3 days? more like 3 months.

Trial by fire works for people who have calloused feet or the mind of a zen master, I'd suspect that alot of new players have neither. The game is tough, I came in at a decent time, i got to experience some protostomping but not to the level where people are saying they've run out of stuff to skill into. These guys are coming into a game where people have 35+ million skill points and tons of cash, do you really think telling them "oh it will get better a few months down the road" will convince more than a handful of them to stick around?

I do like the mentoring idea but it would have to be volunteer only, there would have to be players willing to join a designated corp that all new players came into where the volunteers could help acclimate them.

Still, going back to the metal gear online reference, I feel like this game would do better if the players had a little control over their matches, if they could make their own rooms with their own rules and number of clones or objectives or join anyone else's and stay in as long as they wanted, none of this getting kicked out to join an entirely new group of people. There was also a designated training section where players who were experience enough could share knowledge or just screw around with anyone who wanted to come in, in a room where stats weren't affected.

There's a difference between a game that's hard and a game that's punishing, I've played dark souls and the difference between dust and and anything in the souls series is that it's rewarding to overcome certain challenges, challenges that gradually become more difficult as you go on, if this were put in a souls setting it would be like introducing you to the four kings boss in the first 5 minutes.

This is exactly why things aren't changing, because people can comfortably sit back and say "well you'll just have to tough it out", and if someone quits it's because they weren't tough enough or didn't know to seek out dust uni or something, I have alot of friends who are hardcore gamers and I wouldn't even want to get them into the game because it would just be torturous and they would move on to play other things. It's just not fun to get your face shoved into the dirt by vets.

I'd rather think that if someone quits out of that kind of frustration then we (players and devs) could be doing a better job to make the game more enjoyable without sacrificing the kind of difficulty that helps people learn.

When I started playing dust in beta I got stomped, there wasn't even an academy back then.

That was a long time ago.

And i'm still playing.

But expecting newcomers to do the same thing is rediculous. That was one of the problems with DCUO pre-server-merge. There was too much ganking for the newcomers to even get in their stride, let alone get to the same level as the ones doing the ganking. The only people who DON'T want this are people who think killing newcomers EVERY MATCH is fun. I don't, I want close matches. Not all the time, but I want matches that were as close as the ones in Open Beta. When there was no tank, I mean.

Remember though that in a video game "brutal and ruthless" means "no one gives two f*cks" and "we will just move on to another game".

Not everybody measures their c*cks by a video game.

This is NOT EVE where you just set off into the world and do whatever freely. This game is a specific thing in a specific context. It must have parameters and arbitrary limits in order to function as what it is supposed to be.

Right now the protostomping just makes everyone else give up and make a mockery of the game. There's so much f*cking around by those who know how to read a roster that it really isn't a combat war game. It's a frat party.

All the tryhards might like to prove their manhood in this video game but CCP as a company can't afford to cater to them. DUST is already the butt of jokes even on its own forums.