I've tried it, and some of the issues I had.
It did not feel newbie friendly.
You had to type in a ton of info when trying to create a character instead of just picking stuff from a menu.
The soundpacks weren't available on the website.
It seemed very, very cluttered for a newbie, but my biggest issue was the lack of spellchecking on both your website and the game itself. I know we all make typos now and then, but it just makes your game look like a kid put it together.

I've played the game, it's on my regular muds list in Vipmud and I will certainly be playing again.

That being said, it is true Cm isn't quite as compulsive as some games I've tried, so I'll try and  a few things that I've found missing in the game.
The first, and one of the most major things for me, is variety in progression.

cm has a lot of activities with well written descriptions and unique equipment.
The problem is, once you've done an activity for the first time, the activity itself becomes slightly rote.
This is because a large percentage of activities devolve to go to location x, type in a command, wait to get a given resource then type in another command.

Other than occasionally fixing errors with harvesting or trash collecting equipment, there isn't much variation in what you actually have to do while carrying out the activity, you can't be suddenly surprised, or for that matter, suddenly rewarded by something else.

There are a few notable exceptions, particularly those activities like dangerous package delivery that involve a little ground combat, however there should really be more of this, more need to actually be engaged with what your doing,  different levels of rewards, and try  puzzle or fight your way past different circumstances.

After all, something like asteroid mining should involve a little more than just finding an asteroid and waiting, what about cave ins? what about random space junk that might need blowing away, what about suddenly finding valuable mineral remains or bits of dead aliens that need carefully scooping out?

When doing some of the water based activities, what about suddenly finding people floundering in the water you'd need to rescue (rather than having the search command).

Variety is the spice of life, and many of the cm activities need a little spiccing methinks.

This brings me on to the second point, that is combat.
Having combat in asteroid fields was a great idea, the problem is space combat in cm is  not exactly the most tactical kind, generally it's a matter of going in one direction, blasting away with whatever weapons you have hoping that the enemy's fire power or detections don't overwhelm your systems.

it'd be great if space combat was slower and more tactical, and less based on how quickly you can type, not to mention more integrated into the rest of the game and different activities, though as this has been mentioned before I won't say too much.

A third issue for me is questing, The game has quests and they are fun, especially those that come with ground combat, but more quests would be nice, especially giving you a reason to explore different planets and wander around, indeed not just quest, but random items to find or harvest in different locations, giving you a reason to see a lot of the great world cm has to offer.

This also goes with the idea of expanding the ground combat system and making gameplay there more tactically based, since it'd feel much better to have say the possibility of finding something valuable lying around on a hostile alien world if there were hostile aliens ready to leap out and get you .

I do know there is a little of this later in the game with base attacking and maybe exploring and such, but given all the places you go, from  where humanity was at war with the Kaitsar to dodgy space ports, comit chunks etc, a little more variety and danger would be appreciated.

Finally one thing I will confess that really! gets up my nose in cm is the need for ship upgrades. If I buy any! new ship I must spend a very long time indeed running from place to place to place purchicing so many upgrades for different activities. This also meakes having ships destroyed an incredible inconvenience.
It's not the financial cost here, it's the cost of time, especially when you have to run around so many shops.

it would be great to have a way  keep track of your ship upgrades between vessels and basically just have "some of those"

Again, I know it's possible to do some of this when you have your own factory (something I will be seeing about rather soon in the game myself), but having an option to protect upgrades would be really nice, especially if ship combat gets over hauled, the galaxy becomes more dangerous and your in more danger of losing your ship.

Okay, methinks I've rambled enough.

be sure I will be back on cm myself soon enough, (I really fancy trying exploration). but hopefully you've found some of these thoughts useful.

Today this is my favorite mud, but I do not have time to play.

