are only 50k and 2U. Grab a few and you will reach your destination in no time.

Robot prices just went up with the last patch due to some rebalancing of material. In theory, modules prices should drop to compensate.

Now the game is GPU-heavy instead of CPU-heavy. And view distance has been increase. Reduce view distance, and your notebook should be able to survive the ordeal.

This is certainly still an issue for new and returning players. Long term players have created a sort of biosphere of playability, but I can see where it would be really difficult, especially for returning players, to acclimate into the lower pop activities.

We ALL want more peeps though! There's rumors of plans, promoting, and various other things to that should cause massed of bodies to randomly appear in game. Soon (tm) would be nice

Well i played more than 1 hour. But 1 hour was enough to realize that the very same facts that drove me away in the first place are still present. That's not quite accurate - actually it's a bit worse. I'm the typical single account user and running around solo half the time. That doesn't mean that i'm not interacting with other players (you have to if playing with 1 account). But the game favors heavily the "multiple accounts at the same place at the same time" playstyle.
Furthermore even the grind to achieve something ingame has increased ... making research and acquisition of ressources more time consuming. Alpha islands got nerfed quite a bit. Seemingly the Devs are trying to force players to Beta and Gamma islands.
Nothing wrong with that, except that it doesn't work. EVE has shown veeeerrrrry clear that 80-90% of player population prefer the carebear playstyle for what ever reasons (not enough time, avoiding pvp, more afk than actively playing, too old to react fast enough in pvp, too drunk to be useful in pvp ...).
All these game mechanics and circumstances increase the gap between newer players and old/established veterans.
They (Noobs) have to compete with filthy rich, very experienced and extremely advanced (EP-wise) characters using the shiniest stuff available on mostly multiple accounts.
Good for vets - not for new players. The situation was already really bad at the time of EVE refugees (i was one of them). NEX had very large numbers, motivated players, a little bit support (bots, modules), a bit of experience for this kind of game and a decent attitude "We've come here to chew bubble gum and kick *** ... and we're all out of gum." -  and they didn't make it. Those old vets have now even more EPs, wealth and with CIR returning: the same politics .
Granted, the market will recover IF a new chunk of players arrive ( a few hundreds minimum at the same time). The arrival of EVE refugees has shown it. But a new dude here and there won't affect the market in a positive way - but the non existent market will affect him ...
I mean the forum counts over 25k registered user (=accounts created??). Now look how many players actually play the game (really playing not just paying the account.
I'm not angry or raging about the game or the Devs. I'm simply dissapointed and even a bit sad. I really like most of the ingame music, the style of the landscape, the new plants, robots and Nian architecture.

On a side note: the mud fight between CIR and M2S was already annoying a 3/4 year ago. And now it starts all over again ... including posts here on the forum that are annoying as hell as well as tedious.

Thanks for this info. Now i know why i'm running around with 10 fps although my CPU usage is only at 10%.
Does Perp require now more RAM? It's constantly over 1 GB and i just have 2 GB . Memory usage all the time above 83%.
This change is a bit unfortunate since almost all computers have a decent CPU built in but only dedicated gaming PCs and very expensive notebooks can shine with a good GPU.
Btw i'm already "playing" with lowest possible settings ... and it's ugly as hell.

Would be great of course ... but i doubt that Perp can hold these new players for more than 3-4 months. We already had this situation (and that was like a fat win in lottery for the Devs) and the things that led to the decline of player population are still there.
Hopefully my thoughts will prove wrong.

@ Rex
On a larger scale it's quite counterproductive to keep your accounts subscribed. Of course you want to be ready (EPs) for the time you will play again actively. Although i wish the Devs a decent earning from their product ... gaining money from customers that don't use their product anymore (subscribed but not playing) isn't healthy for the game and its development. It doesn't put enough pressure on the Devs aiming for a healthier player population. They DO work for their money and the game IS developing ... just not in the direction required for more/new players.

