rickx
I'm currently enjoying playing after I found the game by happenstance, a banner somewhere, and after a couple of days, I finally decided to gather my thoughts and provide them as possibly useful feedback. My view of the game/mechanics might be flawed/biased due to limited time spent and/or untested mechanics on my part, so take everything I say in good faith and with a grain of salt.
As a new player, I spent my time mostly mining in low-threat sectors and performing delivery/mining tasks; I managed to gain about 80k satoshi and buy a couple of blueprints. The biggest limiting factor in my experience has certainly been the reactor recharge time, which after hours spent waiting feels just so damn slow. The obvious choice was then to upgrade the reactor to make travel times/mining more efficient, but a direct upgrade to an Extreme Reactor costs about 350k satoshi. It's kinda mind-boggling that the same reactor as the one in my starting ship costs over 100k. The painstaking slow recharge rate and the sheer distance from the successive upgrade could be big limiting factors in player retention so here's a suggestion:
-Provide a mid-tier reactor between the basic and extreme, and "Advanced Reactor" costing between 20-50k satoshi and providing let's say 100 energy regeneration.
-If as devs, you are worried about players leaving the early game too quickly, lower the energy generation of the "Basic Reactor-N" to 60/70.
In this way, new players will have a tangible goal in sight and the energy upgrade will make the whole experience less frustrating, especially considering the gap between basic-extreme and extreme-nuclear in both energy generation and costs. Players could also be driven toward such a goal by a small sentence added at the end of the tutorial, somewhat like "Good job pilot, you now know the basics. You might want to upgrade your ship reactor soon, you'll need the extra energy generation if you want to earn more satoshi"
Having said that, while on my quest to figure out what to do next and improve my ship/earnings, I tentatively invested my satoshi in blueprints. Yet it was really hard to decide on which blueprint I should have invested my hard-earned money in, even more as I couldn't know if I had the right resources. Players need a way to know beforehand which resources are used in each blueprint, save wasting a lot of money/time on something useless which might cause even more frustration/quitting the game. If there is already a way to know such a thing, I honestly did not see it.
I also found it extremely hard to contact other players, the 5-6 I added to my contact list since I saw them moving around and mining never replied in the global chat nor with direct messages. The chat system, especially the private chat might need some sort of notification or flag to make it more noticeable.
To end this post, I have to report a flaw with the jump system: while jumping between orange systems (the ones with hostile NPCs), if the NPCs were close to the gate I often experienced getting attacked BEFORE the jump animation was completed. This is probably just a bug, but it needs to be sorted; if it can help I'm using Firefox, dunno if it could be the cause behind this. Hopefully, this post will be useful even in a small way, If I ended up misinterpreting something don't hesitate from correcting my statements, I'll be more than happy to learn something new in exchange.
