How about everyone thinks back about their first time on the server and how they experienced it. I was pretty impressed by Pennsylvania, as it was showing the progress of this mod pretty nicely. You have vanilla right next to you, while you are able to explore a system with so many planets, with planetary rings and moons, plenty of asteroid fields and a nebula that comes in very handy. The helium thing is pretty much the best thing for starters, and I do remember the many hours I used to haul stuff to Erie to earn my first Mammoth, Serenity and Mastodon. It's a really beautiful system with a good amount of detail. The only very dumb thing about it right now is the Kansas jump hole right there. Every newbie is like "Oh yes, I found that absolutely well hidden alien gate in that nebula without sensors in less than ten minutes" because of the online-navmap. Like, they don't even need to discover it. I'd definitely remove the Kansas-Penny conncection and place Puerto Rico back and add Humboldt back to where they belong. Those systems were perfect to move around Liberty. The Copper mining area can stay there or be moved to Pennsylvania to some outer area, as there are so many unused asteroid fields.
TL;DR: Penny works fine. Maybe add a few of the new station part models to Hamilton Station to impress newbies with some rare things. Works pretty well with Niigata in Sigma-59, which is pretty much the most badass station of the entire mod.
Liberty was the starting point for Edison Trent, for all players of this game. It has also been the starting point for Discovery, for ages. Pennsylvania is a good starting point set up a long time ago by our devs, some of which may not even be here anymore. I have not seen issues about players having a difficult time with honing skills. There may very well be. I haven't seen issues of players finding it hard to make credits, but there may very well be. Pennsylvania has been here in this mod for years as the starting point for players, and there's nothing wrong with it being here. The better players venture outside of Liberty and make it into the other factions.
Instead of moving the starting point somewhere else entirely, likely into a system meant to be solely RP purposes, how about making the already RP neutral Pennsylvania some new jump holes to other systems as mentioned previously in this thread? Perhaps link Pennsylvania to other points of interest throughout the game? Or perhaps as Sombra said, at the least, make improvements to the visual details. I personally experienced no issues at all with Penny. It was perfect. A beginning experience of trading, piracy, and fighting. Pennsylvania is a great starter pack for any new player to this game, and any intelligent new player will have the decency to not remain in Liberty alone.
I'm assuming nobody else believes that Pennsylvania is the perfect starting point for new players? I pretty much perfectly agree with Sombra here (hi Sombra) on my end.
Also, would it be rude to ask what the point of changing the starting location is again? It kind of got lost in the bickering.
Personally, I think I left Pennsylvania pretty quickly. I did a few missions for quick cash (guardian and basic armor) and then left. I ended up in New Hampshire of all places, farming missions on the Navy BS. I never really knew of the whole helium mining stuff until later. And my first trader was a correo hauling artifacts to Bretonia, since at some point I'd figured out how to /restart. In fact, I might have even gotten into piracy before trading :/
So if there's anything to be taken from my rambling, I guess make the newbie-things/helium-mining more obvious?
I vote Sigma-19, given the He-3 would have a reasonable sellpoint like Helium had Erie.
Since GMG is a serious backbone for the overall Sirius-economy and Sigmas itself are meeting place of many factions (such as Cryer, Kruger, Corsairs or Blood Dragons), I'd vote for this being the start point, although with different default restart consisting of GMG ID Garanchou AND similiar He-3 selling place in Sigma-19 such as Planet Erie was for Penny.
The problem with that is that it is plopping brand new players deep in the middle of everything, Toris. It may overwhelm them. That and it might disrupt the flow of roleplay in the area.
![[Image: EjUDu1h.png]](https://imgur.com/EjUDu1h.png)
