You make several good points sir. On the point of the scanners I don't agree that much. Most of my fots are running with 2 proto dampeners these days. Yes thats at least a sacrifice of almost 200 HP, well worth it IMO. But then again, I can still have 700 HP on my suit so I guess the point is void.

So we're back to splitting up this already tiny playerbase as the only viable sollution? Anyone got any better idea?

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.

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.

Yeah yeah heard it all before. The funny thing is that this mentality seems to be the leading one for such a large part of the comunity. We've done test after test running cheaper fits with merely any difference in results. Teamwork, gungame and fighting spirit wins the battles, gear is merely the top of the iceberg.

Actually I did another 10 game test 2 days ago. ( I do this from time to time, I play 10 games, solo in cheap fits and notice the scores to see how bad I'd play without team support and with cheap fits.) I ended up with more kills and a better KDR on average compared to my usual stats. Why? Well I played smart for once, no crazy stuff, and I didn't have 3 experienced dudes around me competing for the kills. I did it in a 35K isk enhanced suit with basic weapons. Best game was 40-4 and the worst was 13-5. I know I can play well without my fanzy gear, and no I still won't do it, protogear makes me able to play more recklessly and makes the game more fun cause a loss of 10 suits in a game sort of hurts.

So take that "you need your crutch" attitude and stuff it. Do you really think that the dudes fighting at the top end in PC has no real skills and are merely being carried by their gear and skills? STFU

I agree with your OP KingBabar.

I think CCP has made two errors with the way they dispense match rewards.

Error number one is merely fundamental: ISK payouts. Simply put, there should be an ISK reward for the win, and it should be big enough to matter to peeps.

Error number two, however, is flat-out poisonous: Passive time-based in-match sp rewards. This mechanic sends a message to every single player that the game does not walk the New Eden talk. After a few matches, whether they understand the sp mechanics or not, players realize that their effort or lack of it does not really matter very much in terms of skillpoints paid out for a match. It's a particularly crushing realization for new players, and i believe it sucks the romance right out of the space opera.

That realization, when it comes, destroys any credibility DUST might have in the mind of a player. It's a message that speaks to the core of the gaming experience and what it tells peeps is that CCP does not respect them as hard-ass immortal mercenary soldiers, but rather sees players as rather delicate creatures that need to be taken care of and have their egos stroked by the game mechanics because they can't handle New Eden as it is.

Some peeps are able to recognize, analyze and dissect these sp payout mechanics almost immediately, some peeps only sense the problem intuitively and 'smell' that the situation is somehow distasteful, but i contend that it deeply effects every single player and sets the 'moral tone' for mercenary soldiers in New Eden. Hence my use of the word 'poisonous'.

Somebody at CCP thinks that these things don't matter or that peeps don't notice, i say that in the long run it is a primary limiting factor on the quality of the merc experience, the size of the playerbase and bears directly on the survival of DUST in the New Eden universe.

---

What can be done? First and foremost somebody at CCP needs to champion the players and realize that peeps are up to the challenge of living and dying and earning a buck in New Eden. And also to do something about the nanny-state interventions that CCP is perpetrating on the players.

Once the will is there it's not hard at all to improve the situation. There are so many solid suggestions on these forums, all of which have been read and discussed by CCP on multiple occasions.

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.

-snip-

I think this thread is cancer.

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.

1) Cease allowing us to spawn on Objectives in all gamemodes. There should be specific set spawn points for each side as well as Drop Uplinks which can be custom placed by players and CRU's which can be hacked by either team.

2) When we are the Attackers, we should be attacking and we should hold nothing on the field aside from our footspawn and the MCC spawn. When Defending, we should hold everything on the field until the Attackers have destroyed it or seized control of it (in which case we can always hack it back).

3) Change the payout for losing. As it is now, the losers still get a cookie for showing up. They shouldn't get a cookie, they should get maybe some crumbs but nothing more, slant ISK payouts towards the winners 85/15. Give more gravity to winning the match. Give us standings for the other NPC corps aside from the Militia corps and adjust our ISK payouts accordingly taking into consideration the NPC corps we are working for (multiply our individual payouts by 1.XX where XX is equal to our X.X standing with the corporation). If our standings are low enough for a particular corp, we will not be queued into matches for them since they'd rather spit on us rather than employ us.

4) Add a method by which System Security Status is accounted for and which blocks the use certain equipment for those matches (i.e. metalevel based entry restrictions) as well as blue-on-blue fire. If I go into a match in a 0.7, I can't use as wide a variety of equipment (nor will my bluefire register) as I can if I go into a match in a 0.2 (where my bluefire will register).

5) Allow squads to be loaded into battles, though there should be no "No Squad" guys as well as no "Locking" mechanic for squads. Anyone who is a solo rambo should be loaded into preformed squads if there are no squads on the team with room for anyone. This will incentivize grouping up since no one will want to be forced to squad with John Rando who spins in circles in the MCC while blaring Rick Astley over comms.

Implement these changes and watch the battlefield dynamics change for the better. Incentivize fighting and people will fight, hand out cookies and milk to all and give everyone a pat on the back and a "good work, try better, you'll get it next time" at the end of the battle and watch people blueball their enemies and pull stupid **** instead of staying focused.

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.

Lets have a full reset of isk and sp to level the play field.

