The Perpetuum team has issued a new "state of the game" letter on the official site that is essentially a "mea culpa" for the missteps the sandbox title has made with players new to the game. Essentially, the team admits that throwing newbs into the game without any direction is a bad idea. To correct this, players will have a chance to "play before you play" on a specially designed virtual training program.
The island of noobs
That’s why they have created a whole virtual island, where every wannabe-Agent is sent to at first, cybernetically speaking. Being only virtual, the island is almost completely sealed off from the main Earth-Nia network. I say "almost", because the lovely Syndicate programmers managed to interlink the basic communication lines, so new and old can still chat about their experiences together. But other than that, nothing gets in and nothing gets out.
Sidenote: initially our plan was to create solo instances for this, but as it turned out that would require too many core changes throughout the game, and we have decided that this is not the right time for such experiments. In some aspect there will be multiple instances of training islands, but these will be "hard" instances that we’ll use in conjunction with queuing and load balancing. However, this is not something that we could use for missions for example. But fear not, proper instances are still on our todo.
Read the entire blog post on the Perpetuum site.
