I'll start by saying that while the gamma patch is nothing short of pure awesome, it's clearly not the ultimate solution to Perpetuum's activity problem. Yes, perpetuum ahs an activity problem!

What gamma did accomplish : it added much needed sand to the sandbox and made the PvP aspect of the game even better. That's great, but I hope you devs realize it's like adding high quality furniture to a house with no roof. No worries though, that can be fixed. I'm writing this hoping it will be fixed as soon as possible, rather than the PvP content being overworked when it's not the bottleneck.

I think anyone who expects Perpetuum to succeed without a carebear population is at least somewhat delusional. I also think any reasonable person will agree that in its current state, Perpetuum doesn't encourage carebears to stick around.

I'll be making a lot of Eve Online references in this post so if you have no clue what Eve is, stop living under a rock.

Defining a carebear : The word carebear is being used in this post in reference to a player who is not only uninterested in PvP but most likely unwilling to face the risk of PvP. Looking at Eve, some important types of carebears are Empire (alpha) industrialists/miners and Empire PvE players/mission runners. Someone willing to spend the majority of his time mining, producing or NPC farming on a beta or gamma island is not, in my opinion, a carebear, as he is not avert to the risk of PvP.

Why carebears are good : Carebears bring many benefits even to a game that is meant primarily as a PvP sandbox. They bring revenue, they bring population, they bring market activity. They are easily pleased by grindy content. They give eachother all the interaction they need to stick around by banding together in carebear corps and working towards bigger carebear goals. They give the game visibility, they bring their carebear friends along. They all have a small percentage chance of being converted into a PvPer. They all have a small percentage chance of interacting with PvPers (beyond market interaction).

What carebears need : Long term goals, shiny expensive toys, grindy content. Perpetuum is very lacking in all of those. While PvPers strive for bloody fights, building a reputation and working towards their corporation's territorial success, carebears don't have those incentives. What keeps a carebear playing? For a mission runner, it's simply getting to the next step. The next step in PvE challenge (tougher missions) and probably even more important, the next shiny bot.

Perpetuum's shiny bots max out at heavies (or heavies mk2). This is a problem. Acquiring a heavy mech is not difficult or grindy enough to be a long term goal. If you think it is, then ask yourself is it ok if once someone acquires a heavy mech and uses it for a few weeks, they unsubscribe and quit? No it's not. That would mean carebears stick around a single month, two if we're lucky. Comparing to Eve, is it ok if a carebear quits once they have a Raven, then Navy Raven, then Golem, then a Rattlesnake or a Nightmare? Yes. Hopefully they stay, but if not they still played, contributed and payed for quite a while.

Is this problem hard to fix? No. It may sound like it, because you may think adding new bots affects the balance of PvP too much, and thus requires a lot of work and a lot of planning. The trick is cost-ineffective bots, cool bots, vanity bots, PvE specialized bots. Bots that are a slight boost in effectiveness for a carebear, for a slightly ridiculous cost. An example from Eve online : faction battleships. Are faction battleships in Eve a problem to balance for PvP? No, not really, because they're not cost effective and they're killed just as easily when primaried by a fleet. They are, however, extremely awesome for a carebear, and they are way more of a long term goal than Perpetuum's heavy or heavy Mk2. Perpetuum needs bigger bots. Cost ineffective bots. Expensive bot variants with a slightly different look and (possibly) a very small increase in combat power. A Raven in Eve only serves as a carebear's goal for a short while. After they get one, they don't quit, because they want that Navy Raven, that Golem or even a Rattlesnake.

Once that's done, all you need to do is give carebears something to shoot at with their shiny toys and they're hooked. Don't make it too complicated. Look at missions in Eve, they're initially a challenge, but they're not annoying to find or inconvenient to run repeatedly. You just hit accept mission and warp to it. The carebears do it, they feel powerful and awesome as their shiny pimped out ship destroys everything in sight and they stick around to do it some more. This shouldn't be too hard to add, perhaps you just need a few areas of land where you have NPCs using the new bigger bots that were added.

Voila! With a bit of advertising (or get your game on Steam already, ffs), you have a carebear population, along with all the benefits! Carebear mission runners and carebear industrialists need eachother and sustain eachother. They also both benefit the PvP population to some extent.

Another problem to tackle, alongside adding shiny toys for PvE players to drool over, is fixing the barrier of entry into industry. I'm reffering to kernels, but that's another story entirely and I'll leave that rant to someone with more industry experience.

Until then, there's very few people online, so more people get bored and stop logging in aswell. Off to play Eve, I need to grind towards a Bhaalgorn for my collection of relatively useless and terribly expensive but very cool looking pimp ships.