I never told you why Eve has me on the extendable leashes. They improved on the tutorials, even added voice communication to help further. The travel time can be very short, but it can also be very convenient. Autopilot while you quickly hit the can and grab a drink, pretty sweet to me. In a very short time, I had 1 mil. If I failed a mission and lost my ship, it was VERY easy to get the ship back and restocked with the mining and selling of ore. Not knocking the mining part of Perpetuum mind you, never did a lot of it.

A thought just came to mind, the big difference between Eve and Perpetuum is not just the ships and the mechs, but the "space" and the "landscape". You need to do more than just move forward, back, left, and right, be able to jump, shoot the ground, manipulate more of the environment. Shoot rockets at a mountain side to create a landslide to slow down or cripple another mech chasing you or something. That seems like a lot, but hell, that would be friggin sweet and a major attraction to players outside and inside the game. Just two more cents.

Deo

Oh yeah. It helps to read the devblogs too, lot of interesting tidbits in there. And it's light reading material.

I think 1 of the big things that needs a Major Improvement, and re-construction, is the Learning curve. A more indepth training excercise which help New Members understand how things work. Having a game with such complexity for your average Gamer, who only knows how to press a button to swing a sword in a game, is not going to stick around once trying Perp. We live in a time where most MMORPG's involve cartoon characters and Cookies.

Although most of us here are against Simplicity in Games (I prefer the Complicated Aspect), but to grow the community we need to make it so the New Members understand it enough to stay more then their Trial Period.

I first came across Perp a year ago. On an Average of my Online time, there was about 30 - 40 people in General Chat (Weekend). A Year later on my return, there is 60 (Weekend). Currently there is 36 on a weekday for the same time. In a year that isnt really much Growth. I don't expect Miracles to happen over night, and understand that over time Perpetuum can grow to be a pretty decent, and active game. I just think simpler steps need to be re-worked to attract and keep a New crowd.

From what I understand (Not really being a Member to Perp for long [3 days being back] they have added a "Null-Sec" to try and help boost up the Gameplay, but once again, if we aren't attracting New Members to the Game to WANT to stay and understand, then I really don't see the point in bringing Shiny things in for the handfull of people who currently enjoy playing. I for one, would love to have more people around to have fun with, then a few extra Islands that you'd be lucky to see someone at.

Funny that you mention this, because I have similar difficulaties with Perpetuum. Having played EvE for over two years, I'm used to steep learning curves

But even so, Perpetuum manages to be even less intuitive sometimes. In really boneheaded ways. Two things that really irritated me in the one day I'm playing now, just as examples:

1) Mining. Before you can start that miner module, you have to lock the tile with the ore, AND you have to go through the landmark info from the menu. That can be done waay easier, here is how I would design it:

• -Select the tile with a single click. 
  -Start mining module. At this point, the miner will give you an error message if the tile does not have the right mineral for the miner or is out of range. Otherwise,  minig starts.

2) Collection missions with "get this part from point B". Nowhere does the mission description say that you have to interact with the inconspicious little white icon nearby. That almost made me crazy until I finally got the idea . Better:
Make the little "crate" at the collection point itself interactable.

But aside from those little usability problems, Perpetuum is a lot like "EvE on the ground". At this point, I consider it possible that I might stay around after the trial period. 

Thanks for the hint .

Still, I think locking for terrain could be dropped competely. It's not like terrain will fight back and needs to be balanced for combat. For combat, I'll withhold judgment until I know the game a bit better .

I'm going to start by saying i have never played EVE so i will just write my Perpetuum experience so far.

Saw this game on STEAM and thought i will give it a try. Watched the video clip and it looked interesting. Downloaded the game, liked the cool music = got me hooked. On charactor creation the PvP and harvesting was stuck in my head, so not knowing how this game works I whent for combat / harvesting I think.

In game I started the totorial and got so far, then I got bored of all the reading (not my favorit thing in the world due to having Dyslexia) and somehow chose a normal assignment where I got lost frankly. So whent back to the totorial and found myself stuck on the miner mission (the one that is defended by 3 mechs which kick your rear end) and basicly got so frustrated that I quit and even deleted the game.

A little later on I couldn't help but think about the game as it was still calling me back... somehow amongst the frustration the game had that challenge factor I have been looking for (most games whether singleplayer or MMOs these days are dead boring and have no atmosphere or challenge). Anyway I got my brother into the game (were both of older age by the way - not young) where he worked out how to do the miner mission much to my frustration plus we had help from two others who were there having the same hasstle. Would just like to say the mining totorials are not good in my view as they didn't really explain how things work, and that miner mission is an hard learning curve for someone thats new to this game. Anyway, once past that mission I started to get a feel for the game and how it works and then I started to enjoy and relax.

So I'm past the totorial and doing normal assignments which seem to be - go here and kill X amount / recover item rince and repeat / travel back and forward or harvest and go and make a cup of tea while waiting. So at the moment i'm loosing hope or any perpose as to why I should stay in the game, maybe its me I'm not sure. I will try and explain, I'm stuck in the thought of which way am I going in the game - whats my role ? - is it combat leading to PvP or is it harvesting ? or is it both?, can I do both with the mech I have and its chosen choices? because my start up choises when creating my charactor was combat/science/combat industrial - forgive me if i have those a little wrong but thats my understanding of it so far - but my choises seem to go againts what the game is teaching me. I think i'm more combat which I work for ICS DFD but i'm also doing some assignments for DFI but if i'm looking at this correctly I will be splitting up my EPs beetween the two and that seems bad as I will suffer - I think - its a complicated game and i'm lost to be honest.

I'm not really a pvper but it could be fun here. Harvesting I have always done in other games but it seems very complicated in this one but..well.. if you can't tell by now i'm lost as to which way I should be going. I haven't gone for all the starting combat chioses neither all the harvesting so I'm torn with my combat harvester - does this make any sense? or is it just me.

Last thoughts, its been a hard learning curve so far (mainly due to games these days being - well, I'll keep those thoughts to myself as not to cause any arguments) but this game does remind me of games of old and how hard they were back then but we managed.  Sorry for the long post but hopefully it may help the right peeps to understand a new persons experience so far.

@Nibbles

My advice is to join a corp. I am aware it is ironic that a year+ old player like me gives that advice and I am still in the starter corp. However, that is mainly due to my RL constraints due to which I tend to disappear for a couple of weeks every month or so.

Alternatively set yourself a goal - mine is at the moment the biggest grind in Perp - kernel research.

about the corps:
the starter corp is just the NPC corp you start out with - it is chosen at character creation and designates your starting isle (TM=New Virg, ASI=Daoden, ICS=Attalica). Atm even if you leave it and become a freelancer it won't change anything for you. (*atm because I hope for at least a slight change here in future)
a player-corp has beside the teamwork here other advantages like corpstorages (if you have more than one agent/account) for faster "muling". I mentionend this one because many players ask for better ways of item transfer than using market or fieldcontainer. Have also seen some players open their own corp because of this reason.

about PvP: Beside the irregular tournaments, its the same as in every online game, if you have some friends / have good communication skills, PvP will never be a problem even if you are not in a corp and only have one agent...

about beginner choice at agent creation: it just doesnt matter what you did choose - you need just a few days of EP to completely change your way. Also if you found out that the path you tried is wrong, you are able to downgrade extensions lower than 6 (until your first 30 days of the account are over) and put the points somewhere else (starting extensions are fix).
After 3 weeks ingame are over you will surely know better which path to take and can concentrate on that; specializing on one profession proves to be most effective, but some things can be combined too (like laser and EM - both are turrets so there are some shared extensions <- missile launchers are not turrets).