Topic: Small and simple suggestions.
First and foremost I would like to congratulate the devs for the awesome job with assignments. It's my personal belief that this should be the turning point in perp's future and my suggestions are merely based on a continuation of this feature.
1) Apply Alpha 2 and Beta 1 + 2 assignments. Beef up rewards for beta so players have an incentive to go there. Also keep on revamping highways and teleport network.
2) Introduce some form of player housing. Most modern games are building on that foundation and luckily you have gamma bases, turrets, etc where you can take assets etc. You can have few pre-made spots on Alpha where players can build their 'mini station' - more spots on beta and a lot more spots on gamma. Make it appealing to have your own little station, maybe you can manufacture with better ratios or your base gives you some mined minerals daily. Each account would be limited to 1 base and a lot of bases together would form a small 'village'. Archeage did something similar but they failed at the limit of 1 per account and a lot of hackers etc. Just imagine a small guild having their homebase in alpha and working together, then they expand and could move to beta and eventually they become a superpower and they settle on gamma. Everytime they need to deconstruct their previous base. Every new player should be abe to settle down his mini base from the get go.
Some advantages of bases could be:
1 spark house teleport (players should be only allowed a death clone and no sparks)
Ability to 'hire' syndicate in your home station and request missions directly
Better station facility ratios
Adjacent friendly relation agents would give a benefit aura
You can upgrade your home station to increase benefits
You can install a 'RADAR' on the roof and it alerts of inc ppl (just like proximity probes work)
On betas and on gammas you can surround your 'village' with a wall.
On betas and gammas you can have your own little plant farm at the back!
Some mechanics of bases could be:
Cost nic and tokens to build and maintain (the more upgrades the more maintenance)
Fully destructibe anywhere and lootable. You need to defend it (or bring friends) to keep it.
First attack would be put into reinforce and second successful you destroy and loot it. (like POS)
To build on Blue beta (for ex.) islands you need friendly relations with ICS or they tax you more tokens for upkeep.
The larger (and more full of fluff) your base is, the more upkeep so wealthy players would be happy to wave their big epeen while new players are happy with some land they 'own'. [bases could be made upgradeable vertically for space reasons]
3) Introduce npcs in betas and gammas that are worthed to farm. Currently almost no one farms npc's in betas and in gammas because there is no incentive to do so. The convoy npc's are somewhat the high-end group pve mode?? but most just avoid them as you need a very good group to do them, while observers are the insta-zap mode npc and are very very hard to do solo. In eve they introduced Burner missions aimed at solo players and we could have solo observers roaming and at multiple mech sizes, not just the larger ones (light and assault observers roam alpha 1 and 2 respectively and are orange). Also devs could introduce officer npc's which are very rare and fat loot pinatas found only in betas.
4) Daily login bonus (login each day and get 10% more ep or something)
5) Pink robots for cash (do I need to say more?)
6) Maybe lessen a bit the time needed to farm a fitted mech for pvp.
7) Add a little faction bonus to robots and please do not forget about green bots.
8) Unlimited trial with agents restricted to Alpha 1 islands and no ep accumulation after 14 days until they buy the game to remove restrictions.
9) Please keep in mind that in every game, the bulk will be carebears and the few will be pvpers, (and most pvpers will have carebears accounts as well) so a lot of focus on carebear progression [like missions] is very important to keep everyone happy.
10) Propose a 1 year plan and try to stick to it. People need to look forward to something.
I think the above should not take too much dev time compared to the ROI in the game as most of the mechanics already exists in game.
Just my 2cents because like a lot of people arguing on this forums, (even the most flaming topics), we do care