I feel obligated to start out by saying that I've never played your game extensively. I gave it a shot once on a day when I was really bored a couple months ago, but only stuck through the first 50-100 ish levels.
I do know people who do, though, and from asking around I'm reasonably confident that the issues I had with it don't go away at higher levels.
I'd also like to apologize in advance if I come off as overly harsh, I'm just trying to provide honest feedback here.
1. Spelling, grammar and syntax.
Pretty important for a text game, and yet very obviously not given enough attention in yours. Never have I read a line of text from your game and gone oh wow, that's well written. from help files to starship messages and room descriptions, I've never gotten the impression that writing quality matters. If I'm playing a text game, I expect to get quality text- not something slapped together on the back of a napkin. It's not just the presence of mistakes, it's the lack of depth,  about the lack of consistency. I got the impression of trying to read a project done in google docs where 13 different people are trying to add things in without going back and making sure the top half of the document matches in style to the bottom half. I expect some variety in messages, too. having only played the game briefly, the one thing that comes to mind at this second is weapons firing, which from what I remember relied on a single message with a single adjective and the name of the weapon changing for variety, but other than that was almost exactly the same for 80 percent of the weapons I saw- again, I admit that I only played the game briefly.
I can live with typos- they happen to all of us- but I expect at least some modicum of effort put into presentation of text when the entire game is about text. Wow me with your writing skills. I don't expect PHD thesis level writing, but I'd hope it's not unreasonable to get something that doesn't read like an eighth grade project that isn't even being marked on grammar.
2. me and a five-year-old would be equally good at playing Cosmic Rage.
As mentioned above, very many of your activities are rote tasks- type this, then wait, then type that, then wait, rinse and repeat, or buy an upgrade that makes it so you only have to type one command. More than that, though, it feels like many activities are carbon copies of each other- drawing from my experience, I didn't feel a difference between trash collecting and volcano harvesting, for example, or several other activities who's names I've forgotten. yes, the commands and some of the text changed, but I was literally doing the same thing, and from asking around this appears to be a recurring theme even at high levels. The buttons change, the messages change a bit, but you, in essence, are doing the same exact thing in almost all the multitude of activities cosmic rage has to offer. I get the impression that there are four or five activity templates reused ten or twenty times each, and from what I experienced and what others tell me, once you've done one activity from the template you can pick up any of the others in seconds.
I've also been lead to believe that at no point is there an activity requiring true strategic thinking, planning, timing yourself, or anything similar- that as I said earlier, a child capable of typing would not be disadvantaged at all if they and I started playing at the same time. Nowhere is there a cutoff related to skills, save combat which I will address in a minute. If you can use a keyboard, you can play cosmic rage- which, don't get me wrong, trying to appeal to gamers of any skill level is great and all- it just provides nothing in the challenge department. from everything I've been told, no matter what if you sink enough time into it you'll end up at the top even if you barely understand what you're doing. For a game to truly be enjoyable to me, I have to be challenged. There needs to be some amount of effort involved, if I can get to the top by keyboard mashing at 3 AM then it's not particularly fun. Make people have to use their brains sometimes.
3. The issue of combat.
This is definitely not unique to your game, but the way space combat works has got to change. I'm not even going to go int much detail here, I think @Dark addressed it pretty well above for your particular case. What I will say, though, is if a game relies heavily on luck and better upgrades to do well at an activity touted as the one requiring the most player skill, something isn't ideal.
Again, I'm sorry if any of this came off as me trying to insult you- I'm honestly just trying to provide my personal, and hopefully constructive! reasoning for not liking your game.
Thanks and I hope you have a wonderful day.

Well, In my case, I played the game a few monts ago. I enter to it well time to time to see what is happen and do some actibities, but in general I think that the game is fun.

One suggestion, so that the actibities are not necesarili scalables. I know that some activities give more exp than others, but IDk. give options to manage your own complete fleet of trash truck can give to you a good amount of exp and credits. or give the option to buy various vehicles, and let you share (or rent) it to other players, to get rewards like a enterprise. It will be very fun.

Other thing, is improbe the group experience. currentli, to have activities with friends, you need a.. well some time playing the game, but in various moment,s you want specially at start, can do things with your friends, so add more group activities at all range of levels.

And well, In my case, I love the "non-rol" experience, so, keep it as is done today. as an alternative, not mandatory. if you don't want to do a roleplay you can't do it and only play with activities, do things with only your friends, etc.

Finally, well. add some variations in the process of each activities, to have differences between how you do each one

A, and improve the mushclient soundpack.

For me, these are all the suggestions. for all of other things, the game is very nise.

Hi nightshade!
I'm happy to welcome you back, and sad I missed you!
Some of the options are quite long, I do agree. The saving thing is for saving skills through death, rather than actually saving your character to disk, as it were.
thanks!

