DUST Search - The Terrible NPE: How much is SP and how much is Skill?

Joseph Ridgeson wrote:

Thanks to everyone for replying

Kierkegaard Soren wrote:

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.

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.

TYCHUS MAXWELL wrote:

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.

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?"


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TYCHUS MAXWELL The Fun Police 178	Posted - 2014.04.20 18:02:00 - [1] - Quote I don't really believe in beating around the bush because who cares if someone disagrees with you? That's gonna happen, so here it goes: 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. Combine that with bionic jumping and also little punishment for doing so and it is fairly easy to run and gun. Although I don't mind a game that is run and gun, run and gun as an effective strategy and not a spray and pray does mean that once you learn to keep moving and ignore ADS unless your target is at least 60m away means it's not hard to master. This isn't a common feature to most shooters today, so it catches many off guard. I think Halo is the only game franchise that uses the same minimal penalty to movement scheme with gun game. The only weapons with bullet drop are explosives, which in most cases makes them pretty bad weapons anyways with the exception of the mass driver which is now godly. The Snipers are hit scan with minimal delay meaning a shot just barely in front of the head across the map will hit a sprinting target. Tanks have been toned down thanks to the hardener nerf, but learning how to operate a militia tank (IE oh okay so my blaster has pin point accuracy i'll use the reticle and wait on the turret to rotate before firing...) is easy as I just explained the two nuances, always make sure your turret stops moving and you are golden for pinpoint shots with any of the 3 guns. Dropships are rough controls to learn but are mostly irrelevant as far as time to master vs. effectiveness when someone pulls out a forge or rail tank. LAVs are the same as the tanks in that moving is your enemy with the small turret though it's pretty easy to wrack up road kill with a well timed speed boost. All in all, one long night of exploration into all kinds of suits should leave you pretty much on level with the pros, well at least the ones without a KB/M or modded controller, but there will always be poor sports. We'd have hackers if the game wasn't operated server side. 2. Does superior gear give veteran players an advantage and does skill bonuses also give them an advantage? Does a bear **** in the woods? This should be a no brainer but just for comparison my militia amarr had 400 shields and 360 armor I believe at the start of the game. With 5 in shield and armor upgrades it's at 600 and 510, I think... not looking at the suit but I believe that's its base stats now. That alone is a pretty big difference, now combine damage bonuses, mod ehp bonuses, reloading, dispersion, stamina, dog walking, etc. bonuses and yeah the player will have an advantage that's what bonuses do. Is it enough to tip the scale? Yes, two people of equal player skill getting down to a slug match the one with more bonuses will win objectively. This is a rare occurrence, but it still holds true that in relation it makes a player better than those who lack the bonuses. 2. Is the NPE enough? Absolutely not, but honestly all experiences are bare bones and unfinished in this game. FW is an AWOX fest making players rarely use good gear, which therefore defeats its purpose as an isk sink. It gets you aurum gear but as most players will find out, having the skills to fit the gear normally is better anyways as you won't have the bonuses that come attached to the gear. And counter intuitively the players who would want the aurum gear from FW are the new players who won't have the isk to burn, this is why the matches usually devolve into frontline pissing contests where a couple players bring out the big guns and become gods among men. As far as Planetary Conquest goes... well DNS did what every human does when they can and formed an unbeatable alliance to control most of the region. It's an uphill battle that isn't worth the effort and whatever fun could be derived was sucked out of it by turning it into a real world situation of a market monopoly. Everyone else has pretty much just given up on that game mode. It's for the hardcore players or in the case of Dust it's for the hardcore players who have been here since beta. No real matchmaking is a symptom of a small player base which is a symptom of no real matchmaking. It's a vicious cycle that could probably be broken if everyone put down their proto gear in pubbies and just had fun. Giving new players the chance to enjoy themselves and not throw their ps3 in a fire or turn around and play a better game. But people love to beat off to the fantasy that players see their proto gear in the kill feed and go "Man that guy is good..." said by no one ever. Having high sec null sec game modes with Meta level based gear restrictions would forcefully remedy this but such a thing is too obviously a good idea for CCP to pursue. If they are people have been talking about it since last summer so good job on keeping up with the tiny player base you do have. 3. "What can be done to remedy things in your opinion Tychus?" asked Tychus. Well the Meta level game modes would help. Drone PVE would help. Pretty much any new or improved game modes that add more depth. Also, though this won't remedy the NPE, please fix the glitches CCP. Forge guns shouldn't be so impotent and bolt pistols shouldn't fizzle out of existence past optimum range. 4. "What won't change things and will continue to waste time Tychus?" asked Tychus. MOAR GUNZ. VEHICLES, SUITS, SNOW AND TREESSSS!!!! That's my two cents anyways.
