There is no need for newbies to 'catch up' with vets in SP.

Pretty soon they'll be vets and a new set of newbies need to catch up, what then? Do we suddenly give them 100M SP in the first month so they'll not feel bad playing against 200M SP vets?

EVE reverted back to 80k starter SP just for this reason.

I have capped out every week since the switch to weekly. Hell, I never missed a daily cap either. I usually cap out on Thursday or Friday at the latest.
Anyone remember the thread posted on the first Wednesday? Mr Zitro capped out in about 4 hours. Other tankers were very close (Granted, they had Surya and Sagaris tanks on Manus Peak Ambush).
I've capped out on a Wednesday more than 5 but less than 10 times. You think it's a grind when SP gains end at 1000? the daily cap had each and every match after the cap give out 50 SP. (though the active cap was 27200 and passive was 28800 per day)

I am in full support of a cap. No cap and SP gain of 5/sec + WP? I would honestly have every skill at 5 except those skills that don't give bonuses.

I think that new players need an unlimited cap, up to 5 million SP. While increasing this minimum cap by 400,000 per month after it is implemented.

I'd really like the rollover system to only last 1 week. 190400 for normal, take a week off and it is 380800, but take two weeks off and it is diminishing returns. A maximum Rollover of 500000 SP

Anything to help new players. No cap till 5 million sounds reasonable. Full rollover system too. The gap is bad and new players are rare. The fact that player count is so low that vets are always fighting noobs does not help. This needs a fix before any $ is spent on marketing.

I voted for a rollover system and I regret that decision.

What I would like to see however is a Rollover SP or Banked SP system that has a cap on it.

I understand not everyone wants to play Dust all the time, people go on vacation, have lives, play other games etc., but I don't see why we should reward players for not playing the game. In eve passive SP is only gained if one is paying their subscription. There is no possible to way for a new player in EVE to go and grind out a 150m+ toon. Why are we trying to make it so in Dust? In EVE there are always bigger fish and I think that's something we've lost sight of in Dust.

"Bigger fish" is a misleading term anyways. In regards to "catching up with the pros" I strongly believe this is a myth supported by players who do not want to acknowledge that the reason they get stomped is not because there are people with more SP and better gear but because there are people who are just better than them. I have 30m SP right now. I was as strong as I was ever going to be on my main fit 15m SP ago. The rest is just luxury - new toys and expensive vehicles that don't put me any more ahead of the pack when it comes to 1v1 encounters. When I have 60m SP I won't be any stronger than I am today in my Templar Assault with my Templar ScR.

My point is that if you don't play the game, and don't invest the time into it, you shouldn't get the same rewards as the people who do just for showing up once in a while.

What I propose is that we limit the amount of SP eligible for the rollover system. This could be somewhere around 1 million SP players could grind out if they quit dust for a couple months, have busy work weeks, go on vacation, etc. It doesn't punish players for taking short breaks from the game but also it doesn't allow players who abandon the game for extended periods of time to come back without consequence.

tl;dr
1mil max SP rollover on active SP doesn't punish short breaks and encourages people to actually play

This is right on the money. The 'never catch up' argument comes from peeps who don't understand that the sp costs rising with level is the great equalizer that allows noobs to become vets in the same time it take vets to get that last level in their skills.

The system is already designed to accommodate the noob vs. vet disparity.

SP rollover.

It does have the problem of boosters being used to do things like super back to back grind sessions to cut down on the value of booster needed, but that tends to happen anyway.

You could have SP trickle into the active pool much like passive SP over time, without a limit on it - when a booster is plugged in, keep the trickle the same but have an additional 'bonus' pool, for example.


Also, no cap for newbies until they have a solid chunk of SP. I would also suggest an accelerated rate of SP gain for newbies.

This would be true if DUST was more like EVE with regard to what certain skill levels "unlock" for the player. However, in DUST you have the situation where, in some cases, the only items worth using are of the "complex" type (requiring related skill at 5). I'm talking about shield extenders, damage modifiers and such. The difference in performance across tiers is simply too large to make usage of sub-complex gear viable. This situation strongly favors high SP players, and is very noob-unfriendly.

