DUST Search - Keystones - A few thoughts on Dust's deeper issues

m twiggz wrote:

Leither Yiltron wrote:

Here IGÇÖve put a bit of a focus on how difficult it is to train new Dust players, but the presented issues reach farther than that. The map design is very bad for the entire concept of the light frame, for instance, and lends itself to the scoutGÇÖs GÇ£underpoweredGÇ¥ status. The suit tiers exacerbate balance issues. Low in-match player counts limit the impact of Planetary Conquest. The list goes on.

Most critically though on these keystones rest an unavoidable feeling I get after two years of working with Dust:

I feel like the game is constantly fighting against players getting together into a cohesive community. Its design favors veterans with high SP pools, but turns away fresh blood before they can become veterans. It rewards boring, lifeless play over tactics, strategy, and coordination. And these issues often go unnoticed or ignored, or at best simply arenGÇÖt part of CCPGÇÖs dialogue. While the people who want to recruit, train, and start new players on a journey of playing Dust gnash their teeth more priority is given to making the next new gun than tackling these hard core problems. Meanwhile hours and hours of hard work are poured into developing what community infrastructure we can. Many of those hours are wasted. The unfortunate part is that the only fix requires CCP to embrace their own vision of Dust as a community-centric FPSMMO, not just another lobby shooter.

I quoted the smallest post just for the sake of saving space, if I could i would have quoted all of it. I agree with some aspects you bring to the table. I've been playing Dust for a mere month now and find it much more interesting than most FPS game I have ever played. I understand what you're posting is just an opinion, as is mine.

As for the game favoring high SP players, this is only a half truth. Like I said earlier I've only been playing for just over a month now and have accumulated 3.5 million SP. just enough to get all of my important skills to advanced levels. I have absolutely no problem taking on players with 5, 10, even 15 million SP in a straight up fight. Perhaps it's because of my vast experience of FPS games, but never the less, new players are becoming more welcome to the game with additions of boosters, daily SP and the new aim assist which was added in this week.