TYCHUS MAXWELL The Fun Police 179	Posted - 2014.04.21 20:37:00 - [2] - Quote Joseph Ridgeson wrote: Thanks to everyone for replying Kierkegaard Soren wrote: 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. 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. TYCHUS MAXWELL wrote: 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. 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?" You should try playing an fps that has been made in the past 10 years. They all have customization and weapons with various uses. Hell Halo came out in 2001 and it has weapon styles that don't even exist in this game like a needler. Actually if you look back to the 90s many games used to have even higher levels of in depth customization, so don't try to pass off that it's so deep drivel. This game isn't the elder scrolls arena/daggerfall or UFO Defense, the meta is pretty basic and if you are into 6th grade arithmetic it is simple to determine the best gear. That said the meta is forcefully changed every patch without resets which is what drove away most the hardcore players who weren't in the Beta and can afford to SP dump every patch. The real difference is the grind. It has a grind as large as a korean mmo that arbitrarily sets limits and determines who will be the best pokemon master. I don't take issue with this personally if the developers would tier the game system like most rpg mmos do where they have vet battlegrounds with higher rewards, but Dust is incomplete. I know exactly what's good but in the end if I bothered to grind and chase the FOTM it will change by the time I get to it, because I didn't start in Beta and didn't have a good year and a half head start. People can dance around that bullshit all they want, but hands down that is what seperates the hardcore fps players in this game and mostly drives them away. The fact that someone who started a year ago will have the latest FOTM to wreck the newcomer. The casual players generally get driven away by the **** poor NPE where they are forced to fight the best after a couple of matches in the BA. That's why now I only play the game to have fun because like most games if the devs don't enforce good sportsmanship there won't be good sportsmanship, so I just do what I do like anyone else that bothered to stick with this game. I'm just waiting for destiny in September at this point.
TYCHUS MAXWELL The Fun Police 180	Posted - 2014.04.21 21:39:00 - [3] - Quote Joseph Ridgeson wrote: 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?" And I'm telling you it's the later. Casual gamers are driven away by pub stomping. Hardcore gamers are driven away by the fact that they will never catch up to the pub stompers. Shields and armor are hp values, they have resistances which won't matter to the player making a suit because your opponents will have varying weapons in every match. The big deal with those is shields have lower values and higher recharge while armor is the opposite. This takes one time of a player being shot at and not die to figure out. Scanning precision are something for players with a lot of SP and are irrelevant to the newcomers who will get scanned even in militia/std light suits. Most players will learn that for all those high and low slots that no other mainstream fps gives you (It's still not unique if you look at the plethora of less publicized PC shooters) the high and low slots will 90% of the time be filled with hp buffers and rechargers because damage mods were nerfed into obscurity and the cardio regs are pointless. Most the mods are pointless unless you are going for a minja or shotgun light suit which still is just as capable if they are tanked out instead. The game has a lot of artificial depth that for the most part is irrelevant like most games with a lot of depth however the basics are simple enough to learn. Day one I was going 30/2 in the Battle academy last summer. Day two I was getting face rolled by the imperfects every match. It had nothing to do with the core mechanics and their "Complexity."
TYCHUS MAXWELL The Fun Police 182	Posted - 2014.04.22 19:26:00 - [4] - Quote Charlotte O'Dell wrote: A very good question, so I will give you a good answer. Skill > SP Start a new character, take it through the academy and see how you do compared to your main. Chances are if you were a ** player on your main, meaning you didn't do well running anything less than proto gear you will do very bad on your new alt, but if you are a good player, getting 25/0 in proto and maybe 10/3 in standard, you will do much better out of the academy. One can say that a new character cannot compete with a 1500 HP sentinel, but is that because he only has 450 HP or is it because he is charging it head on? Now, sure, he cannot take out an Assault gk0 with a G-1 Frontline suit in a head on fight, but that is just a numbers game. There is nothing stopping him from grabbing a shotgun and OHKing anything short of a well fit assault or better. Yes, the NPE sucks and 50,000,000 SP guys are stomping 500,000 SP guys, but it has less to do with SP and ISK than it has to do with new players not getting the chance to learn the skills required to survive. A lot of people forget that most of the guys with 30,000,000+ SP started playing in January, when there was no proto. We all had time to learn the game and the protostomp only happened when you had the odd SVER True Blood tank stomp or Pink Fluffy / Imperfects against you. We had time to learn; I chose Caldari HAVs and by the time I had a Gunlogi, everyone else was running Advanced Dropsuits; when I had a 80GJ Compressed Particle Cannon on my Sagaris, everyone was running prototype gear, too. We all learned at the same rate. Then you throw hardened gladiators who had 100,000,000 ISK from the asset refund in with newberries who do not get a High-Sec to learn in and it should come to no surprise that MAYBE 1 in 25 newberries I meet stick around**; but they stick around for the social aspect- not the gameplay. The Academy was a good step, but it is not enough. There needs to be a very strict matchmaking system: Mode 1: Militia and standard dropsuits and weapons, only. Militia vehicles and standard turrets, only. 2 vehicles/battle. All equipment allowed. All modules allowed. Rewards are <200,000 ISK / battle Mode 2: Same as right now (only vehicles limits) Rewards are 200,000 - 1,350,000 / battle I agree with the mode ideas but as to the Skill > SP, you roll a new character and go even 10/3 against a pubstomp without redline sniping. Pics or that never happens. Everyone gets the match every now and then that isn't a pubstomp where you can easily go 30/2 I get them from time to time all while using militia gear, but that isn't the norm. Proto death squads will just hands down overwhelm the best of players, so Skill > SP, quit being delusional.