I've been playing with a lot of new people over the last few days, trying to get a feel for how they view the game. One of the biggest issues I see them having is figuring out where they fit in on the field. They have a crazy number of places to spend skill points and very few of them have people in-game looking to help them get their priorities in order for their skill tree. They spend days if not weeks wasting away precious SP on things they will likely put down for something else before long. IF they stay around that long after seeing that all of their bad choices collect up, many people I have run with were talking about quitting altogether since they had wasted so much time and SP already and didn't have it in them to start all over in a new branch. I met one guy who had spent all of his SP on day one before he'd played his first match into vehicle turrets thinking that vehicles were something that auto-spawned on the field like in Battlefield. Another had dumped all of his into dropsuit command and Amarr heavies because it just happened to be the first things on the list, then didn't understand why the suit he'd specced into was so slow compared to everyone else.

I understand that New Eden is supposed to be an unforgiving environment where you are supposed to live with your choices, but that exact thing seems to be a large (not claiming it's the biggest, but it is one of the biggest) contributing factor to player retention issues. They know nothing about how fitting a suit works, how passive skills effect them, which weapons work best for them, which skills are important for them and which ones are useless to them, and they know nothing about how different racial suits function compared to each other. And most are not interested in reading a ton of stuff from the get-go just to start playing a game. Back in the closed beta days we could say "HTFU, Welcome to New Eden", etc., etc., etc., but now that it is painfully obvious that that attitude is hurting the player count as bad as it is, sticking to our guns on the issue will only do us harm.


I propose that we offer 2 respecs to new players to help ease their transition into Dust 514 from other shooters. When they first log into Dust, they should be reminded that they will have the opportunity to respec their skill points at two SP checkpoints, once when their SP total is between 4 & 5 million and once when their SP total is between 9 & 10 million. This should also be explained in the introduction to make sure it sinks in that these are the only times to do this. When the SP total of a character hits one of these checkpoints, have it trigger a flag that puts a red tab on the top skill tree in which they can respec their SP one time while they are within the SP range provided above.


And before anyone says it, no this does not effect me in the slightest. This will in fact increase my competition since new players will be able to correct mistakes they made when they were still learning the game basics.