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Leither Yiltron KILL-EM-QUICK RISE of LEGION 681	Posted - 2013.09.07 00:40:00 - [1] - Quote Typically I reserve this kind of post for my blog, but I think it deserves to go on the forums this time. A lot of times around these parts, we get mired down in the nitty-gritty details of the game's current shortcomings and successes. And with that, there's this tendency to forget or neglect the longer-term issues. This post has a bit of commentary on the sometimes distressing tics that plague Dust. By GÇ£a littleGÇ¥, I mean you might want to read it in multiple sittings. It was spawned off from a conversation held between quite a few really active community members, and I was perhaps unfairly shocked that they aligned for the most part. Brace yourself, I'm dropping the harshest statement up front. For quite a lot of people, even people who are totally sold on the concept of Dust 514, the game isn't fun to play in the long term. That's quite a bomb, but it's an unavoidable part of the discussion. Ignoring it is tiptoeing around an uncomfortable reality for the sake of sparing everyone's feelings. But it's an unfortunate truth. Even discounting the daily player count, you can point to countless stories of previously die-hard Dust fans that just don't really play much anymore. The primary reason to my eye? Despite Dust's roots in Eve Online and supposed adherence to a doctrine promoting the growth of in-game communities, there are an alarming slew of design decisions and feature prioritization choices that fight against promoting said growth. Some are results of hardware limitations, but even when that's the case it often seems like little work is being put towards creating stopgap measures until those limitations disappear. In-match player counts - This needs to be mentioned first, because it is the most impossible to fix directly. It's clear that CCP can't easily manage to increase the player counts from 16v16 on the PS3. Nevertheless, the small player counts combine very poorly with a great many other gameplay factors. It's critical to notice that the smaller the player count in battles, the harder it is for new players with small SP totals to accomplish a relevant battlefield task. Of course that situation is exacerbated by the way suits are tiered in Dust. The problem with player counts isn't that CCP can't push them farther up, necessarily. What's really bad is that CCP's other philosophies exacerbate problems with player count, rather than trying to mitigate the issues created by the situation. It's exceedingly hard for organized groups to justify taking on new players with the aim of training them for organized matches. The fewer people in the game, the more it costs to substitute out a seasoned veteran. Suit tiering - This is one of the biggest issues underlying why the new player experience of Dust 514 is absolutely brutal. In fact, trying to start out playing Dust 514 is harder than Eve Online in many aspects. An impressive and disheartening milestone, that. The current suit design philosophy is very ingrained- You start with a suit class, say medium frame. You decide on a few parameters, say speed, base shield and armor health, and slot layout. You call your vision for the suit "prototype", and then you dial back these critical numbers as you work your way down to "advanced" and "standard" levels. This really sucks at keeping new players in the game, or even having fun. Statistical disadvantages are not fun in any context. The recurring theme throughout this post is going to be training, and the way Dust fights against allowing the community to train new members. Gear tiers make it hard to train new players. If you instruct someone on how to play to their particular suit class at standard level, it's a much different instruction set than what they need to do at say prototype. And if you try to teach them prototype tactics, all you're going to do is get the poor guy killed for doing the right thing. The only real solution here is to sit down and really work out some ways to stratify players by skill points while still letting players with low SP pools have access to unique options that provide battlefield utility beyond just basic point-and-shoot gameplay. Certainly Dust needs to have a sense of progression, but the one we have now is not the way. Some interesting commentary suggested by a few people is that the current tiers are CCP's attempt to make money from the AUR market. I can say with confidence that they can make more money on AUR from retained players under a new tier system than they can trying to "bully" players into buying more advanced AUR equipment early. Map and game mode design - My focus here is on Skirmish, because while Ambush is an FPS staple it really isn't anything that sets Dust apart from the competition, or promotes any real sense of community. Skirmish 2.0, particularly with the current maps (maybe neglecting the new ones) is designed to be a strategically and tactically brain dead game mode in which skill points, gear, and raw gun skill are the only relevant factors to success. There are three points to be made:
Leither Yiltron KILL-EM-QUICK RISE of LEGION 681	Posted - 2013.09.07 00:40:00 - [2] - Quote (1) Relevant map objectives are overly centralized. Often a majority of objectives are set close together within relatively small outposts designed to promote close-quarters combat. This turns games into no-brainers on a tactical level. Despite the HUGE size of the maps there are perhaps a smattering of 5 or so critical points that anyone would ever care to defend. A lack of relevant alternative paths to objectives is also prominent. Granted all that itGÇÖs never a mystery where the other team is, and thereGÇÖs no real overall strategy to battles other than the initial push. This centralization lends itself to further downgrading the utility of any player whose forte isn't specifically raw killing. Which is, again, a huge blow to playing as a noob, training, and building a community. ItGÇÖs nearly impossible to create tactics that cater to any style except all kills all the time, and it throws a monkey wrench into community building since quite a lot of people prefer to play auxiliary roles in MMOGÇÖs. Training is basically impossible because GÇ£gun gameGÇ¥ is very much a skill of muscle memory, not one that can be conveyed and taught. (2) Lack of relevant secondary objectives - This deserves its own talking point, despite the fact that you could lump it somewhat under the term GÇ£centralizationGÇ¥. CRUGÇÖs, Supply Depots, and turrets are the only secondary objectives in SkirmishGÇÖs current iteration. And they all either suck or arenGÇÖt important enough to fight over generally. IGÇÖve made the arguments in all these cases before. With so few secondary objectives, the tactics of a typical Skirmish game rotate around just the null cannons. This drives newer players away from any sense that they can impact the overall outcome of games, and leads to stagnant kinds of strategies like forge-gunners camping lines of sight on consoles. The results are the same as the centralization. ThereGÇÖs never a place you can direct a trainee to go other than the cannons that makes a difference, and while at the cannons their inferior suits just waste clones. New players never feel like theyGÇÖre doing anything. ItGÇÖs very hard to understand why CCP have gone so minimal with secondary objectives. One could anticipate scanning outposts, small-scale