The only problem I see with complete removal of active SP, and only leaving passive SP is:

In EVE, SP gain is monetized by having to pay a subscription to the game so keep gaining SP over time.

In Dust, no subscription is required to play. In this case, this would bring about:
1. Players who think, I can never catch up to the vets in SP, so why bother? This is similar to how a lot of people mistakenly believe this in EVE. However, the difference between both games is that player skill and knowledge does not give you as much of an advantage in a first person shooter.

2. Players just signing up, creating an alt and leaving it to accrue SP over a long period, finally coming back to the game and having the same amounts of SP as someone who started at the same time. As it is, the game already suffers from a low player count, this would, IMO, compound the problem.

3. Players who think there are no rewards for playing apart from ISK gain. See point 2.

In any case, this would reduce a revenue stream in the form of active boosters, and we have no way of knowing if passive booster sales would increase, though in all likelihood they probably wouldn't.

While some people play for fun (I hardly cap and genuinely enjoy playing Dust), for a lot of gamers today, it's all about the carrot and stick. All passive SP would not be a large enough carrot to entice them to play, as they hold the mentality that they should be rewarded some way or another just for participating.

My 0.02 ISK

Absolutely not true and proven by many mercs in many instances. Peeps can & do perform very well in pubs running militia/standard gear. CCP has done a good job in that respect.

The primary variables are player skill and the ability to adapt your playstyle to your tactical environment.

In a F2P game, the point is to make it ALWAYS attractive to come back and play it, even if you took a break to play other games for a while. .

Hey all,

As someone in on the meeting with the CPM yesterday I can say that it was pretty great and went well!

Having spoken with a bunch of you, the SP Rollover seems to be something that's been thrown around the community quite a while before I joined. It's something we're definitely interested in exploring further and discussing internally, but I'd welcome any thoughts you all have as to what would be the best system to encourage both new and veteran players.

The CPM are going to be continually involved in discussions with us about this and would be a great place to start for getting your thoughts and suggestions heard.

Cheers :)

You're talking about an completely unrelated thing here.

A player like 13ear will probably perform excellently even with a 1M SP character and running militia/standard gear. However, this is due to the fact that he is an extremely skilled player and has absolutely nothing to do with amount of SP and gear he's running.

In a similar fashion, if you took a complete noob to DUST (or FPS games in general), gave him a 30M SP character and a billion ISK, he would probably still suck at DUST.

All of this, however, doesn't change the fact that CCP has done a lousy job (at least, a good portion of it) in balancing gear across tiers.

I thought the topic here was helping new players close the SP gap towards vets. Not that vets perform well running cheap fits.

Your ideas are all painfully complicated and serve no purpose other than to punish those who want to excel at the game.

Remove the SP cap.

Anything else is wasting time and developer resources just to pacify entitled whiners who don't want people who work hard to have any advantage over people who do.

The attraction of a passive sp system is that it removes the OCD-like need to grind, which is an unpleasant game experience for many. Nobody wants this to feel like a second job. On top of that the step up players have to make to accommodate running merc corps in New Eden is already fairly joblike and consuming.

The attraction of an active sp system is that it rewards players for personal performance in battle and for contributions to the team and the win.

I think we can have both of these sp-accrual methods working together in a much more synergistic fashion.

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Proposed:

Mercs accrue only passive sp, but at a rate modified by performance in-match.

So every merc would get sp at a constant trickle, just like we do now. Warpoints would be rewarded in-match just like they are now. At the end of match these warpoints would be converted to a bump up in the rate of passive sp accrual.

This bump up would not be permanent, but would last for a day or a week or whatever timeframe seems reasonable. To simplify the accounting on our devs writing the code to keep track of this, it would be nice if today's total warpoint->sp bump up would accumulate throughout a day's playing and get applied to the passive trickle rate the next day.

Caps could still apply, active and passive boosters could still work, rollover could still work. My belief is that because the rewards are not an immediate sp-payoff, the pressure to grind would be somewhat ameliorated.

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That's really the core of my proposal. i think we could still give out lump-sum sp rewards at end of match, but these would be only for team and squad-based performance.

- A team bonus for the win.

- A squad bonus based on the total extra WP a squad earned from their squad bonus WP only.