Good things
-quests - gives you something to do before ticks start and gets you lots of roids
-Paid accounts - much better way of doing it than previously - though i think the choice between asteroids or resources is a bit silly - one is clearly better than the other imo
-covert ops - just from looking at the page it looks much more interesting than previously
-interface has some slight improvements with the ability to hide aspects
Bad things
-takes too much effort to find out why I should bother upgrading
-default skin, and skins availble to free accounts are very poor
-user interface in general needs a major upgrade - there will be no point trying to get new players without a complete overhaul of the current user interface - too much information is displayed at one time, it takes too many clicks to get to information you need - finding out about features is too difficult - need things like mouse over help etc.
Now I admit that the impressions before tick start might not mean much - but if it wasn't for the fact that I activly wanted to investigate what the game is like now, I probabaly would have stopped logging in by now.
The game needs to look modern and sexy in order to keep players once they have signed up - it takes time for people to learn to play the game (quests will be a huge help) - so players need to be kept interested until they get adicted.
There will be no point in doing any marketing, face book integration etc. until the game interface is drastically improved - unfortunatly form my knowledge of the game design/code this may be far from an easy tasks without a complete recode (though I admit that my knowledge is somewhat outdated).
My advice to Pete would be to do some extensive research on user interfaces for web based games, but also on what websites for sci-fi based games do in terms of style. We need a functional design where information is easy to get to, but also a sleak and modern sci-fi style. I believe that he and Fubra have hugely underestimated the amount of work that will be requried to make real money out of Planetarion, but I am pleased that Pete has shown he is willing to make brave decisions. Lets hope the brave decisions continue, and that they are the right decisions for the long term future of the game.
Expect me to make another post in the future once I've played the game a bit and seen how it treats inactive players
