Shaun Iwairo wrote:When I do my qq about tier lock, it's always from the perspective of improving the size of the playerbase. With the current size of the playerbase in Dust, Scotty is inevitably going to be putting new players up against experienced, knowledgeable vets geared to the teeth utilizing full bonuses from SP. New players aren't dumb, either. They're quickly going to work out the stat difference and the SP & ISK needed to get there, and they're going to be dissuaded. I know that stats don't mean everything, but you can kinda see where the new player is coming from. All they're trying to do is learn the game but they're being asked to do it while facing established players with a couple too many advantages. Weapon, map, game-mode and teamplay knowledge is usually enough to ensure that established players will make life pretty hard for new players in any FPS. Yet here we are giving established players more HP, more DPS, better EWAR, etc on top of all that.
For the sake of being able to play the game we love for longer than anyone expected, maybe we could tone it down a little? The day Dust has a playerbase to support proper matchmaking I will drop the issue. But until then. Tier lock.
^ This.
I played a game yesterday, some dude named Little Zach from turdrock went like 20+ kills to 0 deaths while running Scotsman Gk.0 and Ghalags RR even while they out numbered us 15 - 9. He just camped a roof with hives and would run whenever his shield was popped.
That one player made a huge difference in the meta of that game, at first we weren't out numbered but within 5 minutes of playing several people dropped because we were getting spanked right off the bat.
These players who have tons of isk and gear already don't really fear dying, running proto/officer then helps limit the chance of that happening. Any new player who wants to go after someone like that because they think its just a normal FPS, if they land enough shots even the highest of tier players should die. Nope, not in Dust, where you effectively have to land double the amount of shots to take that top tier player out where as they only have to land a 1/3rd of the same amount to kill that new player.
New player checks out gear he's been killed with and notices its going to take months of just grinding SP to get anything prototype, let alone all the passive SP bonuses from skills and then if the player doesn't want to dump every single point of SP into one suit or weapon it will take them years to become flexible with complex mods and proto equipment across several suits and several weapons.
Realizing the other players around them are already there, suddenly they ask themselves "why am I playing this game?"
Maybe remove exp./ofc gear skill prerequisites so new players can readily use them and allow them to obtain them through the warbarge easier/cheaper than it is now. Instead of taking away the passive generation for some, what if we gave it to everyone? No one would lose anything and meanwhile new players could access high end gear early on which would help balance those games where they feel they are getting stomped. At least they would feel like "oh **** proto stomp going down, I can get out my stuff and try to kill a few" rather than "oh **** proto stomp going down, I have no WP yet so I'll just find another game".
I could see vets getting ruslted at the thought of new players having access to stuff that took them awhile to get, but that's about it. This would overall benefit everyone.