The difference between all those other shooters and Dust is the power-based progression.

The only learning curve in Dust 514 is:

Accepting that you will lose the vast majority of the time in a solo environment. Accepting that you will often lose when pit up against coordinated squads in Public Matchmaking.

Understanding Dust as a whole does not take that much effort. Coming to terms with the fact that you will lose for reasons beyond your control (power differences) is a whole other beast entirely. They can see you before you know they're there. They can move faster than you, they can fire more accurately than you, they can do more damage than you, they can reload faster than you, they can jump higher than you... this is what Dust is for a new player.

You could theoretically be the best FPS player in the world, but you get dropped into Dust 514 and you will get beaten senseless even if your positioning is superb and your situational awareness is spot on. Being able to glance at a guy and know that "There is no way in hell I can take him on in a 1v1 or even a 1v3 scenario" is why this game has been (and always will be) fundamentally broken.

It isn't like other shooters. Player skill is secondary to having an optimized fitting or a squad to carry you. You can only do so much as an individual, and all it takes is TWO PEOPLE being in a coordinated party to control an entire 16v16 situation.

Another part of the flaw of Dust 514 is the fact that the development team is full of sadists and masochists that get off on suffering. It took what.... years... for tiericide to happen and even now the gaps in power are more than enough to make new players miserable and to create unbelievable differences in potential based on the limitations of fittings and/or numbers difference.

I'm awful at console first person shooters, but there are people I walk all over because my innate stats dominate theirs. There is no such thing as "handicap" in Dust. It's choosing to increase your suffering for some misguided idea of respect. You don't get "better" at the game by decreasing the power of your fitting, you learn to play the game a different way. In that sense, you ARE playing a different game.

You learn to play as a vulture. Picking and choosing each and every engagement and focusing on the weak or overpowered players. Sounds great in theory, but in practice it's a test on sanity. Boring at the best of times, frustrating at the worst. You're taking advantage of the work of others to compensate for your lack of versatility and output. Who wants to wait for other people to do the work so they can steal the score? Not a lot of people with their head screwed on straight, that's for sure.

i admit, i never played tabula rasa or crysis, was tabula rasa even a fps

You've never played Crysis?

Worst. Dev. Ever.

Dude, it is on Steam, I will buy it for you if you play it. It'll revolutionize your life.... Barring of course that your rig can run it optimally. It is still used as a bench mark in some cases, afterall >_>;

Ok there's a problem with what you just said. Stop comparing your own game to other FPS. Is different with TTK and SP/XP. In COD and Battlefield, you can 1v2 and still get away with it if your lucky. In Dust we can 1v6 and get away with it no problem if you know how to out smart them. As far as SP/XP you can atleast kill the guy that's rank 80 a few times no problem in COD/BF. Dust, you have to fight for that kill if the guy is In a full prototype suit with passive and active skills and 70 million SP. The new players have to grind in dust and it's a *****. Just saying

[quote=CCP Rattati]4)I have the drive to do better which motivates me. Dust is no different.

So in all other FPS games, the new players start on equal footing with veterans. I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with that because I sure don't see a lot of the starter weapons in my killfeed.

Second, player skill always wins, gear is secondary. This is hard to accept for many people, but its the truth. Good players can easily outplay prototype lower skill players in starter fits.

bf and cod are only grind, because they only allow a sequence of predetermined unlocks, so it feels much more grindy, to me at least. Especially since you start from zero in every new iteration

you oviously have no idea what I am talking about, it has nothing to do with the gear and more to do with the fact that new players don't know what they are doing and dont have to skill points to be able to compete with 2 second reloads and damage that far surpasses their own not to mention the higher base ehp that older players have trough the skill tree

also do you even dust m8? or as a matter of fact do you even sense? take a look at what you are saying you don't seem to know what your own point is

You've never played Crysis?

Worst. Dev. Ever.

Dude, it is on Steam, I will buy it for you if you play it. It'll revolutionize your life.... Barring of course that your rig can run it optimally. It is still used as a bench mark in some cases, afterall >_>;

so I've been playing on one of my alts just to get a break form the usual routine and I've been noticing that even tho my character has rather low amounts of pretty much everything I am getting put up against proto squads and even whole teams, but then I started to notice the people getting put on my team and what it meant

as I saw who my team mates where and who the enemy was I realized that both of them were pretty high sp players, players that only run in squads of full proto on both sides and that when we won it was due to our sides proto squad doing better then the other side and when we lost it was because our sides squad had given up

ok thats all fine but then I look at my score and I'm not doing any worse then usual but I see that I am placing last more then half the time which is fine its a very low sp char so I don't expect to be able to do too much

what upsets me is that when I think about the people I normally get stuck with on my main are pretty noobish I just thought they were bad players but now looking at it from my alts perspective I see that these players may be getting stuck with "the big kids" because of their low mu scores, this makes me think that there should be a way to keep low mu players out matches that have high mu players as when one of these newer players comes along for a while they will have a hard time fending for themselves

I may be wrong and that may not be how the matchmaking is but it looked like the low mu players were being put in as filler for the higher mu squads running around, on my main I can have a big impact on whether my team wins or loses but on my alt anything I do seems to not have much of an impact other then making a proto player angry that he died to std NK's or a recruit assault rifle

^ Power of militia gear in experienced hands.

I was actually watching this and paying attention to who hes killing here. You can see alot of confused newbies in militia gear, he walks out in between the crossfire of like 5 people and doesnt die at one point. For the time I watched I didnt see anything over advanced gear and the majority was militia/standard.

The difference between all those other shooters and Dust is the power-based progression.

The only learning curve in Dust 514 is:

Accepting that you will lose the vast majority of the time in a solo environment. Accepting that you will often lose when pit up against coordinated squads in Public Matchmaking.

Understanding Dust as a whole does not take that much effort. Coming to terms with the fact that you will lose for reasons beyond your control (power differences) is a whole other beast entirely. They can see you before you know they're there. They can move faster than you, they can fire more accurately than you, they can do more damage than you, they can reload faster than you, they can jump higher than you... this is what Dust is for a new player.

You could theoretically be the best FPS player in the world, but you get dropped into Dust 514 and you will get beaten senseless even if your positioning is superb and your situational awareness is spot on. Being able to glance at a guy and know that "There is no way in hell I can take him on in a 1v1 or even a 1v3 scenario" is why this game has been (and always will be) fundamentally broken.

It isn't like other shooters. Player skill is secondary to having an optimized fitting or a squad to carry you. You can only do so much as an individual, and all it takes is TWO PEOPLE being in a coordinated party to control an entire 16v16 situation.

Another part of the flaw of Dust 514 is the fact that the development team is full of sadists and masochists that get off on suffering. It took what.... years... for tiericide to happen and even now the gaps in power are more than enough to make new players miserable and to create unbelievable differences in potential based on the limitations of fittings and/or numbers difference.

I'm awful at console first person shooters, but there are people I walk all over because my innate stats dominate theirs. There is no such thing as "handicap" in Dust. It's choosing to increase your suffering for some misguided idea of respect. You don't get "better" at the game by decreasing the power of your fitting, you learn to play the game a different way. In that sense, you ARE playing a different game.

You learn to play as a vulture. Picking and choosing each and every engagement and focusing on the weak or overpowered players. Sounds great in theory, but in practice it's a test on sanity. Boring at the best of times, frustrating at the worst. You're taking advantage of the work of others to compensate for your lack of versatility and output. Who wants to wait for other people to do the work so they can steal the score? Not a lot of people with their head screwed on straight, that's for sure.

I can attest to this, as I never run anything but Prototype and I'm not that good at all.