SP != survivability, never has, never will.

I was taking on protosuits with only 1.5 million sp. That's because I play a lot of shooters. It's more about training new players on different play styles and having them learn ones that work for them, not giving them SP that they'll end up wasting on something they know nothing about yet.

PvE wouldn't really fix the game at least not at first, it could potentially kill the game actually.

now this is just a hypothetical, so take it with a grain of salt.

game population is about 800-900 active playing games not afk at any given time.

if PVE was introduced I suspect most new players would run to that rather then getting pub stomped, old players would then stick to playing PVP once they got bored of beating on dumb AI's.

this would leave pvp format as nothing but hardcore proto pub stompers if I was to to take a guess I'd say that is about 35% of the current pvp population but then how and when will the lowly newbie get into pvp? short answer they probably won't. any new player who tried to get into pvp would likely face an army of proto stompers

killing the pvp population slowly over time, and eventually the game.

player retention might go up, and I'm hoping for that result, but f their is no encouragement to move to the "more rewarding" pvp formats, then the game will lose both the pvp and pve minded players eventually.

And stop this PVE nonsense.

PVE is for story based AAA titles.

Why would anyone play Dust and shoot at bots? Its only useable for the EVE carebear peeps that are tired of getting stomped in a game that actually require some playerskill. This is not a point and click in space game, its an competitive shooter.

Dust has serious playerbase issues, taking even more players away is not a good idea.

What thing could CCP add that would increase average player count by several thousand?

I think: MTACs or Fighters.