I will - for now - answer that question with another question (because I can't very well shake my fist at CCP for over-promising and then do the same kitten myself now can I?), so...

How would you mercs like a Drone survival mode?

I'd personally love to see a scaled element where the longer you survive (limited clones etc) the harder the fight and any earnings from it scale with the 'wave' you reach.

A drone survival mode? Does it involve getting stuck on terrain/objects, grenades bouncing of of clear air and crappy aiming mechanics?

If so, i'll pass.

Any news on Hilmar/Rouge/Rattati's positions on core fps mechanics?

PVE should exist in this game under only one circumstance: as PC district maintenance contracts.

Dust needs the social interaction between high-end PC corps and low-end pve corps which that would engender. A contract system would be required to support it, which would in and of itself be a tremendously valuable immersion/community-building tool.

If Rattai is serious about how to bring New Eden to Dust he won't find anything more immersive or that generates devtime payback than contracts/PC maintenance.

CCP Rattati has been looking into improving the core mechanics. The legacy code is frankly a mess but there are folks working on ways of sorting it out. It is a priority and I expect continued improvements to it.

CCP Rattati has been looking into improving the core mechanics. The legacy code is frankly a mess but there are folks working on ways of sorting it out. It is a priority and I expect continued improvements to it.

On that general theme my stance has always been to support a port to both. This stance was stated plainly in my platform before the election and remains true now.

Being utterly blunt, as I have said elsewhere, community infighting about "which one" will happen is both detrimental and a waste of energy. In the end market analytics are more likely to decide which "one" if there is only one but a unified community with robust numbers/support for the game is more likely to get both than a divided community.

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They do actually know that the game needs to move to a new format for it to continue I hasten to add. It's not like it's escaped their notice

But such a move has costs as I'm sure you'll understand. The game would most likely have to done from scratch as the PS3 architecture and code is simply not able to be ported as is to an X64 based architecture. Not a small job by any means.

The issue is that supporting both platforms will alienate a portion of users from both who don't want to be involved with the "rival faction", so to speak.

If the game supports both, PC players will refuse to play it because it's full of "console peasants", and console players will refused to play it because they don't want to deal with "elitist" PC gamers and hackers.

Now this is an interesting tidbit. I didn't realise how unportable the codebase was. Having said that, as they based most of the models, animation and art assets on the UE3 engine, I imagine they can be ported to UE4? That would save an immense amount of time, especially if they started with hi-res assets and had to downscale them for PS3 (which happens a lot I imagine).

Assets can be ported without much trouble as I understand it from UE3 to 4 for use in any new game.

The legacy code for everything else needs to die with fire. The only defence the Devs could give me about coding for the PS3 was that it wasn't as bad as the PS2.

It's not too much of an imaginative stretch that should a port become a reality the current team would want 'fresh code' to work with rather than the older stuff.

I think the Dust Dev team might say instead 'Old code is code that works but not how we want it to work'

Playing on both console and PC myself for many years I am well aware of the ludicrous feud that is maintained by some, even unto this day. However as I've discovered recently just because a group of people, or even two groups of people, on the internet do a thing does not actually mean that said thing makes any rational constructive sense.

Having this community, of currently active players in Dust 514 seek to forcibly exclude a portion of our own based on their next gen hardware preference (be that desktop or console) is of no constructive merit. It impedes the current game and does nothing to define the format of the ported game except perhaps reduce the likelihood of a duel port.

Even if a portion of each 'faction' refuses to play due to their 'rivals' being present (a very odd stance for those signing into a war game) that does not equate to a lower total potential player base than a port to a single platform. Further those who would take the route of refusing to play under a duel port system are not a very high priority segment of player base, indeed cannot be if their loyalty is more to the hardware than the game. Each hardware type provides many games, seeking to appease someone who may just as likely leave for "greener pastures" as stick around to be active is not the most savvy way to see Dust thrive. Where as supporting both opens the doors to those who have only one or the other hardware type (and not the funds to purchase a second) but still wish to play the game.

The whole discussion may be moot, there may not be a duel port in the cards (much as I support one) and if that's the case then it will be a business decision, based more on market analytics than anything said on these forums, which defines where that port lands.

In essence any way you slice it conducting the "console vs pc war" here on the Dust forums serves no viable constructive purpose, only a detrimental one (AFAIK)

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Nobody likes how it currently works. There is a process in software development of improving the code you have instead of literally starting from scratch. What makes you think a smaller, poorly funded team, likely with a lot of different people in it than the original guys can do the job better from scratch? You're literally advocating that CCP should do the one thing that should never be done in software development.

Well, CCP have done it before with Crimewatch in Eve, where they gutted the whole code and rewrote it from stratch. It was deemed easier to rebuild it than figuring out how to repair it. It's also what is planned for the Corp mechanics.

Dust is a strange creature. It's already a hybridisation of its original PC code, mixed with PS3 cell tech and utilising a heavily modified UE3. Much of the hotfix process has been spent just figuring out what it can and can't do.

Rattati and his team have found a huge amount of what it can do, hence the fairly significant changes that hot fixes have brought. But by the same token there's s lot that it can't do. It needs a way to fix that so the game can be iterated upon and improved should the opportunity to go next gen happen. How much work needs doing exactly has not made privy to us. But it's something I'm sure that Shanghai would love to get their teeth into.