I'm aware that it's not the only reason, but the people who have it for free don't play because the other people who have it for free don't play That's basically the most frustrating thing for us devs. (I'm not here to lament, just putting in my 2c.)

New players don't care about the game foundations (although important), they care about a good gaming experience which none of these patches addresses. The game is nearly empty and as Jita just said, the single player experience is vastly more important when the game world is virtually empty.

The missions have improved but still too short and repetitive and extremely boring, to pile on this 'foundation project'
old beacons removed and static spawn removal give new players less options other than missions.

Where has the game improved on the perspective on new players?

When perpetuum dies that will be seen as the point it became untenable. They could have done so much and it was just so terrible. Worse was the fact that not a single part of that travesty of a patch has been changed. Terrible.

As you observe, an MMO lives on a critical mass of players to populate the Massiveness of the Multiplayer in order to attract and keep more people around and for longer, an unfortunate catch-22.
Silicon Valley people call this 'stickiness'.  A metric to understand how long a player sticks around: lifespan, maybe.
If this is too short, then you have to find a way to bolster the single-player experience to increase the lifespan of the casual player, and then create a spark of attention/attraction with something new and exciting that would draw old and new players alike back into the game, or purchasing the game for the first time. 

The assignments update is great, and you are following through on Beta increasing incentives for Beta activity; which is great.
But fresh, new content seems to be the only big attraction for most players that leave the game, or are on the fence about buying.

The talk about the balance patch is relevant too.  Not because if its reverted vets will magically come back because they left as a protest? (is this true? need citation).  But because new players that do show up hear from the remaining vets that if they picked green, they chose wrong and this negatively affects their outlook on the game as they feel like they start at a disadvantage. 

The sad truth is it doesn't matter what is True for the player, only how they feel and what is 'truthy' for them.

This same negative feeling comes from how dumb new players feel when they cant find the artifact in the tutorial.  You guys are addressing this, and I think it might be the right way to look at things now.  I admit, I was against the artifact scanning change because the rigor it required made it appropriately difficult.  But the negative effects of rage-quitting tutorial-level players can't be ignored.

I guess the question is, what other topics in game, or not yet in-game, could address this player experience in other areas?

Anyway keep up the good work, and feel free to ignore all of this because I'm dumb and don't know what I am talking about.

yeah, its a constant foundation for a dead game, especially mmo's.

that kind of progression is a guarantee for new player facing emptiness from the very beginning, since the location they start has content for 2-3 days, then they already have to move on.
Given we have 3 starter islands, and about 10 new player per day, the average number of player in sight of each other is... zero.

that alone would be not much of an issue, since mmo's these days are populated by single player that feel forced to play online - if there would be enough NPCs to fill in for the missing player, on BOTH sides (hostile and allied)

The only answers i've seen so far make the game more hardcore not less. This game is so niche its not worth playing. Everything other indy games have done to get success they turn their nose up at and because of that it should have died a year ago.

Can most people agree PVE keeps newbies around.. PVP keeps vets around?  Hey Zoom what did you think of my NPC Siege island that was "Instance" Based?  http://forums.perpetuum-online.com/topi … ge-island/  And what did the player base think?  It was mostly hi-jacked by people asking for T5 stuff

Most of us can agree that PVE keeps the 'masses' around and busy (whether waiting for PVP, waiting on EP, waiting on friends or just to get a few casual minutes on-line).  Hopefully we can all agree that new content is needed to keep this game living (and not just massaging the same old content we have).

Your idea is one of a dozen ideas that we can recommend, but the DEVs need to decide which one they can tackle. Other ideas may be just as entertaining, but maybe harder or easier to implement. 80% of their time should be devoted to NEW content. Ex.

- PVE Siege instances (sounds like a raid dungeon to me)
- Intrusions/Rifts that randomly occur
- More bots/modules.
- How about Gamma 1.0 terraforming islands with no PVP (isn't that similar to what all the minecraft kids do).
- New GUI - in and of itself wont help, it would be a prettier game that was still boring
- A PVP tournament island
- Siege equipment (artillery)
- remember the pink colored bots and mustaches for my gropho

The remaining 20% of the DEVs time should be focused on QoL, balancing, end game content (pretty much most of the DEV poll that was put out a few months ago).

TBH: Devs should finish Beta 1 revamp and missions, then do a quick tp/highway revamp of beta 2s and skip the beta 2 missions (cause its gonna take ANOTHER 2 months to finish) to start some NEW content.

I think the tier 5 will miss that mark cause it will just make T1-4 obsolete (like T1-3 currently is 95% of the time).
I think the premade syndicate bots will miss the mark because (again), its just another form of rehashing the same things we have.

Giant PvE dungeon...  You're talking about a Raid. I don't think anyone's ever tried that in a full loot open PvP game before.

Even if it didn't work, it'd be unique enough that I'd come back to try it out.

A lot of suggestions while good, can't function correctly without the foundation in place.

The mission rework coupled with the static NPC removal solves the game's biggest problems - vets botting 4star spawns on Alpha in perfect safety for maximum NIC income in the game. Conveniently, it also moves the game away from static grinding to more involved gameplay.

Field terminal taxation, facility point rebalance, and spark removal; they all incentivize larger corps to own an outpost and cultivate their territory instead of sitting on Alpha or owning islands they never use, while providing opportunity for lesser corps to make the effort and capture their own outpost. Further, if taxation is tied in to stability of the outpost, it will further discourage owning more then you can effectively control and cultivate.

The beacon rework opens the doors to wormholes/instances/whatever down the road.

I partially agree with Altera - NEW content needs to be the focus in the future, after Beta 1 and 2 are seeded with field terminals and mechanics are implemented for taxation and optionally reward differences between them.

I even offered to terraform new islands..