I still do great on my alts

But I can't expect a new player to know the maps like I know them. Know my weapons like I know them. or have great friends and squad mates like I do.

Note before we begin: I understand that it may seem like I am stating "New players just don't have skill so they get stomped on" but I am not, or at least trying not to say such a thing. By skill, I just mean being familiar to the game, the skills, the fittings, knowing things like "don't shoot an Assault Rifle at the tank" and "don't charge straight at the guy with the machine gun that has a Ghostbuster behind him." There is nothing wrong with being unfamiliar with a game; we are all unfamiliar about a great many of things. I will be using skill in that manner rather than a "you suck n00bz!"

It is very popular to say that DUST has a terrible "New Player Experience" (NPE). The game is brutally difficult to get into, much like EVE. Many people lament tales of themselves or their friends doing the Academy for a couple of games, doing decently, and then being murdered repeatedly by Boundless weapons and tanks they they can't even seem to hurt. This causes them to fall away from the game which limits growth.

I have been thinking on this one a couple of days: how much of it is not being able to use Prototype gear, not having better modules, and not having the passive skills that help your radar, HP, speed, stamina, etc (SP) and how much is just not being familiar with the game's maps, movements, playstyles, weapon ranges, and even the concept of fittings (Skill)?

If there was an avid EVE player that was quite familiar with FPS, understood the notion of fittings/vehicle/SP investment, and read extensive online guides about 'how to play', would they have a better experience than someone who has never played EVE, didn't do any research, but was given a character with 200,000,000 SP? I haven't started a new character other than one as a drunken joke (haven't played him other than that) and started playing only about two or three weeks after Open Beta (after the final reset). This means that I wasn't seeing mountains of Prototype stuff from the beginning; it was mostly Militia, Standard, and the odd Advanced. I was quite familiar with the game before the Protobear was awoken so I honestly do not know the extent of how difficult it would be to compete with people that have 20, 30, 50 times the SP as you.

EVE is brutal too and many fights come down to "who has the most ISK in the fight and who has the most SP in the relevant skill?" but you can play 1,000 hours without ever having to actually fight others. Even then, the tutorial teaches you tackle, mining, shooting people, and the art of GETTING THE HELL OUT OF DODGE when the poopoo hits the fan. It is a slower paced game and lets people get familiar with everything before "there is a a Hurricane fleet locking you and you are going to die." You do have the High Security suicide ganks but the odds are low assuming they are not flying something worth lots and lots of cash.

With the NPE in DUST being "as bad as it is", is it just a case of people not being familiar with the game at all (Skill) or just 10-40 million SP being too great of a barrier to overcome (SP)?

Cheers.

Currently it is 80% SP, 20% skill. With some tiercide it can be 25% SP and 75% skill.

With the NPE in DUST being "as bad as it is", is it just a case of people not being familiar with the game at all (Skill) or just 10-40 million SP being too great of a barrier to overcome (SP)?

What if all uncreated mercs started gathering passive SP from a certain point? Let's say today, April 20, 2014 (or further in the past for better NPE today). This way any new players have a bit more SP to play with from the beginning. Players starting next year will have even more to help close that SP vs Skill gap from the very beginning. They won't have 30/40+ mil, but they can definitely start getting some cores out of the way. I don't think that would be the sole fix, but I'll bet that would help a lot of people stick around without such a grind.

I still do great on my alts

But I can't expect a new player to know the maps like I know them. Know my weapons like I know them. or have great friends and squad mates like I do.

In no other FPS will you see scores of 30:0 or 50:1 like you see fairly commonly in Dust. Any game where those sorts of differentials exist across the playerbase at large is completely broken from a competitive perspective.

First off, I was an EvE player long before Dust was even in alpha stage development, and (...) I had a limited amount of FPS experience through the Battlefield franchise. So, I was placed to quickly get to grips with the nomenclature and ethos behind a Dust when I finally installed it, just after Uprising launched. I understood damage profiles, fitting concepts, and what each of the modules could do for me and how they were tiered into three different bands of effectiveness. If I did not have my EvE experience to fall back on then all of that would have been lost to me, and the tutorials would have simply confused me further. Very little is explained very clearly. Much of it seems to assume I would understand power grid limits, stacking penalties, and how bonuses effect your performance on the field.

1. Is this a hard FPS to master?

No not really, this game has very minimal penalties for movement and has reticles that light up red when you have a bead on someone.

Thanks to everyone for replying

Minor Edit by Joseph to focus on what I will be talking about.
Exactly my point. I basically had the same thing. I had played some shooters but knew everything about EVE through my years as a player, even if it was long ago. I cannot imagine how a new player would feel going "Why can I fit this module but not this module? What's CPU and PG?" EVE's rough tutorial can at least be remedied by linking to the "Getting Started" forum thread because it is on PC. A console can't do that.

To those stating: "Of course SP is an obstacle; if someone has three times as much HP as you, does 25% more damage, and can shoot farther than you does that sound like a fair fight?"

This is completely correct. However, is that an issue for the person that is first starting? Is that what is causing the "how the hell does this game work?" It is certainly a huge issue but is it as bad as someone knowing nothing about EVE's fitting, damage profiles, optimal range, or even the concept of the skill tree? I remember reading about a new player that immediately dumped all their points into turret skills because they thought that vehicles spawned on the map like in Battlefield. Without any kind of information on the game, you can expect that many people will be stuck in a fog like "where are these vehicles coming from?" The good news is that a couple 5-10 minute long Training Modes (1. How to move. 2. Suit Types, Weapon Types, and how Fittings work. 3. Equipment. 4. Vehicles and Anti-Vehicle. 5. Skill Points and the importance of being careful and wise (IE: You only get 400,400 if you log on every day and cap every week). 7. Bot Match) can fix a lot of these issues.



It is true that the notion of "shoot people and try not to get shot" is pretty easy to come across. But that is just the shooting game. That isn't where a huge portion of the concern comes from. Fittings, where to put Skill Points, what each suit is 'meant to do', what weapons work best in what situations, how do you get vehicles or new weapons, etc, are far deeper and more intricate than the gun play itself. Every FPS comes down to shoot the red-reticule but DUST is one of the few FPS that has people confused. Is that confusion causing more problems than "those guys have 30 million more SP than me?"

I never suggested this game was UFO Defense or Daggerfall. I know that most FPS give you some level of customization but it is generally "this weapon, this sidearm, this throwable item" at least that is what I have noticed in the Call of Duty games. My last Battlefield I played was BF2 and that was just class based but I assume the newer ones are not as such.

The point I was making was that the game has no tutorial. This game has concepts that are fairly alien to other FPS (not saying that makes it better, more lofty, or whatever; just that it has concepts that others don't) that are never really explained. If it weren't for looking online, we wouldn't know you get 1,000 SP an hour Passive. If it weren't for looking online, we wouldn't know that Advanced or Prototype weapons have better range. PG/CPU never got a quick blurb about what it does. The game, ironically, is about as well explained as UFO Defense or Daggerfall rather than being closer to the tutorials that X-COM or Skyrim have.

"Is the lack of game knowledge a bigger obstacle for a freshly made character or the fact that people have 30 times as much SP as them?"