Don't know if someone already suggested this, but here's my take on the matter:

1. ICE - no problem there. New players in dire need of NIC and without the support of a corp can just straight-up buy ICE units for the older vets to consume.

2. EP-catch up game - imho, i think it would be better if new accounts get a gradual EP modifier that lasts until a certain point. Maybe a 3x EP modifier (18 EP per minute) up to 50k EP, 2.5x mod (15 EP/min) from 50,001 EP up to 100k EP, 2x (12/min) mod from 100,001 EP to 150k EP and 1.5x mod (9/min) from 150,001 EP to 200k EP.

This lets new players develop their core EP skills within about 2-3 months instead of 5 months and - more importantly - leads them to believe they can catch up to to the vets.

when you want to improve the new player experience -

then tell me why "small firearms" are a dead-end decision to level them higher then for unlocking medium ones, but got extension complexity [2].

Their range, their ammo consumption and mass is horrible.
100 Briochit and 100 Hydrobenol for T4 small autocannons - > are you serious?
looking at the list of DIFFERENT ores just to build a single stack small bullets makes me cry.

the disperson makes you even miss assault bots...
and an arkhe runs out of CPU when trying to fit T4's ...

It's obviously too late by now anyway, but at least I'll be able to say 'I told you so' before ragequitting .

1) ICE

According to the op the main reason for adding ICE is to give new players an option to get some NIC without 'making this option mandatory' and 'making the game pay to win', but that's exactly what you'll achieve:
Of course it's hard to tell at which price ICEs will settle, but because of the money older players have access to and the amounts they're able to farm I think it's a very conservative estimate to say they will settle around 50m - 100m NIC.
Considering the amounts of NIC new players can get, instead of attracting them,  a good percentage of new players might rather be pissed, because they will feel to be forced to pay additional money to compete with other people; especially new players will have absolutely no chance to keep up with others who sell ICE. And at least for new players this will in fact be some sort of 'pay2win'.

Other negative aspects of ICE are:

- It's an open invitation to use bots and/or exploits.

- The possibility for people to get hundrets of millions of NIC that easily (provided that their real life wallet allows it) might have a very negative impact on the already pretty fragile ingame economy.

While it's clear that it would be very convenient especially to vets to trade some of their NIC for game time, this doesn't really make up for further lowering the rate of trial players who subscribe, hurting the ingame economy and adding an 'indirect item shop'.

I have great respect for you guys that you admit mistakes publicly and try to fix them once you realize it, but it won't be that easy to undo ICE in a future patch if things don't work out as expected again. So it might be worth considering to take a few steps back and think about possible problems before making a permanent change that has a great potential to *** things up.

2) additional EP

I'm glad it's 'just' 20k and not some percentage of the maximum EP or something like that.
Here's the 'but':

Everytime you make contents accessible earlier in the game it will have two downsides:

1. The meaning of existing 'early game content' will be reduced.
2. Possible progress will be reduced.

For example people will be able to use Rivelers at the end of the trial period with those additional 20k.

- This will reduce the usefulness of Termises.

- Once a miner is sitting in a Riveler there's not much to upgrade regarding bots; maybe a mk2 at some time, but that's it.

Listen.  Anything that will make the market more fluid will help this game.  Being able to  buy IcE then sell it in order to  go out and pvp  will only help.... Everyone.  Demand for materials increases, production speeds up to meet demand more people farming, more accounts active, Devs making more money which means more content or a peaceful island retreat vacation.

This is ICE negative aspects what I also dont like, but worked in other game so we hope will work here,

the DEVs did something because the time was close to ...

I think what Inda means is that there is a free to play aspect of the game that will bring in a lot of the potential steam community!  I for one like it and think it is a great idea and I hope the Devs can atleast buy a new toaster with the money from the initial ICE purchases.

Anni why should you be able to fit t4 anything on an Arhke? Who cares if it has fitting problems and other nerfs, it's the goddamn free starting robot ...

And now for hopefully something productive and related to the topic.

