As I've said before, I'm so very tired of the constant stomping and can't really see any better way of upping the action than go in in small groups, mostly 2-4 dudes per squad. This way we can't be all over the battlefield, there will always be an unguarded point etc. This means that we most of the time have players on the field to fight and we don't have to stand on the redline. It also means we'll get some truly awsome fights when we're up against stacked teams. You know, FUN!

So yeserday this is what we do. We're 3 players and we mostly played dom. And a trend was starting to reveal itself. Many corps and groups of players were "stuck in our queue", meaning that they were in our games for 2 hours more or less. So when put on our team they bring out their ARs, LAVs and playing the point and trying to win, nothing new about that.

The next game, when facing us, they never even leave the redline. And here we're talking about 6 dudes from the same corp a corp thats been here since beta ffs, all bringing out their snipers to sort of spite us I believe. And yes I do indeed see the joy in that. Off course this leads to a very boring game for us and I would believe the other 10 dudes having their prime group of that battle not taking part. And this repeated itself more or less several times with various groups of players.

I remember back in the early days of MAG, my first competitive shooter. I had a scrub clan, with scrubby players, myself included. We were normally very happy if we could do a game and not go negative KDR wise. So back then also, our little group of rag tag scrubs and houswives were set up against Q-synced teams from the best corps in the game. And what did we do?

We faught them with nails and teeth. We played as tight as we could, pure combat updates/tactics on coms. In short: we did all that we could and tried to make our organization count towards beating players with way better gungame. Trying to get into 2 vs 1 scenarios. Trying to outflank and hit one spot with our 8 man squad etc. Naturally we mostly failed horribly. We got stomped over and over. Slowly but steadily our performance got better, we got respected and eventually became a factor in MAG. This was mostly the trend in MAG, most battles were filled with fierce competition, or at least thats what my rosie memories tell me....

This is far from the average situation in Dust. This goes for both the less skilled and the pro tryhards. I've been in group with and seen so many players with 5+ KDR leave battles or spawn back into the warbarge as soon as the fighting gets though. The scrubs hide out for different reasons than the tryhards, they're mstly interrested in saving that KDR, they can put up a fight but just can't be bothered. Both of these mentalitie doesn't go well with me.

Fighting agaist better players, do you really think that its benefitial for your learning curve to:
Stay at the redline sniping?
Stay at some high point, a house or rail or whatever, taking the occational pot shot? You know popping your head up and shoot somone in the back while he's engaged in ground fighting...
Same goes for the perifferee hero, sirkling the outskirts with a RR or Scr.
Same goes for the logibro suddenly calling in a tank and drives aimlessly around. And so on.

Why don't you people try to better yourself?
Why don't you form up, wait for each other and try to blitz the point from various angles?
Are you really content with having an evasive doctrine vs any good team you play? Really?

IMO the Dust community is the worst I have seen in terms of player skill and cheap "lets make the game boring" tactics. Way too few try to fight the odds and improve their gungame and tactics, its just safer and better to get defensive, even if the current battlfield dictates that you'll attack or lose the game.

Conclusion:

Isk payout and perhaps even skillpoints should be affected by winning or losing a battle. This difference should be large enough to matter. At least a 3 to 1 difference. Hopefully this will lead to a mental shift of the general community giving us back more intense and fun battles, and that is the most important improvement of Dust IMO.

My personal choice for things done right would be to remove the sp dole and replace it with differential WP rewards - noob taking down 40 million sp vet running full proto should be damn well rewarded for it, that same vet should get fractional payouts for harvesting that same noob. But what we should all be rewarded handsomely for is the win.