If you're reading this you're probably a fan anyway but for those new that might want to know what it's like .....

I'm not a big PvPer, I actually perfer PvE, but I've been looking for a space game for a while now since I updated my graphics card and couldn't play FreeLancer and dropped Star Wars Galaxies when the missions got boring. What with a free 30 day trial & 30 min download I figured I didn't have much to lose so decided to give it a try.

First if you've played FreeLancer or the X-Wing vs Tie Fighter games, alot of the game play and HUD will look familiar enough to help you ease into the game.

Since it is a pure PvP game it's nice that your starting spot is 'fairly' safe. No griefers camping outside the space stations etc .... so you can run the tutorial missions without too much worry.

This fact leads me to my first really nice thought on the game. It is kind of safe, but with just enough danger to keep it interesting and ensure you pay attention and not run your brain on auto-pilot.

On the downside, part of this 'safeness' may be from the smaller player base currently playing. All I can say is as it stands right now both my 14 and 10 yr olds can also play and not worry.

The missions. Seems to be a decent amount and variety of one's to choose from. They also seem to support the concept of becoming what ever 'profession' you want. Currently I seem to be leaning towards the life of a courier pilot.

It would be nice for the inital mission blurb to have a little more info in it like which system they want you to go to and maybe what the pay (rewards) would be. I'm not currently clear on the ramifications (if any) of my clicking mission accept, getting the full mission brief and then clicking abort (mission) if I don't like it. Will they not offer me anymore work? No effect? What?

Advancement/Leveling. Both fast and slow. I got 1 whole level jump in my trade section by just doing the first easy courier mission on one hand, but my light weapons / combat's been going slow since just random shooting the NPC miner droids only gets me 5 xp each. There is a droid shooting mission that gets more xp plus a bonus I may have to try, same with the Advance Fighting tutorial although that one sounds fairly robust just from reading it. My 14 yr old has gone up 1 or 2 levels from just doing the mining missions so that part sounds ok.

Graphic's. I like them, bold rich space views, different looking styles of stations, the 'foreign' language neon signs etc..., haven't had to tweak anything to raise my fps and with the exception of visiting 1 certain station that always stalls my system down to 1fps for a bit once I get close to it, I haven't encountered any problems, although my fore & aft radar displays went out of focus last night but that wasn't a game breaker as I could still make out the radar dots - they were just fuzzy not crisp circles. I'll see how they look tonight after work.

I do find the look of the ships a little weak (of course the neutral SWG ships were too), but from throwning the thought back and forth with my 14 yr old I'll give you that designing TOTALLY NEW ship designs that are real eye grabbers would be hard. What with all the other games and TV / movie shows out there you'd have to stay away from looking like anything that's been done before.

Gameplay. You have 2 types of flying control. Flight Assist which most games use I believe; mouse / keys to turn, fly like an airplane. And then you have the Physic's mode which I had seen before on the Babylon 5: I've found her game. 6 axis flight, just turning the ship doesn't effect your movement direction, you'd have to use your engines to power you onto the different direction. Does allow you to fly 'forward', point and shot 'backwards' but at the cost of not being able to see where you're going. LOL! If you lean towards motion sickness you may not want to try using the Physic's mode or fly in the 3rd person view.

Community. This has to be one of the stronger aspects of the game. You always have a good mix (differnt factions) of players on the Global chat channel and all of them are willing to answer questions no matter if they're your nations friends/enemies or neutral. That part of the game is just that - part of the game. Answering questions is outside of that, just players which is nice.

So to sum it up, come ruin my low population game :). Get one of the 30 day trial keys and flood the game with players. You can't beat the price thats for sure and you just may be surprised and end up staying.

Well, I'd say we have a fan! Welcome to VO, Nebless!

Interesting reading, even after more than 3 years in the game. I would suggest you choose a high-traffic gaming website and post it, I always advocated for more people in game in all the ways (active and vocative) I could.
Welcome to Vendetta, see you ingame.

Same thoughts. I love the fact I can fly in space and not worry about jumping out of the station to only be slammed by L33t speaking Pirate types with the soul purpose of ruining new players game time.

Love the community!

Drat! I was hoping this thread was for vets to review new players...

Oh well.

EZR

Ratonu - I also put this over on www.mmorpg.com where the 30 day free trials are coming from.

Wasn't sure under which topic there to post it since they have so many that fit - I ended up putting under the 3 it seemed to fit best! LOL! Someone should see it that way.

Plus I know when I first clicked on the trial key banner there it kicked me over this way and after reading parts of the manual, I checked out the boards here.

Update:
Well that wasn't very nice of MMORPG.com. They pulled my write up from the main forum, which was actually good, but they also pulled it from the Looking For a Game forum too, which is where I thought it should go. They did leave it buried back on the VO forum which pretty much tells me that unless it's a BIG game you shouldn't talk about it on the main boards, but sticking it back out of the way is OK.

Heck I didn't even know VO HAD a seperate forum there as it's not even mentioned on their home page game list, you have to find it by going through their seperate page entire game list.

1 out of 3 is better than nothing I guess.

I just logged out. I said hello i'm new 5 times in chat and got nothing. Says to me a pvp unfriendly game. I tried this game before and i see nothing has changed. In fact, the chat was full of pvp talk and pirates talking the same smack and making threats to other players.

"Says to me a pvp unfriendly game."

"In fact, the chat was full of pvp talk"

...what?
Sometimes the chat scrolls by so fast that most people don't notice everything that's said, especially if it's something that they're used to seeing a lot.

Pvp smack talk and no one can greet a new player saying hello. Thats what.