mortars, forcefield generators, effective artillery, and more as authentic additions to the battlefield. It would certainly add a lot larger sense of movement- current designs encourage players not to move from a few spots for most of the battle. Right, clones. (3) Clone count - Clone count isnGÇÖt a terrible mechanic, but it is exceedingly poorly implemented. Not only does it discourage newer players from playing aggressively, it also makes it hard to justify even taking on a recruit into a battle because every clone counts. CCPGÇÖs entire concept of how many clones are really enough to play a round of Skirmish is entirely borked. Any push to retake a hotly-contested objective, even a successful push, will probably cost upwards of 30 clones. Given other clone bleeding factors, that leaves little room for error. All of these things combine to make Skirmish 2.0 a very boring game to play, even for veterans. ThereGÇÖs simply little to do other than shoot players who come into your kill box. WhatGÇÖs even scarier is that CCP have been making strides towards, not away from, the centralization mentality. Skim Junction is a prime example of a map with objectives that were literally brought to the center of the field when they used to more spread out. Supply depots have disappeared from Line Harvest, limiting the already tiny selection of secondary objectives there. Player grouping options - For a game thatGÇÖs supposed to be about vast alliances of players working as a team, thereGÇÖs a really pathetic lack of grouping options. CCP have been aware of this for over a year now, but resolutely march on with a very un-New-Edenish policy of severely limiting group sizes. The only commentary here can be terse. A limit to 6 player squads puts a dead halt to all kinds of training programs. You can only train players when they understand that they own the outcome of a battle. When youGÇÖve just got 6 guys against the world you not only canGÇÖt convey that thought, itGÇÖs not even true. Where can you queue up with more than 6 players? Planetary Conquest, where every hair of a disadvantage is typically not something you can afford.
Leither Yiltron KILL-EM-QUICK RISE of LEGION 681	Posted - 2013.09.07 00:40:00 - [3] - Quote Here IGÇÖve put a bit of a focus on how difficult it is to train new Dust players, but the presented issues reach farther than that. The map design is very bad for the entire concept of the light frame, for instance, and lends itself to the scoutGÇÖs GÇ£underpoweredGÇ¥ status. The suit tiers exacerbate balance issues. Low in-match player counts limit the impact of Planetary Conquest. The list goes on. Most critically though on these keystones rest an unavoidable feeling I get after two years of working with Dust: I feel like the game is constantly fighting against players getting together into a cohesive community. Its design favors veterans with high SP pools, but turns away fresh blood before they can become veterans. It rewards boring, lifeless play over tactics, strategy, and coordination. And these issues often go unnoticed or ignored, or at best simply arenGÇÖt part of CCPGÇÖs dialogue. While the people who want to recruit, train, and start new players on a journey of playing Dust gnash their teeth more priority is given to making the next new gun than tackling these hard core problems. Meanwhile hours and hours of hard work are poured into developing what community infrastructure we can. Many of those hours are wasted. The unfortunate part is that the only fix requires CCP to embrace their own vision of Dust as a community-centric FPSMMO, not just another lobby shooter.
Leither Yiltron KILL-EM-QUICK RISE of LEGION 700	Posted - 2013.09.07 19:59:00 - [4] - Quote m twiggz wrote: Leither Yiltron wrote: Here IGÇÖve put a bit of a focus on how difficult it is to train new Dust players, but the presented issues reach farther than that. The map design is very bad for the entire concept of the light frame, for instance, and lends itself to the scoutGÇÖs GÇ£underpoweredGÇ¥ status. The suit tiers exacerbate balance issues. Low in-match player counts limit the impact of Planetary Conquest. The list goes on. Most critically though on these keystones rest an unavoidable feeling I get after two years of working with Dust: I feel like the game is constantly fighting against players getting together into a cohesive community. Its design favors veterans with high SP pools, but turns away fresh blood before they can become veterans. It rewards boring, lifeless play over tactics, strategy, and coordination. And these issues often go unnoticed or ignored, or at best simply arenGÇÖt part of CCPGÇÖs dialogue. While the people who want to recruit, train, and start new players on a journey of playing Dust gnash their teeth more priority is given to making the next new gun than tackling these hard core problems. Meanwhile hours and hours of hard work are poured into developing what community infrastructure we can. Many of those hours are wasted. The unfortunate part is that the only fix requires CCP to embrace their own vision of Dust as a community-centric FPSMMO, not just another lobby shooter. I quoted the smallest post just for the sake of saving space, if I could i would have quoted all of it. I agree with some aspects you bring to the table. I've been playing Dust for a mere month now and find it much more interesting than most FPS game I have ever played. I understand what you're posting is just an opinion, as is mine. As for the game favoring high SP players, this is only a half truth. Like I said earlier I've only been playing for just over a month now and have accumulated 3.5 million SP. just enough to get all of my important skills to advanced levels. I have absolutely no problem taking on players with 5, 10, even 15 million SP in a straight up fight. Perhaps it's because of my vast experience of FPS games, but never the less, new players are becoming more welcome to the game with additions of boosters, daily SP and the new aim assist which was added in this week. Thanks for the reply and story. New player feedback is some of the hardest to track down while also being the most important to have. Let me hone in on one thing, though: m twiggz wrote: I have absolutely no problem taking on players with 5, 10, even 15 million SP in a straight up fight. I have a hard time believing this when you get to the 15 million SP range. Sure, it's possible, but at the very best it's an uphill battle against worse odds. And for sure even if you're taking on 15mil SP guys with your better gun game, that's an argument for the fact that CCP have made Dust a whole lot about slaying players and very little about anything else. For every 5 players who can pull these kinds of stunts off, there are probably 95 who can't. Also, you might be able to get through one or two lone wolf high-SP guys in public matches, but the problem blows up exponentially when talking about PC. It gets back to the training thing- I can't train a guy with only advanced gear when he comes up against a bunch of guys in prototype. The only thing he'll learn is that you shouldn't bring a knife to a gunfight. It just really puts a damper on the sense of community in Dust. Surely CCP are trying to take steps in the direction of fostering new players, but I'm afraid that a lot of changes that they've been making recently are basically band-aids covering up the more critical issues underlying why D514 can be so hostile to newbros. That's the essence of the post here.