Ok, I can give some feedback on what to possibly modify to make this better and devs you discuss it with your team on HQ.
And yes, I know the devs are actual people and need the money to maintain the servers and the game alive, and also for their personal lives and family, but this is not the way in my opinion, there are better ways with better incentives for people to hapily give you money. I really want this game to come back alive like the old days but with this update you are slowly burying it even deeper than before.
The RSS Stuff its pretty good actually, because many people dont even visit this forum, I myself just lurk here. so getting direct up-to-date relevant news in-game is a great way to keep the player informed of everything.
I would say keep the 3x the energy cap, dont reduce it.
why? because with the new mat cost and the new drone e consumption mechanic that will drain the energy REAL FAST for non-memb players, this will just destroy any motivation of keep playing when you costantly have to "i have to find an e field now and stare at it for 5 minutes to be full again and get drained again in 2 minutes", High energy consumption ships like the punisher and paragneiss drain AN INSANE ammount of energy which you will spend more time refilling than actually playing the game, this is a game about shooting stuff and doing missions, exploring planets etc, NOT an energy orb collection simulator.
Just why? dont you want us to play your game the way it is? instead you want us to camp an energy field.
This is great, specially for new players opening new planets.
Why? you are reducing the energy cap AND also increasing the hyperjump cost, this doesnt fit, if you want to encourage people traveling other systems, for example a noob needs help in vega and you are all the way in sirius, you gonna arrive to vega with literally no energy to help the poor guy from too many hyperjumps. you should either keep the 3x cap or reduce the hyperjump cost with the new 2x cap
Now into the memberships, which is imo the most messed up thing here:
Why was this lowered from 50% to 30% and raised in price doesnt make sense to me, its a scam, if 50% before was almost nothing imagine this.
Revert to 50%, add it to drones too and keep the price as 4.900 gold to justify the increase.
same thing here, except it has the drones reduced consumption, BUT it was lowered from 75% to 50%, do the same as above and put it back to 75%, and keep the price as 10.500.
Now this isnt a bad price to be honest, considering that currently on the shop you can get a gold pack exactly for 20k gold, this falls exactly for this membership, and also you get 300g left over for an energy pack, buuut i think you guys should add the 33% mat reduction like the supernova but reduce it to 30%, why 33? its an odd number, yes you can mat 3 times and you end up with 1% of the total energy for.. i dont know, repair after mat lol, assuming you dont use energy at all between pods.
Now this is the big one, and I know exactly how to make it very worth it to buy.
You know there's the anniversary drone that raises your e-cap by 25% right? put it in there, Done! Now its worth to buy it. and also reduce the 33% to 30%, thats enough to justify the massive price increase from Ultimate to supernova.
Yes i know the anniversary drone is meant to be something special but, are we really gonna wait for literally another 10 years to get this again? isnt this literally the perfect opportunity to being able to buy one? you havent done something like this since the PLUS Drone and that was YEARS ago.
Im not good at this kind of stuff, "balancing" etc but there's a few suggestions on what i would like to see.
I wish you guys could discuss this even further with your team at HQ and also the community to make this fair for both sides, the small bunch of people that still play this game really want this game to come back alive incluiding me, im very certain the new e update of 30th june made people come back to play as well as made the game more enjoyable to play.
Also buff cryo drop rates.