Sorry for bad grammar and wall of text.

You're just saying, that a communist corp (like your own) should be the only possible way to play the game. Where i say it's only 1 option out of many (at least it should be).
I'd like to differentiate between running around solo and running around without interaction with other players. Thanks to some advanced and independent industrialists as well as some industrialists from major beta corps i do have the equipment a bloody noob can dream of (ok no T4+ stuff since it was impelemented while i was elsewhere).
Andyouknowwhat ? I could obtain the stuff by working with them together. It's called economic/market activity. They take my kernels or NIC and i'll get their shiny stuff.
I'm more complaining about the "multiple accounts at the same place at the same time" concept. There are very few activities ingame that can be done with only 1 account. In fact a lot of activities need 2 or more accounts - not 2 or more players. Mining with one bot needs an extra hauler (thanks to 15 minutes lifetime for containers) but it's not worth for 2 players (1 account each). Same goes for all those small static spawns.

Yes drama makes a game interesting. Just not "your" kind of drama. Since the first time i ever heard of Perp it's always about M2S vs CIR. And in such a manner that it's only tedious. Like 2 small children quarreling with each other and forgetting their surrounding. Well ok ... there is no surrounding anymore
Look at all the recent forum posts. In every single thread - no matter which topic - you can find at least one annoying post ranting against M2S/CIR (CIR being the more active brat atm).
If you wanna have some interesting drama, add some spy activity, reveal shocking secrets, play the puppet master, make great political gestures, scam the hell out of your opponents spiced up with a bit of backstabbing. Then I'll applaud the scene crying "hurrah!!" .

Trust me error, the game is 10x better when M2S and CIR are at war at least from a PvP standpoint.

Its boring as hell when no one is fighting and there is no active PvP in entire timezones...

I didn't say that at all.  I said that the game strongly favors and was designed around big organized groups of players working towards a common goal.  This is not my design it's ACs.  They have been unequivocal with every patch that the direction they are moving in is towards big corps with hundreds or thousands of players which don't yet exist.  I think that's a big BIG mistake but that doesn't mean communism is the only system (it's just the best one).

I don't see any reason to separate them.  Really soloists, small groups, and small corps are all in the same boat of being locked out of most of the game.

So you're saying you're a well disguised Blackomen-anti-multiple-accounts-per-player troll.

There have been far more corps and alliances than currently exist which equal or greater animosity.  I'll invite you to go back a year and read the old forum corporate dialogue posts to get a clearer picture.

There is all kinds of metagaming, which is what you're referring to.  You have no idea what goes on behind the scenes because you're by yourself on alpha.  People do not want to tip their hand to their enemies, so often you won't hear about it on the forums unless there is some kind of advantage to be gained by doing so.  Even now, though, there is plenty of what you describe on the forums as well if you can read between the lines and/or are privy to certain information.

You should pay more attention to M2S, because it is exactly what they do and are doing with the corps they have designed as meatshields... err... allies. But since you are in alpha you don't get to witness it.

It was sort of an accident, or cosmic inevitability(?), that the biggest forum warriors ended up in the same corp. The CIR tag is seen alot, simply because we have a large number of active players - both in game and on the forums.

@NeX - I've alwasy believed that if the bitter vets had come in and got distributed among the already active corps in the game, this would have turned out very differently. Having 700 new players all in one corp didn't make them immeditaly competitive, but it did make them competition. As STC has shown, it takes about 90-120 days to make pilots that can compete, EP wise, with even 700k accounts, as long as they have slightly more numbers. If NeX had continued for another month or so at the same size, they would have completely ruled the game.  The potential dominance wasn't any shock or surprise to the existing power blocks of the time, so there really wasn't any choice but to destabilize that corp.

But, if those 700 players had divided up naturally to existing corps, there wouldn't have been any single 'major' target to go after, and with a mixture of high and low EP accounts, there would have been a 3 faction balance on the server.