Well today i made an alt up to run with some friends who have both just started and are coming back after not playing since chromo and all i can say is the new player matchmaking is awful. out of the 4 guys i spent an hour convincing to start playing only one is coming back tomorrow evening to try M/KB as he didn't realize you could use it.

The things that came up were just the completely un-balanced matchmaking.
We went in and started the academy battle, we had a good match both sides equally matched everyone had an average KDR i went 12/5 other went things like 7/9 5/4 11/7 ect all very similar and the top 8 on each side had over 1000 wp

then we started a new match.... well an entire squad of full proto guys, other squads of mixed proto and adv and 3 tanks. going up a team of full starter corps who most of us had min 500k sp and probs max 2mill sp. we got f***in thrashed worse than a gimps backside.
Wouldn't have been too bad but all night we've come up against the same issue. the starting SP is so low you can barely get anything worthwhile. the assault rifle with none - lv1 skill is so pathetic the mercs may as wel just pick the stones up off the floor and throw at the proto guys cos they'd be more accurate and do more damage.

sometimes we've found the odd match that we've done reasonable at but the rest of the time has just been constant MD spam, forge spam and sniper spam. after an hour one guy got fed up and left saying he'll stick to BF3 and 4 shortly after another left saying he was just fed up of not being able to move more than 10m without dying after 3hours i was by myself with a couple of messages on my psn telling me they're deleted the client and are gonna give the game a miss as they didn't enjoy one bit of it as they were just constantly spammed over and over again.

problem is this isn't the first time i've had this from my friends. i've got 9 recruits and the only 1 still playing is me on an alt i made.

My ideas to make it a more welcoming and gentle introduction.

Matchmaking needs to be more balanced, the academy is a great idea but you're removed from the gentle approach far too quickly. players need to be matched by individual skill points or maybe a squad average so everyone is running the same skill leveled setups.

Starting SP.
Far, far, far too low. the original setups of giving you a fixed set of starter skills and skill books depending on the role you want would be a lot better. starting with approx 1mill sp with fixed starter skills gives them a little more chance of survival.
Also, new recruits should receive 2x SP gain for the first 30days (allow boosters to increase that further) this will allow them to feel good about getting skills trained and that little buzz you get with a new weapon or suit that finally unlocks to try give a positive first month experience.

After just them 3 hours my friends morale for the game was just crushed and there was no excitement just misery and frustration and its not just them, 80% of the 385 members of my corp all feel the same way. most of us feel its a chore to play the game and we're just here to grind out to skill gap and only relief is when we do. the only reason we keep coming back is because of the time we've invested and the constant telling ourselves its got to get better soon.
there was a reason we had the AFKMCC issue. People are simply just rubber banding the analogues and doing it that way instead of wanting to actually play teh game. its time CCP woke up and realized that for the most part the game isn't much fun anymore we need something other than the constant proto stomping in pub matches we need the infestation mode, somewhere to go with a small group of mates to go against some AI to blow off steam when you've had your 6th match in a row of being forged, MD'd and sniped all round from the red line or trundled around a near empty map and come out with 200wp each.

Personally as much as i have a love/hate relationship with the game i just pray that it will be around long enough to fulfill its potential but with the constant bad decision CCP seem to be making to p**s off the player base and the ridiculous idea to not even release a compatible client for ps4 i just cant see DUST surviving another 12months. with average 4000 people online at once, falling to about 2500-3500 once folk have capped out and other big name shooters coming out i just see the player base coming online to cap out and then going off to play bf4 and cod leaving dead maps the other 4days of the week