I'm not exactly sure why you weren't greeted, but 99% of new players are. I haven't noticed a single "hi" go unanswered in the past little while, myself. Have you, besides yourself?

Jarfaru and other new folks reading this thread; if you are saying "hello" in Channel 1, not many will read it/see it. You are probably only viewing (and not "in") channel 100. Ensure you type "/join 100" prior to saying hello. Just something I have seen happen a few times (as I have been recently monitoring channel 1).

I thought you were in 100 by default.

And yes, this is the friendliest game community I can think of.

Professor Chaos,
True, however once folks go through the trainers and what not it does not tell them to join 100 again; it says leave 100, join 1 and that's it. So once they complete that they forget to join 100 again. Just an observation I have made.

I just got offline too and dropped channel 100 about 3 min's into my play time. It seemed to be 4 or 5 old friends just going back and forth and I found it a pain trying to fly and watch the 4 lines that show up for anything important. I do know someone asked a question and I caught it only because I was in station and actually looking at the chat area at the right time. I tried to answer him but wasn't even sure if he saw it since with the others going on the lines were zinging by at a pretty good click, so I sent him a directed message with the/an answer to his question. I guess he got it, didn't hear back from him so I'm not sure.

After dropping the channel I monitored channel 1 and 4357. Someone did come on Ch. 1 and say Hello but since my understanding is that Ch. 1 is the help channel (Wiki info) I figured it was a mis-send since it wasn't a question.

From checking the number of players on from time to time I've been seeing 50 to 65 on, but only the same 4-5 people going back and forth on Ch. 100 which kind of tells me that Ch. 100 has become pretty much their private chat channel as it's hard to get a comment in. For the others? Guild chat? Non-talkers like I generally am? I don't know.

Earlier my son was on and said that someone did ask a question about the grey space sector boxes showing bot's present when none were actually there and all the guy got was a ration of crap - read the manual noob, don't ask dumb questions, learn to read the map etc.... which speaks poorly of them. My son went on and said that he had checked and the guy WAS looking at the map correctly and it DID say bot's were there so where were they? That seems to have shut the heckling up.

The number of chat lines you get to see is pretty small. Trying to fly/fight/type all at the same time is pretty hard so I know if I'm put in that spot, blowing off the typing just to say 'Hi I'm new too' would be my pick. Doesn't make me a bad person.

Last night I saw the same people answer a guys questions left and right. Tonight they didn't. ?

Sorry no one welcomed you to the game. Usually chan 100 is used for everything. You can just talk, ask questions or anything else there. Since its such a small user base at times everything happens there. But if you need immediate help with something try chan 1 and chan 11. Most vets do monitor chan 1 and so do the people in irc. If its not something covered in the main tutorial people with be quick to help you.

But remember there are only a few lines of text in the chat window. And people might be busy with other stuff. Just wait 10 mins and ask again, some will help you.

Just saying hi or hello might not get you a response but saying "hello i'm new" will.

Good luck and welcome to VO!!

For the quickest response say "Hello, I'm new. I am in [sector #] sector carrying [cargo type/quantity] in a [ship type/armament] headed for [destination sector]." That is very effective. Be sure you're on 100.

VO really has the best community. Just look at VO's general forum and WoW's general forum.

VO:

"Great game!"
"Merry Christmas, devs!"
"New patch notes"

WoW:

"BLIZZ WTF U RUINING THE GAME"
"I hate rouges"
"My class sucks"
"I hate whiners"
"I hate everyone"

Now that doesn't mean VO consists of 100% mature players. There are griefers and trolls in any comunity. So your mileage may vary depending on when you log on. Some people are just too busy fighting and can't read chat. Some people just turn 100 off due to too much off-topic trafic there. Some people are just sitting in a station and chat with bored traders and miners.

As for grey space sectors -- yes, in some systems the map may show the wrong info on sectors. There is this relatively new thing called "Dynamic Hive": one in Latos/Sedina/Odia, one in Serco space, and one in Itani space. The word "dynamic" means that some sectors can be cleared from the bots and some can contain a wide variety of them (not just the ones mentioned on the map).

Also if you're new I just suggest not to go to grey space unless you know what are seeking there

Oh, and DO NOT say your location on 100 unless you want some bored pirate come and shoot you down.

Aleksey: How long is it since you have been ingame? :) The "grey" areas never displayed hive present, and the "dynamic" systems had the hive information removed :) [The only system that has incorrect hive information is Deneb]

@ the new guys: Usually when I am online, I will answer any questions I see asked. I monitor all the regular channels, so if a new guy is lost on 1, I will usually find them :) (especially if they give out their locations) - oh, did I mention that I am what you would consider a "smak talking griefer" in most games.

huh....I'm a "new guy" and I've never experienced anything but friendly, helpful people in this game.

Even the pirates are friendly...in their pirating way :P

Of course, I never expected the entire community to stop what they were doing / talking about just to say "hi" to me either. I kinda just figured that I'd do the tutorials, read the wiki, and do my best. And that if I had any questions then, I would attempt to find someone to answer them...but not storm off in a huff if people happened to be too busy to cater to ME. ;)

If the only thing you're saying in chat is, "Hello. I am new." then what type of response do you expect? I mean, you're not saying anything which is interesting to anyone, you're not asking a question, you're not looking for help. You're just stating you're new. You want people to talk to you? THEN CHAT. Say stuff. Don't just announce that you're new then expect people to start fawning over you.

In Channel 100 there are often a variety of discussions going on. Sometimes if it's dead when I'm on I'll start an inane conversation about nothing just to get it moving.

10 points to Whargoul for hitting the nail on the head.