Not my job to coerce and hold hostages. Sorry. I am sure his leaving is noted, I am also quite sure that if his leaving was to be blamed on any 'balance' changes there is little to nothing anyone can do to change that penalty back.

Without this penalty cal logi would be the next screamed about thing as people gravitate towards the new anti-armor rifles and make a laughing stock of the current fotm and shields becomes the next in the barrel to be chased in an imperfect balanced game we have.

Scrambler Rifles are sort of new. There were a handful but it wasn't prevalent. The game at this point should not be this susceptible to a sudden rise of FoTM. The current FoTM is thanks to the power of Burst. The ScR ability to charge a shot and the ARs absurdly ease of use and power. Shields get wrecked. Armor isn't far behind.

There is another issue here and it's not shield recharge rate.

Sorry to see you dial back, though I don't blame you at all. There's only so much effort anyone can put in without seeing a return on investment, and you're only the latest in a long tradition now of vets gracefully stepping away after trying their best and hitting a wall. I also know full well that this is a morale blow to other players, some of which will also leave as a result.

To address the OP - Unfortunately far too many players have threatened to quit or take a break from Dust over just about every little change that its no longer reasonable to expect CCP to respond to that kind of appeal. That being said, CCP is a business at the end of the day, and can only expect to maintain customers if they put effort into the relationship they have with their players (however meager at times).

The plight of the scout is rather specific, but also related to a much more deep-seated problem. I'll start with the more deep-seated problem first: CCP has left a trail of half finished projects winding all the way back to April of last year when the first beta keys were handed out. The reasons why are still lost on me, and one can only hope that CCP Rouge has the business sense to end this pattern once and for all. Its still too early to tell.

We see evidence of this everywhere: even the recent FW changes rely on a marketplace and team deploy to function, both of which currently exist as "things we need to do". The Sentinel bonus is the posterchild (though I prefer to liken it to the nasty booger stuck in CCP's beard that they've left there for years). Simply put, they really had no business programming in a bonus to an unreleased weapon, in hopes they'd follow up with it later. They haven't, and I still have no idea when we'll see an Amarr heavy weapon. Planning for the future is one thing, saying "When we have __________ this will be awesome" is quite another. We often don't end up with _________, just the unfinished eyesore in the meantime.

This brings us to the Scout, the latest casualty of this longstanding practice. Essentially Scouts are terrible because they're waiting around for Cloaks to make them not-terrible. But as everyone knows we don't have cloaks, just the half finished battlefield role. This isn't even a racial suit we're talking about, its a whole playstyle with its own dwindling fanbase.

To me the solution is simple - its time for CCP to finish projects they start, and to do something radical for such a forward-thinking game. They need to start designing for the present. Not the future, not for "next patch", for the present. Every build should be highly playable, balanced, with design choices that inherently work in the context of the current release. Its great that CCP has plans for cloaks - but everyone deserves to be able to run as a Scout NOW if they'd like, not in several months. CCP should design with room for iteration in mind, but shouldn't be releasing content that depends on other content to function unless released simultaneously.

All that to say, I'm totally emptyhanded in terms of encouragement here, I'd also be reaching that point of frustration if I were you and I don't blame you for your decision. As for me, all I can do for now is to continue to approach this with CCP Rouge as a process problem, not a tribal problem. None of this has anything to do with CCP shitting on Scouts in particular, or the Scout community - it has to do with failing to improve judgement over what content to release and balance and in what order. The sooner they learn that bleeding customers while waiting for a magic content bullet is just bad business, the sooner we can turn this around not just for Scouts but for everyone else in the community as well.

You're right. I too use the scout suit for speed; beginning of the match, load the "Haxlink" suit, run to the first objective with uplinks. Hack, drop uplinks, hack depot, switch to Logi or Assault.

That's the extent of the viability :)

Thank you for this. This is something that I've been attempting to articulate as well. I'm relieved to see that a member(s) of the CPM recognizes the flaw in the design process that might work for a game akin to EVE but does not rationalize well in Dust.

When things are broken in Dust, there is no way for the player to step back and away from the thing that is frustrating them - this is ALL that Dust is. Our content is limited to fighting and only fighting. When the battlefield mechanics are broken, the only thing we can do as players is endure the frustration or step back from the game itself entirely. There's no crafting mechanics. No trade. There's no PVE. There's nothing but a long series of frustrating fights coping with weird, unreliable mechanics and dropsuits with mismatched bonuses.

Doing this, from a business stand point, cannot sit well with them. When this happens, they potentially lose players indefinitely. When they rely on the market to bring in income, they need players to be interacting with that market which means playing the game. Players are not paying when they're not playing; this is a serious problem.

The game is a serious up hill battle for enjoyment when there are unfinished mechanics that negate the validity of an entire class.

Well spoken. Thank you for the support and understanding that you're showing the players, as a player yourself.

This is the only reason I still jump into battles, I only play with my friends now. I used to enjoy soloing when the matches, even with unreliable teammates (it happens, such is life), were still balanced. You might have lost but it was more rarer than not to actually be crushed completely. Now? Not so much. A team is routed so quickly and so well, even when both teams have players in squads, that you rarely see matches that are an actual fight.

It's no fun being on either side in one of those matches. It's especially prevalent in Domination and Ambush while Skirmish is just as bad, only with a longer duration typically. I have seen more matches in Skirmish ending in one team being 'cloned out' than I ever have before. I think that shouldn't happen as frequently as it is now.

Which is a shame. While Dust is drastically improved by utilizing squads, playing solo shouldn't be so detrimental in Public matches of all places. There are just days where you enjoy playing solo. It is definitely more fun with a squad, though. I've seen a decline in squads since they removed the warbarge from public matches.

On that note, why did they do that? It was awesome and was a great place for them to let players advertise their AURUM variant dropsuits.