Very good feedback. One thing I do not agree on is that the maps are to big, I do hope they get much bigger.

Plus 1 for spawn camping. Just happened to me in FW. Someone put an uplink down, map looked safe to deploy there. Deployed and there was a heavy and some other people just mowing us down. Pissed me off so bad that I had to turn the game off. All of the FW matches I've played, I've never dealt with that in there. FW had an invisible line of respect, but after that.... I might just stay away from it and go play with the blues in pub matches.

Spawn Killing is like my pet peeve. I hate when people on my team do it and vice versa. I remember one pub, me and this dude were hacking the CRU and our team mate started shooting at us to stop hacking it. Like wtf? Why spawn kill?

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Anyway Vilstan, don't give up.

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the spawn/map system took 5 minutes to figure out on my 1rst day... what is so foreign about it? red = enemy = standard. do not spawn near them. if your coming from cod or this is your 1rst fps then you should get out more and play something besides AAA titles. dust is really not that hard if you actually can be assed to play it.. especially now they implented auto aim, seriously how much easier can they make it for you? dust does suck but not for the reasons listed. there now i am speaking in absoloutes also.

I'll preface this by saying that I'm sure people are going to refer back to the famously steep learning curve and harsh unwelcoming environment of EVE. That works for EVE. I love EVE, and the unforgiving and risky environment is part of what makes it great. But there is a key distinction - there is no other game like EVE. If you want to play anything like EVE, there is EVE, and only EVE. If it has warts and faults you have to put up with them.

Not so for Dust. If I want to play a scifi fps...I have unbelievable amounts of options. I chose to give Dust a try because I really love EVE and want to love Dust as well. However it doesn't seem to love me back. As an FPS, it seems to be distinctly mediocre and suffer many glaring faults.

1) The new player experience is pretty horrific. Not *quite* as bad as the new player experience in Planetside 2, where they just hurled you into the middle of a massive firefight as the very first thing in the game. My first kill there was a friendly medic who was wearing camo and healing me and I had no idea what was going on. It's not quite that bad here, but it's pretty bad. You have no idea what's going on, what you are supposed to be doing, how to not die over and over instantly. I know how fittings work from EVE, but scanning seems pretty important and is never explained anywhere. Sometimes you'll unload an entire clip into a guy, he'll casually turn and kill you. Othertimes you drop someone in 3 bullets. It all seems wildly inconsistent. New players can't learn if they can't tell what is going on. The information conveyed by the death screen in PS2 is pretty bad and I feel like this one is even less informative.

2) Spawn camping. Most games seem to go out of their way to prevent spawn camping. This game downright encourages it! Part of that is the way the different spawn options work, and I understand why they have done it the way they have, but a new player isn't really going to figure that out. All he's going to know is he keeps spawning and then getting instantly mowed down. Maybe some sort of visual indicator of 'safe' spawn points vs non safe spawn points?

3) Orbital strike. Thematic, yes. Gameplay wise, I think it's horrible. Particularly as people seem to like to drop it on spawn points. Plus, roofs don't seem to protect you.(?)

4) Matchmaking: Atrociously bad. There are almost no close fights, it's almost all hilarious one sided blowouts. Usually there's a couple guys running around from the same corp going 12/0, 16/1 or whatever, and everyone on the other team is like 2/8 or something. Sometimes you're on the team with the miracle crew, sometimes you're not. Either way, the success or defeat is pretty much pre determined for you by the matchmaker and your actions have no impact

5) Extremely poorly explained victory conditions: one match where there were no amazing 20/0 killers just wiping everyone out, it was a close match. Our MMC was very close to death, theirs was a little farther away. With a heroic effort, we managed to capture ALL the null cannons! And there was much rejoicing. Now we just have to ferociously defend them for a few more seconds until their MMC dies and..oh wait, what? Our MMC just blew up anyway? But there are no null cannons shooting at it! This wouldn't be a big deal if the game weren't full of moments telling you that what you are doing doesn't matter

6) You feel you aren't having any kind of impact at all and that what you are doing barely matters. Ok, so we're anonymous mercenaries doing whatever we want.. That's nice, but when one day I'm fighting for the Gallente in FW and the next day I'm fighting against them in FW, it really makes me not care a bit about the way the match actually ends and mostly about my own performance in it. And even your own payout seems to be mostly divorced from your actual performance. I seem to get about the same amount as when I own it up and kill 10 people and we win and I suck horribly and die 10 times and we lose. Your allies one match might be your enemies the next. One minute you're fighting at this end of the Universe the next you're fighting at the other end. Shrug. It all feels very ephemeral and pointless.

