yet IWS says it's cool cuz keeping them in academy longer means more players left. So pushing them out this early means they'll stay? lol... yea people love getting a beatdown as seen in this video. That looks fun.

Yes, we are.For a number of reasonswe're running tests on a weekly cadence right now, so we don't really have time to explore the entire possibility space variable-by-variable. Instead we're jumping between reasonably optimized implementations of various different plausible models of new player behavior, to try and establish as quickly as possible which model gets us in the right ballpark. We have a number of likely-looking mountains that we want to do a rough height-check on; once we've established some baselines for those, we'll be in a position to consider doing hill-climbing to find local maxima.

lol no ****, you just get told what to say.

Sit IWS sit, good dog.

This is a combination of a terrible NPE in Dust as well as a gamer who is just being introduced to competitive multiplayer shooters.

Yeah... ok.. sometimes is funny, i'm guilty of teasing the occasional NooB too...but i feel horrible after, and i let them kill me few times as a "Sorry" type of thing. Still... we should try to be a bit more welcoming with new players, and you know that.

Academy folks that have not been in the game long, hell from the very start of the game, need clear progression points until your in the clear so to speak and have a decent amount of sp and battles under your belt.

Have some basic classes to look at visually and then have the game prompt you to skill towards (For instance a brawler type "Assault" visual image might suggest speccing into damage mods and core shield / armour skills where as an advanced medic type might suggest equipment and hit point extenders like shield extenders and armour plates.
Maybe a testing area for the weapon types and ranges, a firing range would be ideal.

Also academy should be just like the original game modes, yes you can tweak the clone count but dont make it too small.

Some basic voice overs and visual guides would do the trick to inform the new players about things like null cannon objectives, what supply depots and CRU`s do etc...

lame, but if done properly wouldnt "athena" be able to be used for more than just that localized first time speaking


I.E when using google translate, you can have it read short sentences back to you in any language, or how some old computers used to have a text to speech function

edit- I see and you know IWS, it becomes difficult to have conversations or debates with you as a lot of the time you edit your previous post instead of posting a new one