Everybody wins. Experienced players get better competition and less boring stomping. New players get to actually compete instead of getting rolled and quitting (as they should). DUST's days are numbered anyways. let's make the best of the time we have.

To keep it fair you could give all players a one-time SP bonus at the same time you change the SP floor to 15 mil. The more SP a player has, the smaller the bonus. Experienced players would lose nothing and gain a much more interesting game with more evenly balanced competition and a much higher rate of good fights (and they'd get their bonus). Newer players would be greatly heartened and would be more confident and perform better in battle. They would also find it easier to join a decent corp. It would also help greatly to hook people who are just trying the game out. It would increase the player base.

You know I'm right!

+1 except the bonus ..anyone under 15 mill should be set to 15 ....congrats u just spent past few months grinding a fresh character lol

But otherwise I agree starting sp is not enought

You started off with a year's worth of SP.

Ive only been here since the end of 1.6 and i have 24 mil sp if 15 mil is a years worth then you must be slow.

Ok, hear me out. You would want a minimum SP gain for players with 15 mil SP or less. Say the minimum is 7 mil, so...

Player with 3 mil SP is bumped to 15 mil SP
7 mil SP --> 15 mil
10 mil --> 17 mil
13 mil --> 20 mil
15 mil --> 22 mil

Then for players with 16 mil SP and up, the bonus would gradually taper off, until it reaches the minimum for high SP players. Let's say that minimum is 500,000 SP. And lets say that is reached at 40 mil SP. So if you have 40 mil SP or more, you're getting an extra 500,000 SP. If your'e at 15 mil or below, you're getting 7 mil SP. If you're in the 16-39 mil SP range, you're getting somewhere between the two. So maybe something like this:

22 mil SP --> 26 mil SP
28 mil SP --> 30.5 mil SP
34 mil SP --> 35.5 mil SP

You pull 9 mil a year from passive SP, and up to 10 mil SP active if you cap out every day unboosted.
If you no-life or use boosters then sure, you'll get a little more than that. For the unboosted, average player, though, 15 mil is well within what could reasonably be expected in a year.

15 mil SP would be an understandable number to have after a year.

Passive SP
1000 SP/hr
24hr/day
24000 SP/day
365 days/yr
8,760,000 SP/year

Active SP
~190k/week
52 weeks/year
9,880,000 SP/year

Total Unboosted SP
~18,640,000 SP

Total Boosted SP (150%)
~27,960,000 SP

Pretty much.
If you don't boost, 18 mil is the absolutely maximum you pull in a year by capping out every single week.

While I absolutely support more SP for newbies, I don't think lump sums alone are the way to do it.

You end up with a lot of people not really knowing what to spend their skillpoints on. Newbies already fall prey to SP wastes like higher levels of dropsuit command. 15 mil is an awful lot to give to a newbie at once, and chances are they'll spend it all very quickly not really knowing what to spend it on.
Then, after they've spent it, they won't feel like they're progressing. There'll be no feel of progression - You started off with a year's worth of SP and even if you grind all week you'll only pull <500k.

Instead of a lump sum, you need a few things in tandem.
Firstly, you need vastly better educational support for newbies in terms of spending their skillpoints.
Secondly, you need a better designed skill tree. Skills like dropsuit command 4/5 are travesties of game design and should be axed completely.

Then, thirdly, for the increase in SP, rather than just having a sudden (very large) lump sum, give a greatly increased progression rate. Still increase the base SP (from 500k to 2 mil or something) and then give scaling bonuses to take you up to the higher SP counts. For example, start off with a 5x rate of gain and gradually slow down as you increase in total SP until eventually you're at a normal rate of gain once you have much more SP.

Pretty much.
If you don't boost, 18 mil is the absolutely maximum you pull in a year by capping out every single week.

Regardless of how much you've gotten over time, newbros need help now. They don't have any option but to play with the proto-stompers (us). Until they do CCP's progression system is broken and the gap between rich and poor is not only making the game boring, but killing player retention, and poisoning the NPE. The point is to bring new players up to speed so they can compete on a playing field that, while not flat, would no longer be a steep slope that they have to climb while we're taking potshots at them from on high.

*sleepwalks*
Mmm... 15 million SP for new characters?

So that means I could create alts forever and immediately have a protosuit and weapon to test out all the time. And proto vehicles too!

Then nobody complains about flavor of the month because everyone has it! Yay!

Munya munya....

*drifts off to sleep*

Yes, newbies do need help.

But what you have proposed here is at best a hastily constructed bandaid solution.
The problems of the new player do not begin and end with SP. There are many, many problems, which need a much more complex solution than increasing a single number.

Pretty much.
If you don't boost, 18 mil is the absolutely maximum you pull in a year by capping out every single week.

I say get over it, we all got stomped when we started, they can take their beating too.