Yeah, I was planning on making a more substantial and worthwhile item pool for newbies to pick from. Could be achieved by lowering the experience requirements on a portion of the items. I've already worked towards this more subtly before by making Reinforcement an item with a role, rather than just a bad version of a normal item. A complete 'reset' to 0 experience of a large number of items might be unneccessary if the shark is modified to be a starting ship. If I recall correctly, this role for the shark was already suggested long ago. Private frequencies are on my todo list, but there's more on that as well. It'll happen eventually. They'll probably not be allowed to flag, though. As for balling, I'm not really sure if letting it 'interfere' with flagging as a seperate game will be fun. The current system, with a few tweaks to prevent 'camping' (or at least make it a lot more difficult) seems to already do its job, as I see a lot of flaggames start when the jackpot hits a certain amount. Scoring just needs a bit more "newbie favouring" so they have a 'job'. Seeing as the shark is already set up to have a long ball-hold-time, making it the newbie ship will go well with this. FR goals have already been gone for about 2 weeks.