I do agree with gremrod I also have some ideas. (1) offer products that player may want wich also works as advertisement example stickers, poster, shirt, things that can be put on cars, possibly action figures, ect.
(2) make a purchasable disc with an eye catching cover it's works as a selling item at the same time as advertisement.
(3) have images on the website that player can pull and use.
(4) publicly call out other games an claim to be more attracting controversy creates attention.
(5) let us sell time codes in game for nic the thought of paying for your time with nic is exciting for involved players and the ability the pay a few extra bucks to get a boost for new player is good all the same time it brings more money to the game and helps stimulate the market.
(6) have a place for players to contact devs with plans to advertise in there locale areas.

I personally would buy stickers and put them on vending machine I own if there was the option.

I'm new and decided to stick it out after my free trial was up, but I can think of a few things that seemed kind of weird as I was starting out:

• I assume this is well-known already, but the broken mining tutorial mission (suggesting area charges instead of directional, and giving players the impression they are supposed to search at a specific spot when there may or may not actually be ore there) totally baffled me and in the past couple of weeks I've probably seen dozens of new players get caught up on it. Some of them go straight to /help and get sorted, other spend an hour scanning and getting angry before hitting the chat channels, some threaten to ragequit, and I assume there are more that just give up quietly. I know this probably seems like a super small thing when you're worried about corp wars and gamma expansion, but it really sucks to have one of the first things you do in-game be so blatantly broken. Not only because it's no fun, but because it makes the game look badly put together, etc. etc. etc.

• Along the same lines, missions could really use some cleaning up. I realize that a lot of pvp-oriented players either never did them or stopped early on, but they're going to be an obvious starting place for players coming from less sandbox-y games. And right off the bat, seeing daily missions with garbled placeholder titles really doesn't instill confidence in the game's pve potential.

• Mission-wise, there also seem to be serious issues with balancing - I've gotten ~250k for super a super easy L4, then ~180k for an L3 that takes 3-4 times as long, and was then offered ~220k for an L4 that was so much harder than either of the others that I had to drop it (ending in a beacon spawning 5 demobbing hero npcs in an area too small to kite them). I realize I'm spoiled by Eve (where you can look up each mission to figure out whether it's do-able with what you're flying), but at the very least there should be some indication of what general bot type each mission is balanced for, as well as rewards proportionate to its difficulty.

• While we're at it, the "you can only do any one mission 6 times out of 10" thing doesn't seem to be explained anywhere. I know it's not that complicated, but Perpetuum's mission system is even more oddball than Eve's so it wouldn't hurt to break it down in small words for new players or ones coming from other games.

• Same goes for the way squad missions "work." I'm putting that in quotes because they don't really seem to work, at least when I've tried them - the end result is that you might as well just both do the same mission separately side by side, except that when we did them as a squad we each got like 10% less than the half rewards we were expecting for reasons that were never clear. Again, this isn't a big thing but if you're trying to retain players coming from games where sharing quests is a common thing, it probably shouldn't be broken and/or confusing. It would also be great to reward players for working together instead of punishing them with lower rewards and non-credited kills.

Aside from all that, there are a couple of more general things that struck me as weird:

• NPCs' super-fast respawn rates. This initially confused the hell out of me (since I was mentally comparing it to every other game/MMO I'd played), and I'm still kind of stumped as to the design intention behind it. It seems like instead of making NPCs non-aggressive it would make more sense to just...make them stay dead a little longer after you kill them, so that people could temporarily clear areas where they wanted to mine, harvest, loot, do mission stuff, whatever? Not saying this is game-breaking in any way, but it definitely contributed to my initial sense of "wait, is this bugged? I guess not? WTF is up with this game?!" impression starting out.

• The market can definitely be weird sometimes, although maybe that's just how things have to be. For instance, it was kind of frustrating when I, as a budding young TM pilot, had to shlep 2 islands over to buy light shields even though they're ostensibly a common fitting for Green bots.

• Artifact hunting. Whenever it comes up in chat it seems like people are overwhelmingly using a third-party program that isn't supported and has all kinds of installation bugs. This seems like a pretty big red flag that the game interface could use some work. I found it especially frustrating because mining/scanning is relatively user-friendly (and has cool graphics), and then you get to artifacts and it feels like you're doing math homework on an old DOS machine.

Anyhow, TL;DR. Game is fun.

I agree and support all this.  I really agree with bleu.  I would shirts all day long.

One big concern for me is that the game world is very static. The best MMO experience Ive had are the interactive non stop battle in Tabula Rasa, something like that keeps players entertained for a long time.
Another thing I really would like to see is making the game world itself a bit more interactive, give players a reason to explore!! Right now the only reason to explore is to find NPC spawns...
The PVP, crafting and PBS are great, time to stop for a while with the making of end game content IMO, and focus on more casual content to attract and keep new players

To be fair, that's not describing Perpetuum (or rather, why you would want to be playing Perpetuum). I would say expectation management is barely the issue. OP and Ferox hit the mark here. There are some outstanding matters that need a good look.

I would always be careful with taking pages from CCP's book, but their new player experience is pretty good.

Replace 30 minutes with 1, 2, 3 hours and you have the same result. Only a small percentage of gamers can dedicate more then 3-4 hours to a game, and thats what we have left in Perpetuum.

PVE must be redesigned yes, but it should be redesigned so that fun stuff is accessible to new players too, not just the microscopic population of veterans with 3+ accounts.

Eh, more simply: missions don't make sense. There should be a distinction between "event" missions that you do infrequently (weekly, daily at most?) and that take longer, and offer higher risks+rewards, and "farmable" missions that you can do over and over (if mission farming is a Perp design goal). As it is, it doesn't make sense that the dailies (which you can only do once a day) are easier and simpler than the regular ones (that you do over and over). I know this is the worst way to make a point, but Perp "dailies" should be comparable to WoW "regular" missions (i.e. harder, more risk and reward), and Perp "regular" missions should be comparable to WoW "dailies" (i.e. easier, designed to be repeated and accessible to even super casual players).

hmm, two weeks are over, spark teleport and private transport assignments should be around the corner,

further PvE content changes havent been announced yet for the next two weeks.
At least if you don't consider copy-paste-different color robots and copy+paste modules with different stats as "PvE content".

At some time within the last 8 weeks i have read "random mission generator" from a DEV somewhere. As it hasn't been written into the blog or news (last "NEWS" are from almost 1 year ago *hint*) its unconfirmed CIR botang spy network information...

I think another big issue for new players is the complete lack of GM coverage, there is no customer support in-game anymore.

Gremrod: "So why isn't the population growing?"

Better PVE and more for casual players and If I right Perpetuum will be ok. After this population should be growing!

Now Perpetuum is for "hardcore" gamers which type of playstyle is rare. The players are 10-15 % hardcore, 85-90% casual, Perpetuum just use the first 10-15 % this is my theory of low population.