Yeah well granted. We did play for 2-3 hours as a 3 man team. Later on (I was getting seriously drunk and ended with a 10-8 game vs nobody and called it a night) before that point we did indeed roll with 4 and then 5. This is a notorious problem. You are 3 in squad and after a batlle you see this single dude in your cop not having any to play with. You shrugit off and play another game and after the game the same dude is still waiting for someone to play with. So your squad gets filled eventually.

And I've stated that we do this, but it doesn't include all of us and definately not all the time. Calling me out as a liar because you saw me in a game with a full squad was uncalled for.

Eve security space mechanics would help.

Public = high sec ( up to adv gear)

PC/FW = low sec ( any tier gear )

I don't see why something like this hasn't been implemented yet. If we want proto stomping to stop, we need to limit its use. Does anyone have more info on how the space security works in Eve, and if we could mirror the idea.

This right here +1.

I personally don't want to run Proto 24/7, i want to be able to cry when i lose a proto suit or shake from the adrenaline of saving my suit from destruction, instead of the "Meh, i got 9000 more of those suits", but then they just made Tanks cost pennies.

so yeah...

Militia Gear should be dirt cheap
Standard gear should be, you know the standard everyone is running
Advanced gear should bite you in the wallet for dying in one
Proto gear should be something you talk about seeing on the field like they talk about how real the Lochness Monster really is
Officer gear should be like loosing your Capital Ship in Eve

But loosing a 230k suit tingles a little, witch sadly does not prevent me from running mine 24/7.

Try to wear ADV sometime.

I don't blame any part of the playerbase for how ****** up this whole goat rodeo of a game is.

CCP just has no clue. And when they get one, they move painfully slow to correct anything. Not even small changes that could at least alleviate issues are made.

As an example: Tank spam- Why do tanks cost as much as a honda civic again? Shouldn't tanks cost a few million? An M1 Abrams costs the US Government $6 million or so. Change the price to reflect some sense of scale, economy, and mimic reality a little bit and tank spam will vanish. No one could beef about AV power as much.. not to say it shouldn't still be tweaked mind you. At the same time, people who've skilled deep into tanks will have some sense of accomplishment. EDIT: They also have to fix their economy or only the same old OG corps will be the only ones able to afford them.

Then there are all the bugs. I die more to bugs than proto suits IMO. I don't mind getting cut down by a stronger foe at all. But when I die to that foe because I stick to terrain and can't escape, can't jump a railing, can't even ******* sprint after i use my weapon, etc. Then you toss on all the protostomping with the shitshow matchmaking and there is no way this game has any chance.

It seems like the ship might finally being righted, and we might all just start sailing smoother. However, they've not only squandered 1.0-1.7 so far, over the course of a year, they've left long standing severe issues that have the playerbase having this discussion. When your customers are discussing and fighting about self policing and gimping play styles and what not- well, that's a developer fail right there.

My pS4 is finally in the mail. My friends all have them. Better games are on the way.... CCPs lucky breaks are dwindling and they are just going to get washed over by hungrier and better developers. From every angle it looks as if CCP plans to let Eve perpetually subsidize dust with dust comprised of the same protostomping corps circlejerking each other. That, babar, is what dust is on it's way to becoming. So enjoy the fact there are newberries to stomp while you can. One day they will vanish to better things and you won't have to worry about it.

I agree with your OP KingBabar.

I think CCP has made two errors with the way they dispense match rewards.

Error number one is merely fundamental: ISK payouts. Simply put, there should be an ISK reward for the win, and it should be big enough to matter to peeps.

Error number two, however, is flat-out poisonous: Passive time-based in-match sp rewards. This mechanic sends a message to every single player that the game does not walk the New Eden talk. After a few matches, whether they understand the sp mechanics or not, players realize that their effort or lack of it does not really matter very much in terms of skillpoints paid out for a match. It's a particularly crushing realization for new players, and i believe it sucks the romance right out of the space opera.

That realization, when it comes, destroys any credibility DUST might have in the mind of a player. It's a message that speaks to the core of the gaming experience and what it tells peeps is that CCP does not respect them as hard-ass immortal mercenary soldiers, but rather sees players as rather delicate creatures that need to be taken care of and have their egos stroked by the game mechanics because they can't handle New Eden as it is.

Some peeps are able to recognize, analyze and dissect these sp payout mechanics almost immediately, some peeps only sense the problem intuitively and 'smell' that the situation is somehow distasteful, but i contend that it deeply effects every single player and sets the 'moral tone' for mercenary soldiers in New Eden. Hence my use of the word 'poisonous'.

Somebody at CCP thinks that these things don't matter or that peeps don't notice, i say that in the long run it is a primary limiting factor on the quality of the merc experience, the size of the playerbase and bears directly on the survival of DUST in the

---

What can be done? First and foremost somebody at CCP needs to champion the players and realize that peeps are up to the challenge of living and dying and earning a buck in New Eden. And also to do something about the nanny-state interventions that CCP is perpetrating on the players.

Once the will is there it's not hard at all to improve the situation. There are so many solid suggestions on these forums, all of which have been read and discussed by CCP on multiple occasions.

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.

If you do that tryhards complain that they cant use the gear they unlocked

Frankly pub games make them basic only thats sorts it all out

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.

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.

But loosing a 230k suit tingles a little, witch sadly does not prevent me from running mine 24/7.

I think you lack understanding, which makes for poor logic. People don't feel like being proto stomped into the ground, it's a waste of time, no fun, and a waste of ISK. The idea of less money for loser will push those who decide it aint worth it, to shy away even more.