What the skill system right now encourages you to do, if you're playing to not get stomped, is to focus on one weapon, one suit, one specialized playstyle.

A lot of the vets forget this, they forget / never even experienced what it's like to claw your way up this slow, boring skill tree in the face of insurmountable odds (proto squad red line ring a bell?) So, if the noobs are playing 'right' they're saving their SP, buying only gear that matches their skills, and only spending SP when unlocking the next level. For months, and months, and months (particularly free players). There is no deviation, minus that which you can attain through gimping yourself (remember, the noobs don't have skills to fall back on, and they might even be working on core skills, making this even worse).

So you've got new players, not allowed to experiment with new skills, buying the same boring gear game after game, stockpiling gear as it becomes available..playing match after match for that tiny boost in stats. No cool new looking gun, no actual change in game performance wise, save the statistical boost. At best you get a new color scheme. So all your gear is boring; static. All your skills are fairly boring (many don't even provide any boosts, and many more provide trivial boosts that are laughable at best, some of which don't even remotely match the suits or their supposed roles)

So at the end of the day, you've got the vets on one hand, rolling in cash (most anyways), with oodles of gear stockpiled, and the noobs, praying to god that their skill selection is actually worth a damn; that the gear they're dreaming about actually plays exactly as expected after months of going to that point.




There is no deviation. This is DUSTs problem. Your skills are static. The second you as a player evolve, the second YOU decide that a given playstyle no longer interests or appeals to you, too damn bad. You're forced to keep it. There needs to be a way to slowly reallocate skill points, to gradually pull them from one place and back into your SP pool. It's so damn boring, and offers no leeway for new and old players alike.