@Dardar,  My personal experience.
1.  You're trying to double as both public relations guy and programmer.  I've no doubt that you're successful at the latter, but from a PR standpoint I can't give you any credit, and that based on your posts alone!  In your first post you admit to being tossed around like a yoyo where systems are concerned, where things can change on a daily basis; it shouldn't work like that.  Systems in a game should be carefully considered, methodically and meticulously planned.  Thorough questions must be asked about the system you're trying to implament; does one group benefit over another?  Does one group suffer more than another?  What are the perks and faults concerning this system?  Can we introduce another system that'll balance it out?  How will it work with everything else currently in place?  All of these and more are questions I'd be asking if I were in your shoes, understanding that I can't truly know the outcome of any system I introduce, nor can I know how people are going to react to it, but aware that you have to have a listening ear that is capable of pulling apart the fans from the fools willing to say anything to see if they can push your buttons.  Some people can double as both coder and promotional voice of their product; your short answers sometimes make me wonder if you've thought about this aspect of things at all.  More often than not I'd come across statements and other particulars while playing that made me wonder if you wanted to be taken seriously or not, IE, jokes about being too fat to walk through walls, and leaving unattended typos on both your game and your website.  Were I anyone else, I'd think you didn't care. There is tons of repetitious writing especially in descriptions, as of this writing something is busted which doesn't allow people to teleport out of the beginners accademy and go home, and I keep getting spammed by the 32nd survey requiring my attention.
2.  Saving your data manually versus paying to have it saved automatically... Why, for the life of me, is this even a thing!  I get it!  You want donation incentives, but I struggle to find why this was even an idea, given this is not an offline game and there are far more greater conveniences you could be offering.  Telling people they have to pay to save their progress after a certain level is nothing short of telling your fans that if they value their progress at all on your game they had better not be stupid, because you can't be bothered putting in any extra effort on your part unless they cough up a chunk of change they otherwise wouldn't need.  Can you imagine how many people would dump Alter aeon if this became a thing out there?  Not only that, but getting a spammy message about being a complete newb every 10 minutes or so is somewhat distasteful.
3.  Excess material... I have no idea what half of it is or why I should even consider it!  Thankfully, the accademy now exists and tells you a bit about where you should go, but it still seems rather vague!
4.  Character creation?  Still spurious and has far more clutter in it than is entirely necessary.  Let people go color their hair in hair care parlors and beautify themselves in beauty salons or what have you, but having to pick through a list of a few dozen plus options for my hair color, nail color, etc etc... Do some of those even exist in real life?  I shudder to think they might, just might!
5.  Menus are busted!  Example:
1: Message board. Price: 7,644,695.4 credits, level: 1. Items in stock, 39
2: Message board. Price: 8,518,374.8 credits, level: 1. Items in stock, 35
May I kindly ask what the blazes is up with that?
6.  Grouping is currently a fit of giggles waiting to happen.  I followed nightshade, but was apparently able to break the whole thing by getting a taxi, claiming I was going somewhere entirely different, then she, by moving, was able to just, bring me back to where she was.
7.  Cities are spuriously huuuuge!
8.  Scanning really shouldn't be as difficult as it is now, something else which is exceptionally spurious; why in this supposedly high-tech modern day and age can this mining scanner not just give me the closest items to me first?  Admitedly, that last line is rather cool, but seriously!

And now, for the stuff I do like!
1.  Thankfully, your host/admin/assistive people who help out are more prominant and able to help!  We left for home almost 10 minutes after I wrote up my first set of statements; thank Lara Stardust for us if you get the chance.
2.  newbie tips: freaking awesome little bit since I last played!
3.  Mentors!  Another little addition I find welcoming!
4.  Extensively documented help files, both a help and a hindrance because you're not exactly sure what you should be reading when, but I think I like it, mostly.
Will be back with more as I go; I plan on giving this as much time as I possibly can.

I feel... so ignored u.u

i don't think i'm not an english,or my english not good enough will got policy worning,i really not good at writing description,on the other hand,i think  game should more roleplay focus,but if force profile,no,again,english.
this is i saying.

