INCARNATE  I'm sorry to hear that this individual had a bad experience in our game. It seems that they labored under several misapprehensions that understandably colored their experience.

1) In no way is it necessary to continue shooting drones, over and over again.. let alone for six months. It only takes a few hours for a new player to hit Level 3 Combat, at which point the Dynamic Warfare missions become available in Deneb, allowing you to join the military on the Serco or Itani side, and take part in real warfare on behalf of your Nation (often with other players on both sides). We start the new players out with simple drones, because some people find the combat learning curve to be a little steep, but other options quickly become available.

2) Pirates and other aggressive players hang out in a specific region of the galaxy, which covers only 8 of the 30 available solar-systems. By and large it is easy to avoid, and you can certainly advance your character without the risk of these areas, especially if you simply avoid missions that take you there. The tutorials include very stark warnings about the "grayspace" region. We specifically *do* give new people a chance, by including terrifying defensive batteries that keep the pirates out of Nation Space.

3) You cannot "lose XP". Ever. Perhaps this person means losing XP they have not yet actually earned, by having a mission not be completed. But once you have it, you have it.

4) You CAN equip items and ships that are above your license level, by visiting the more "black market" stations in (more dangerous) grayspace. Not all items are available, but they can also be purchased elsewhere and delivered there (by the player, or often by other players who re-sell items). Some ships are nation-specific, but a considerable amount of gear is available in grayspace; as evidenced by our effective pirates, who are often "kill on sight" in all nation territory.

Our game is not without flaws, of which we are well aware, and we work to improve them in each weekly release. In this case, a player somehow managed to make it six months while remaining unaware of several fundamental game mechanics (?!). We do cover much of this content in our tutorials, but clearly we need to push new players more forcefully in various directions, to be absolutely sure they are aware of the available options. We are working on an expansion of the new-user-experience to do exactly this, as well as changing the mission system to make our many available missions more apparent to everyone.

Additionally, we frequently read and respond to constructive feedback on our Suggestions Forum, doing our best to improve problem areas and integrate good ideas that our players bring up.  
(Version 1.8.80)

INCARNATE  I'm sorry to hear you experienced problems. Client crashes are pretty rare for us. Please give the updated version a try again, and if you still experience issues, consider posting about them on the Bugs or Mac forums of our home site. Also, if the client should crash and bring up our automated bug reporter, please submit the report, they greatly help us in tracking down problems.  
(Version 1.8.57)

INCARNATE  It's also worth noting that our Public Alpha launched in May of 2002, a year before EVE. We are contemporaries, and I'm sure we have similar influences, but that doesn't make ours a derivative or copy. EVE has had greater success, and is better known, but our development started in 1998. It would be more apt to point out similarities to the early X-Wing or Wing Commander titles, the games that truly inspired us.  
(Version 1.8.57)

INCARNATE  Our.. club? All we ask for is a username, password and email address, and the latter only because people forget their passwords. Vendetta Online is an online game (like, say, World of Warcraft), not a single-player game that you download and play alone. A login and password is necessary for any Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO), it's how your personal characters and game-related information are stored by the server.

Everything about the trial is free, no strings attached, no credit card required. But creating a basic login is pretty much a necessity.  
(Version 1.7.41)

INCARNATE  Well, for instance, what exact type of Mac you have, what version of OS X you're running, and so on. For example, there was a problem with the game on 10.2.8, but that's been recently fixed; and if we knew that was the problem we could have helped you. The majority of our userbase is mac-based, and the game is regularly run on everything from slow G3s to brand-new quad-core Intel machines. Our users generally consider our game to be extremely stable, and in the rare case where it isn't, we're happy to figure out why. But since the cases are rare, we can only debug the problems if people are willing to report them in detail.  
(Version 1.7.23)

INCARNATE  If you post the specifics of your problems to the www.vendetta-online.com forums, you'll usually receive a response pretty quickly. Either from the developers or from other helpful users.  
(Version 1.7.8)