Things worth saying, are sometimes worth saying again with emphasis. It's all too easy for the important issues to be drowned out by the mundane and trivial crises of everyday life.

The 800lb gorilla in the room which you didn't really address is the market this game is meant to target.

Yes traditional gamers tend to play many genres; I play, MMOs, FPSs and racing games but when we're talking the big numbers the FPS crowd is, to a large degree, a different set of players than the MMO/sandbox crowd.

They demand radically different things. SP, while familiar to MMO players is an anathema to FPS purists. Map design is a central tenet of FPS design but a throwaway afterthought in Dust. There is a long list of similar issues.

Dust either needs to:
1) Choose between these two groups; or
2) Make a whole string of goddamn brilliant design decisions to reconcile the two sides

It seems to me like they really do want to tell us the changes they want to make, but are under some sort of NDA and are unable to do so.

Which begs the question: who's holding the reins on these NDA's? Is it Sony? CCP? CCP Shanghai itself?

The inability to explain future changes to this game is kind of hurting them rather than protecting anything, I think.

exactly, the casual player will never do this, even the interested player will assume they can 'figure it out' fail horribly and have a good chance of not playing the game again concluding its 'bad or simpley 'too confusing'. the low population shows only the super hardcore and people familiar with new eden are sticking around. this defeats the very purpose of going f2p and giving equal access to 80M PS3 users. the NPE will continue to make or break Dust, we have been saying it since May of 2012. http://dustmercs.blogspot.com/2012/05/dust-514-impressions.html

'This game needs a Game Tutorial that will tell players about every aspect of the game, how to be successful and even little things like the differences between Amarr and Minmatar, what PG and CPU are and how the info tab is your friend. This just isn't a forty-yard dash, its a marathon. And if the tutorial isn't well done you'll miss out on a lot of players.'

I indeed think tutorials are needed.

But personaly I don't think CCP should fixate to much on newer players at this moment.
Theres no marketing campaign, no real efforts to drag new players into this game anyways, and besides that it's hard to keep players in a half finished game on an olds console. So lets just face the fact that there is not a huge "new player flow"

IMO the right way to go would is to concentrate on what we already have. Atm we have a somehow stable playerbase, build of mostly hardcore gamers who wanna see this game grow. so instead of letting those players go and hope for newer players join and stay we need to concentrate ion the actual game and especially on the eve/dust link.

It is crucial to extend the game and to build up a direct and feelable connection between those games. this is what dust seperates from other games, and if we let this go, we all just can move on to any other lobby shooter. Heck we wouldn't even have to worry about skillpoint anymore lol.

CCP should use the time on Ps3 to concentrate on building up the game. Once this is done and the game is in a stable good working state and good connection with eve, port it to PS4 with a huge ass advertise campaign=profit.

Selling half baked bread just works for one day.

This is kind of the gordian knot at the heart of the whole issue. I feel the best way around it is to create stand alone content for dust that gives us a sense of agency, while increasing the social links (mainly through a strong API and market) cross culturally. Then, once you have a healthy dust community with communication lines to eve, can you implement cross platform objectives that provide benefits to both parties.