My first experience with Star Sonata was some what confusing at first.

How ever, the universe is well spanned and set set out. It does feel like you're in the depths of space.

But there are some major flaws that are holding this game back:

-Glitchy combat mechanics. When you fire and hit enemy on your screen, you miss. You basically have to resort to flying in a straight line and shooting backwards most of the time to get a hit.

-No reverse thrusters.

-Privative chat system.

-No buddy lists.

-Lack of PVP or player interaction. Levels seem to create a too huge of a gap that prevents any real interaction with other players. Plus all you usually see are bots and droids/drones. General chat is usually the only thing that hints there are other players in the galaxy.

-Subscription poorly set out. Once people stop paying on a 20+ character. They can never log in again until they do. This discourages players and decreases the population over it. If there was a free leveling system, but premium players were granted access to wider span of the universe and other special features. It would promote a community.

That's all I can think of for now. This is coming from one still searching for the prefect space ship MMO after the death of Cosmic Rift's Rogue Trader zone.

I just came back to this game after 2 1/2 years, and I have to say it's vastly improved. Especially the community.

I want to clear up a few misconceptions. Those "bots" you see aren't your typical MMOG bot; they're "slaves" which are a direct ingame feature. I don't want anyone thinking people use automated 3rd party bots or anything. You see so many of them because higher level players can control many at a time. They have names like "TS198Giggidy" and "CS987Goo"

Combat mechanics are fine. I don't have that "hit but miss" problem? You sure you're actually targeting what you're trying to hit? If you don't target it your shots will go straight through. That doesn't mean "aim at it".

No reverse thrusters bugged me too after Cosmic Rift, but I got used to it. Infantry's Fleet zone doesn't have reverse thrusters either if I remember correctly.

Lack of PvP is just because people aren't really doing it right now. Back when I played last time PvP was rampant, and you couldn't leave your slaves alone for a moment without some hotshot coming along killing them all. Oh, and f2p (free to play) players cannot PvP, or at least have a lot of restrictions.

As for subscriptions and players being discouraged, it's only the f2p players that get discouraged. This is a game where you can do a lot up to level 20, but you really have to pay to experience it all. No f2p player has the right to complain about not being able to play past level 20 :) If you want to play a free game that let's you "do it all" then Star Sonata isn't for you.

As a beta tester and former p2p, I can tell you this game has improved vastly. There's a steep learning curve (the basics are easy to learn though) but it's really quite a deep game.

Its a good game, I remember when Tobal was around, one man dominated most of that game, he was good.

Now its really resolving around Pantalones, wich is a huge team, and few people who try to oppose them. But its quite a good game and a good community.

Great game, just joined today, and I love it. There are only 2 problems I can see though:

1. The game seems to be having a hard time connecting to the server lately. IDK if it is because of the Universe Reset or something but it's annoying me.

2. One of these "Top players" Names all of his bots "Hairy sex guy" or something related and it is really annoying to constantly see these disgusting names.

Besides ONE PERSON being an idiot and minor connection problems int he last few hours, I give this game an 8.6 - would be more around 9.1 if the ships had reverse thrusters and better aiming, but still great.

 SS has been given a major makeover since like...1 year ago.

no reverse thrusters simulates flying an airplane.  you brake, you fall, crash and commit suicide all at once.

private chat is only: /w "Name with spaces or name without spaces" i made a message

buddy list is in, but one could use it to exploit the game by finding if your enemies are online or not.

lack of pvp is that if you kill someone, you gain aggro to all his defenses and thus, will be killed pretty easily by the near invinsible bases if soloed.

there is a "trade" chat, where you can only post buy x/sell x/pricecheck x

slaves, or what you guys cal bots, are actually automatic units that ferry stuff around between bases if a "trading slave" (TS###Nameofperson) or defend and fight along side of the "owner" in battle are "combat slaves" (CS###Nameofperson)

skills can be trained as long as youahve the skillpoints to do so, which means that you can access the whole universe, so a level cap must be implaced.