Contrast this to Planetside 2, where you are locked into one faction, the other factions are your hated rivals, you will come to trust and rely on other people in your faction and hate and watch out for other people in the other faction. At any moment, you can pop open the map and see how well 'your' faction is doing. You can organize with hundreds of other players from your faction and spend the whole day slowly sweeping across the map and turning it all blue. Each fight is a necessary stepping stone to the next fight, not a random disconnected pointless skirmish in the middle of nowhere. There is an ongoing war and at any moment you can see how it is going and you know your part in it.


(more below, apparently there is a fairly low character limit?)

i keep tyring, but the game steadfastly remains a steaming unfun pile of ****. The imbalances in the matchmaker are ludicrous.

Tried one of the new FW battles...I got 2 kills and died about 18 times. Sure I guess I could have gone AFK in the MCC or exited the battle (actually, how?) but there were teams of guys in prototype suits (all with like 12-11 kills apiece) camping all the spawn points far enough away they couldn't be seen on the map where you chose where to spawn.

I feel like I have to be missing major mechanics at this point - other people strafe back and forth MUCH quicker than I do. they run around bunny hopping and hipfiring weapons with much greater accuracy than I can manage aiming down sights. I've even seen people doing it with rail rifles, and from what I can understand these are supposed to be long range weapons requiring precision. Yet I see guys mowing down people in close quarters combat, madly bunny hopping away. There's no way that's all just 5% skills per level...is there any kind of tutorial at all for this game? I have to be missing something major here.

I'm using the dual shock controller on the PS3. Is everyone else using a keyboard and mouse or something?

I'm a new player. So far this game is the must unpleasant gaming experience I've had in a long time. Take it or leave it. I guess if you want to chase all feedback out with 'you're just an alt!' you can enjoy your ****** game sinking into mediocrity and oblivion.

I know how to do all these things in other FPS. I would have thought the skills would translate here once you learn the controls. But they are not. I always feel like I'm fighting through a sea of molasses in this game. Either I'm missing something major or something else is up.

I'm not an alt. Why would I be an alt? Is alt posting a thing everyone is paranoid about here?

I'm a new player. So far this game is the must unpleasant gaming experience I've had in a long time. Take it or leave it. I guess if you want to chase all feedback out with 'you're just an alt!' you can enjoy your ****** game sinking into mediocrity and oblivion.

I know how to do all these things in other FPS. I would have thought the skills would translate here once you learn the controls. But they are not. I always feel like I'm fighting through a sea of molasses in this game. Either I'm missing something major or something else is up.

I'm not an alt. Why would I be an alt? Is alt posting a thing everyone is paranoid about here?

I'm a new player. So far this game is the must unpleasant gaming experience I've had in a long time. Take it or leave it. I guess if you want to chase all feedback out with 'you're just an alt!' you can enjoy your ****** game sinking into mediocrity and oblivion.

Calling my current skillset mediocre is being far too kind. They are abysmally bad.

My issue is that I can't really tell what I'm doing wrong, which makes it hard to improve. Part of that is that I feel the TTK is quite low. The less time you have to analyze what you did wrong, the harder it is to learn from it. I mean if you do something obvious like stay in the same bit of cover too long and get flushed out by a grenade or decide to go face to face with a heavy with an LMG, the lessons are immediately and painfully apparent.

But this game has a lot of 'keel over dead instantly' moments and those are always hard to learn from.

Also I was never in any Academy of any kind. I created this account something like 8 months ago and played one game then my PS3 got the YLOD the next day. Is it something you can repeat?