Since the Greenlight exposure the game has had a decent influx of new players. I have found myself on several occasions convo-ing a new player who was a bit lost ... And explaining how things work, even coming to help him with some missions for hours on end to push them in the right direction and accelerate their learning curve so hopefully they stick. I should also add I haven't given any of these players a recruitment pitch, I'm just volunteering my time and nic to simply help noobs and hopefully strengthen the health of the game in the long run. I am by no means the only "regular" to do this; I'm well aware of most vets, friends or foes, that do this also.

But, perhaps a better tutorial, maybe an easier interface with better information and easier to search, is required for the newbs. Some don't understand the basic game concepts, basic fitting  requirements, etc. Assignments in particular seem to be lacking enough info, even for a vet familiar with in game terminology. Case in point are the missions that allow them to be completed on the area of the island ... There are no map indicators that the entire island is in play, only the wording of the mission, which isn't actually clear. Second example is I helped someone attempt to complete a daily mission kill quota ... There was no indication that the player was searching for a dynamic spawn, or any idea that there are several types of npc spawns in game ... I spent hours with this player attempting to find him the correct spawns on alpha 1 ... This was a level 1 mission, in contrast I can run level 6 missions much much faster.

Even myself with knowledge of roaming, dynamic, static, and mission spawns have a hard time recognizing instantly which ones I need to work on .... I have a hard time remembering what it was like in the beginning with no experience to draw upon.

So there's a suggestion in here somewhere. Revamp the tutorials and the information available to the new player, so it gives him a better sense of the nuances of the game.

Thanks, Cass

Lets just give everyone max miner skills that will fix everything

thats the best thing i have heard in a while

oh i thought the irony was obvious

As someone who has come back from about two years ago, here's a couple suggestions. (Perhaps a bit Spaceshipy bias, as I started that game in 2004).

1) Allow new folks to build on the second stage islands in a limited capacity.  This doesn't mean make huge forts or what not, but allow them to at least TRY out that stage of the game.  Maybe make something simple such as a titan mine they can place (lasts for 24hrs), that mines the equal of two or three basic miners.  Make the mine disappear in 24 hours, so they have to get ore out or it is lost.    Perhaps give it a two or three tile "spread" that allows them to siphon from.   Again, just an example.

2) The missions need some work.  Right now it is the same old same old thing.  The tutorials really should be improved to make it a bit more... exciting.  Point and click and click and click.  Increase rewards so new players come out with three or four pieces of T1 stuff maybe even a light mech of their choosing.  Maybe even some teamwork based ones (You've got an hour to kill x amount of drones - better find some friends to help you).  Almost like a public quest/mission type thing. 

2a) Missions can be more dynamic.  Perhaps the player is teleported to an area where they can do their thing, rather than driving for 5+ minutes to get there (And assuming the bots are there for them to kill).

2b) A bit more randomness in bots wouldn't hurt either.

3) Make the easy things easier.  There is a very steep learning curve.  Again with a reference to the spaceship game, when I started that 8 years ago, there was no learning curve, it was a cliff.  Once the easy things started to get easier, the population of that game improved dramatically.  Just saying.

4) Keep the hard stuff hard.  Make it worthwhile to get that mech/gear/whatever.  Give players something to look forward to.

5) Allow solo players a chance to do some of the things corps can.  Again, NOT everything, but nothing kills off potential players more than "You have to join a corp to do X".  These folks don't care about the "metagame" and who owns what. They want to do there own thing.  Allow them to at least try some of the "big boy things".  This would be easy enough to add in perhaps a handful of new islands where half is consensual pvp, the other half is full time pvp.   It lets them do pvp, and build stuff/produce stuff.   I had a station in low sec in the spaceship game that was just me - I mined/hauled/fought for it.  After standing up to some pirates they left me alone - I had "earned" enough respect for them to just ignore me (and they wanted what I sold too

I've got scads more, but I think this wall of text is enough for now.

Cheers

And kickstarter account purchased.

Cheers!