as for the "huge" team, voyagevsbor, teams have a max member cap of 150, so pantalones isnt the biggest team out there.  Death Mental, Zephyr, Traders, Aidelon, and Core are quite powerful.

this Hairy Sex beast guy's slaves, actually are named after him, so if he is named "swingarm", his slaves would be either CS# (swingarm) or TS# (swingarm).  this is short for CombatSlave# of swingarm and TradingSlave# of swingarm, which we know is far too big in size.

the aiming problem is fixed by using a weapon that has better tracking.  weapons are broken into different types of bullets.  they are laser, pulse or ball, slag or a cylinder that home in on ptarget til out of range of it hits, mag or a bullet or bullets that home in on target til out of range or it hits, torpedoes, which are deployed then it launches itself with sometracking at target, and thorax, which is deployed longer than torp but have more tracking.

ships hull classes are meant to be used by different classes.  Light Fighters by Recon Focus: Seer Class and Speed Demon Class.  Heavy Fighters by Combat Focus: Berserker Class and Sniper Class.  Freighters by Support Focus: Shield Monkey Class and Engineer Class.  Capital Ships by Fleet Focus: Fleet Commander Class and Gunner Class.

Well I do know that... and he is now banned for having an offensive name I believe. Besides, this post was made 7 months ago.

And 2 years later...

   
Spacebrakes which are nearly equivalent to reverse thrusters have been implemented, by holding the "S" key the player can slow down their ship to a rest.

Private chat, or a private message can be expanded upon using the squad system so you can talk to a group of your friends at once, you can do this by creating a squad and then using the command /squadinvite playername to invite that player into your squad, this also allows you to see what items they scoop.

The buddy list is still the same, but calling it exploitable is far-fetched as knowing the online status of your enemies poses very little benefit if you don't know their location, considering the size and scope of the playing field.

Bases are currently still unbalanced in player vs base fighting. However, base vs base mechanics have had a thorough work-over and is bound to see some action with a large war currently going on between approx. 120 players from 6 different teams.

Trade Chat has been given a 3 minute timer per message to prevent people from spamming and all chat channels now have rules listed upon first logging on to aid new players in their conduct.

Currently, teams still have a maximum member capacity of 150 players (including alternate characters - each player has 5 characters per account). The team line-up however has changed quite a bit and is nearly always changing.

Inappropriate names are against the rules now and can be reported so administrators may impose a forced name change on the player or ban them, typically a ban is handed out, but if they are a P2P character a name change is given.

Sniper, part of the combat focus skill branch is undergoing a revision right at this moment and current testing has proved promising, unbalanced classes are nearly a thing of the past, although Star Sonata is still heavily team-oriented rather than player-oriented and shows now signs of changing.

The server has also undergone major upgrades, lag is basically nonexistant and server crashes are very rare averaging one a month for at most a couple hours (arguably more than your typical game but you have to be a serious nitpicker to find it a problem). Instanced zones have also been implemented and a new tier of end-game content has been implemented to take advantage of this feature.

The AI and visibility code has been given upgrades as well, boss fights are much more entertaining than simple point-and-shoot fights, however mob fights are still rather bland, but this a "problem" that's pretty much standard across fighting MMO's. visibiltity is now affected by two things, detection and reflection. It's rather complex so I won't bother explaining it but it really changes a lot concerning visibility.

Explosions have been added, as well as knockback-type weapons, which, as it would appear, knock you back. Sadly, explosions don't have all that fancy graphics right now but they will with the new client...

And talking about the new client! Client 2 is nearing completion! (Although I say this optimistically, perhaps too much even). With client 2 there will be real-time control of your own bases, slaves and drones, equatable to a RTS.  There will also be 3D graphics, although the game will still be played from a top-down 2D-style view.

I'll leave it at this, it's really tiring writing down all the new stuff.