@Nocturnus Lara Stardust = Nathan
But yes, their support is quite nice ... thankfully, since last time I played I had a habbit of breaking the game every 5 minutes.

@Nocturnus, in terms of auto saving, saving in the game isn't  necessary or has much to do with whether you donate or not, since the game saves itself when you perform many activities, or you can just type save if your worried, though %90 of the time you don't need to.
I've bought a couple of donator items for the game, but auto saving wasn't one of them because I saw no need for it.
this is a text game, so why should my character be short with tanned skin, blue eyes and black hair when they can be compact with richly olive skin, sky blue eyes and curley black hair, actually this was  one of the first htings that struck me about Cr, not just that I got to play a dragon, but that I got to play a dragon who's physique and colouring I decided upon myself.

I will say I do find colouring options for each and every bought item rather long  since if I am buying a shovel or a radio I'd rather just buy a shovel or a radio than have to specify, but you can get through the options pretty quickly.

I'm also afraid I disagree regarding size of locations, I personally love exploring, and having a planet that feels at least somewhat large, rather than just a couple of shops next to a launch pad increases immersion factor for me especially if the planet is a particularly alien or harsh environment and I can find out about it's history, culture, place in the universe etc.

I would like to see the writing in the game cleaned up a little, since there are some interesting locations in terms of description, especially given Cr also contains soundpacks), so getting rid of a few of the more childish messages E.g "your too fat to go that way" or "The game crashed!" type saving messages would contribute to the game's atmosphere.
This isn't to say the game should be humourless, just that it would be nice if the humour and descriptive level were equaled out, so that a really harsh environment such as sdf outpost theta 15 did not appear along side really silly messages.

The one problem I have with many of the games' locations is that practically there isn't a lot of point! in exploring since you will not get attacked, run into quests, find items to hunt for etc. This is especially jarring on particularly harsh or wore torn planets, particularly given that the Cr universe is supposed to be  one of inter racial war where people are far from safe.
The same goes for space, indeed if combat in the game were a little less based on firing and forgetting and typing quickly, and a little more tactical, it would also be possible to make space a trifle more dangerous and thus more interesting than it is even the ratica have had their teeth pulled in recent updates to the game, going from acid spewing predators whom ship captains need to fight off, to just a miner annoyance you can largely ignore if you remember to get the right bits of equipment (which you need to do for each and every room in each and every ship you own).

I do agree in terms of writing that some extra text alternatives for activities might be fun, but if activities were engaging enough and had enough by way of potential surprises and variety this would probably matter rather less than it does, after all I wouldn't mind hearing "your harvesting equipment diploys" every time if there was then a potential of me having to interact with the equipment a little more and watch out for something unexpected to come up that I might need to deal with.

The thing is, Cr already has a hole bunch of systems that would rock if implemented for random encounters on planets.

Hunting, gathering, archaeology, lots of resources and crafting projects, not to mention  ability to have random encounters and a potentially interesting ground combat system.

All that needs to happen is a few of these things need to be spread randomly around the different planets rather than just occuring in one area, then come with a reward.
I'd love to be able to wander the desert in saharia, be attacked by a random critter which I could then slay and skin, and be able to fashion the skin into something that I could then sell off to a trader for credits, or to wander the lower decks on some grimy space station, only to be set upon by a gang of shalker mercinaries who drop some draconic wrelics that I could then take to an archaeology research center to decode for cash.

Or how about having my hand mining computer suddenly alert me that I'm close  a vane of minerals so it's time to pull out my shovel and start digging.

While we're on the suggestions field, I would also suggest a miner change to ground combat, since at the moment  only die if their torso or head is mangled (an entombed reference?), this in effect means that when fighting the more body parts an enemy has, the less chance you have of disabling them, especially because it seems that enemies can suffer manglement of most body parts without too much inconvenience, indeed sometimes it's taken me longer to kill lower level vacus than higher level droidics simply because of the fewer body parts :d.

It'd be nice if this balance was addressed, e.g if an enemy's legs (or tentacles, wheels etc), were damaged they could no longer walk, meaning you could sit in another squeare on the battle field and pepper them to death at a distance, or if an enemy's hands were  damaged their attack options would be reduced.

This would be particularly good if, as I hope, we see  enemies and more attacks in the future.