First off let me thank the devs for creating such a great game. I have been a fan of Escape Velocity For years but I have allways wanted a similar game that was multiplayer and 3D wich Vendeta online provides. Second I am new to this so I apologize if any of these things have been sugested before. I searched the sugestions but there is about a billion of them so I may have missed something.

1.) I think you should be able to see all ships avalable at a station regardless of your license status. Excluding nation specific ships if there are any. This would help starting characters figure out wich direction they want to take there character as far as licenseing. I also think it would be more realistic. Even if your not eighten you can still see the guns in the sporting goods store you just can't buy them yet. I feel this would also encourage players who take the free trial to stick around. I know that during my trial it took me almost 6 hours to realize that as my lisence increased new ships were visable (I died alot in the begining). I think some trial players see the low number of ships and outfits and quit playing believing that there is only a handful of ships available to a character.

2.) I think that the amount of energy used to open a wormhole should be a percent based on the size of the ship and the battery onboard. It just seems unrealistic to me that regardless of what battery I have it is depleted by opening a wormhole. However I do think you should still have to have full energy to open one so people don't leave mid combat

3.) I believe it would help the devs alot if the sugestions had a poll for each of them. That way everyone who read the post could vote yea or nay and the devs could look at this to quickly get a feel for the communities feelings on the suggestion.

I agree on all points completely.

I do too. I've wanted the poll thing for ages and ages. We're working towards it. Good suggestions, thanks for the input. And welcome to the game :).

I do three!

Especially the mass/energy relations for jumping seems very logical to me.

And, hello there, fellow EV player, see you some time in-game.

/me four!

and what's wrong with phpBB, Inc? =P

Aside from the terrible performance and major security problems, nothing!

heh, obviously not a big windows user...

Very edumacated. I like these suggestions

Incarnate:
Hawk & Ananth (of http://www.applegeeks.com ) recently (okay, about 2 months ago) switched to a bulletin board by simplemachines http://www.simplemachines.org/ .

Maybe it is worth checking out? It seems to be free, but apparently not open source.

Welcome aboard VO and thanks for the suggestions. I agree with all three points. Also, in case you're wondering, Incarnate's a dev. So... yeah... you're ideas will be taken into consideration.

Looking forward to shooting you down in-game, :D
-Calder

I use smf forums on several websites i've designed.
It's a breeze to setup and maintain. Hell, I just replaced my hosting site's homepage with it:
http://www.leberhost.com
Did the whole setup from the initial download of the software to the change of the template and the logo in under 60 minutes.
Lotsa plugins on it. It's a fast bulletin board system, but my server is slow as molasses, so don't judge it too harshly performance-wise.

OH - and the frikking SEARCH button works like a charm!

maybe we don't want you finding old threads :P

Haha! I KNEW it! A conspiracy to hide the truth!

I agree with your points, but IIRC the reason you can only see equipment one level above your current stats is that it was somewhat overwhelming to be a 1 hour noob and presented with too many ship and equipment options.

maybe increasing the range of items to those within 2 or 3 levels of your stats would be a good compromise.

If you can't tell what there is to work for theres no incentive to improve, one of the most annoying things about being a low level char.

Of course if you can just direct them to the wiki early on it's not as big a deal.

While I agree with spellcast that having all the ships viewable could be overwhelming at first thats also half the fun. One of my favorite parts of getting a new game especally an RPG is going to the "Store" for the first time and browsing through everything I want to buy when it becomes available to me. Its like car shoping, you may only have enough money for a old rusted out Ford Tempo but you still take a long hard look at that brand new BMW.

agree it would have been nice to know what i could get and give me a goal to work for instead of leveling blind.

let then see everything.

then they can drool over the valks, proms and mauds?

So do you want to see everything or is it better to have things revealed as you progress?

I have the feeling that showing everything is giving away the ending. Can we find a compromise that the Devs would agree with?

maybe make only the Mk1 versions visible to new players... that way its not overwhelming but you still get an idea of whats availible?

Base models is fine, varients as you unlock them would be very cool.

And no offense Sarahanne but Prom/Valk/Maud being given away??? "...giving away the ending"????? Firstly, you can see them being flown around the 'verse, secondly there are no endings in MMO's. Well, except for maybe VO since once you've done all the missions you might as well retire for a year and wait for the next batch to show up.