For introducing how trading works, cargo delivery missions might be a good idea.

The missions always start at someplace that sells goods, and always ends at a buyer for the goods.  The missions pay less then if you did the trading yourself, but on the other hand you don't have to worry about actually being able to afford the cargo that you are hauling.  This mainly serves to give you a good sense of what cargo is delivered where.

If you take a mission to move cargo more valuable then basic ore, then you have to pay a small fee to accept the mission, which will be given back to you upon successful completion.

These mission do have a time limit, but you still get partial payment for late deliveries.  Having cargo pods destroyed also reduces your final payment.  But so long as you don't try to sell the pods to a fence or something, your reputation with the faction giving you the missions won't be negatively affected, just your bank account.

A more dangerous variant of this mission might be moving high value cargo that isn't normally traded (classified documents, secret or illegal research, list of security backdoors...) with a very high risk of an opposing faction sending ships specifically tasked with either stealing or outright destroying the cargo.

So, let me give some pretty raw feedback about the beta.
Background on me:
I'm a 24 yo photographer from Hungary.
I've played through EOC several times
I've pretty much played games my whole conscious life.
I can code in most web oriented prog languages, and get the logic behind programming itself.
I can pretty much land and fly any plane in MS FSX, so I'm not totally incompetent with a complex game.

My first try went like this:

<prologue>

I had downloaded the installer 9 times from your mirror, all to no avail, and no result, every time it told me there was an error with parsing.
I after an hour of figuring out why I couldnt download it from MODDB; my adblock plus chrome extension screwed out the "advert" I was supposed to watch to get the download link to work.
That version would not install either, just flash the screen, and not do anything. Luckily I have 2 other PC's lying around at home () and I installed a fresh copy of EOC onto my main workstation, wich was nice enough to run the installer and the program. As luck would have it, EOC can be just extracted and copied and still runs fine on whatever machine. This all might be the OS's fault, dunno.

<expectation>

Finishing the game left me a pretty good pilot (with obviously different damage model than this, as I learnt from the Alpha) But since in the alpha you had quite a decent ship to start with if you wanted to (I've done the 80pod convoy runs enough times in the alpha for it to get a bit boring) shoot stuff and pirate. As a lone wolf. As a badass. That's what I wanted.

<experience>

1st try:After setting up the resolution and getting started wherever (irrelevant) I get into the ship, and realize there's no friggin weapons on board. <incite panic from memories of how easily it is do die in the alpha> and since I was going for the pillage and plunder pirate approach I this definitely needed fixing.
Trying to dock to the station - no luck, as it turned out you now have to ask clearance, which is either new or I did'nt remember.
No affordable ships to buy, I settled with 3 light PBC's and the weakie shield after remembering how quickly it was necessary to increase faction rep.
But I was'nt able to fit the third pbc to the pylon mount. (which, in the original game, was not a problem if I remember correctly, because I had like 5 quad lights on my patcom at one time)
Not being able to resolve this (and remembering I could hold my own against 2 patcoms in the alpha), I went with trying to find someone to shoot and loot. Most freighters would not talk to me, so I decided to only shoot to get a hang of the game.
Every time I did so at a station I got my little yellow truck's ass handed to me, so I scouted out a lagrange point instead, but every time I got close, all the NPC's in the viscinity bid farewell and went on their merry LDSy ways.
Time to get some LDSi's me thinks, so after goin on a goosechase to find weapon sellers, and only finding 3 deserted stations after half an hour of LDSing, I decided to call it quits.

2nd try a bit later: managed to get a hold of LDSi's went to jump point to scout, and as soon as I arrived everyone started to leave as usual. The problem with this was, that although it says "transport" or "utility" in the contact's menu, if everyone's spammin their lil heads off with fare wells I never could identify my target's ship shape (as in -truck or SNRv, fuel or pod hauler) not to mention identify wether it has any cargo on it...
After 3 jumps and no luck I decided to wing it, and LDSi'd the first transport's ass as soon as it popped up in the contact. No effect. It was gone. Second try also to no avail, so I got in close and took out some engines before it could jump to LDS. And then I got shot down with them turrets in a flash.

3rd try: Well, I guess I need a bigger ship. Edited the player start to give me more cash, bought the patcom, and 3 pbc's to go with it. Too bad that pylon mounts can't mount PBC'S, so I'm left with one PBC on the comsec. OOOKAY, then I need some weapons for this ship, so lets scout for some underground places and weapon sellers. Trying to find weapon sellers cost me around 45 mins, but the LDS was way faster on this ship at least. Noone sold me Pylon weapons even in Emerald with allied rep to NSO or system defence fleets. Tried to find pirates by rumour sellers. Found a drone base and got my ass kicked.

This was when I decided to give up until I found out what I did wrong, and why I can't find any gear for the ship.

Point:
After spending a couple hours on traveling and reading the library, I was nowhere closer to understaning the fundamental game mechanics. And that leads to ragequit. I went into so much detail so you could benifit from a fresh point of view. There are a whole lot of things that is probably taken granted because of the immense develpoment time you've done on it.

If it is at all possible, give some boundaries as a tutorial, so the player can't get killed off so easily (traditional RPG's do this by only having low level mobs around starting areas, and lets face it, this game is sort of an RPG now, money is your skill points, and your ship & equipment is your talent tree)

Guides can be quests for cargo (and getting rewarded in money AND cargo, just to really lock in the hire-fly-dock-buy-sell mechanics of it all) or liquidation contracts (weak enemies, in segregated places, maybe a nav point in a remote location with some floating pods nearby, with a not too hard-ass enemy). Maybe even exploration (reward being a better active sensor for discovering x new unstable cap routes for NSO Lapace's shipping). And, even asteroid claims, or locations for X amounts of trafficked minerals from a frequented mine.

All of these could, in a second phase of the quest, direct you to do  the stuff you would actually be doing if you wanted stuff to get done. What I'm saying is, after a liquidation mission, to restock on  ammo, possibly buy new gear, you would be contacted to try and contact a shady dealer at a pirate base in X system, so you should "ask around for rumours"; Bang! Rumour seller on the nav sheet. And maybe let it be the 3rd from the list down. (and make sure no drones or evil dudes at either one). There you could be refered to another guy who has better gear in another system, but you need to do him a favor; his rival is moving XY components, they need tracking down, and liberating (pretty much how it was done in EOC)

After finishing these missions one would not be lost at all. You would know where to look to find something, and know what to expect when searching or trading for something.

I sincerely hope you won't freak out by the size of the post (preview's not working well on the forum for me) I hope it doesn't break any guidelines either. I just really wanted to contribute. Keep up the good work!

I am currently going over eyewitness's and Alex Heartnet's comments in detail, as they are providing invaluable feedback about what I can do to make the game better.  I kindof expected these kind of issues, but I needed the beta out there to have them revealed clearly to me.  Thank you very much, both of you, and everyone else who has given critical feedback and information.  It helps.