With all the fuss over SP caps and whatnot lately I was just thinking of a way to relate Dust514 to a real life situation - so, let's think of this game like a sport (because in a way, it kinda is).

Think of playing FPS games like the sport of football (or soccer for those who mean something else when they say football).

Now anyone can play football just like anyone can play a FPS game. You can grab a ball and just go kick around in the street - this is like playing an ordinary FPS game like COD for instance. You don't need to have put in any time or effort to just have a quick kickaround.

Dust is a step up from normal FPS games; it requires time and effort just like if you wanted to take playing football from the streets to playing with a team or trying to go pro. To make that next step you have to spend a lot of time training, going to the gym, and maybe even buy some decent kit.

The people at the top of the sport, say in the English Premier League, are there after spending thousands of hours working at it. Nobody, not even the most talented player, can go straight from playing on the street to playing in the Premiership. In Dust, anyone can jump in and play; there's nothing stopping you. However, if you want to be able to compete against the top players, you have to put in the same amount of time and effort but it's still going to take years to catch up on all the extra time and effort they've already put in.

My point is: why should it be somehow arranged that a person could go from low level to competing with someone at a high level who's already put in so much more time? That's not realistic. If you can only put in a couple of hours a week into playing, you're not ever going to stand a chance against someone who plays all day every day. This is not punishing you for doing other things - this is realism.

If you don't make football basically your whole life, you're not going to be a premiership footballer. But that's okay; maybe you want to be a chef or a teacher or something else. Nothing wrong with that but don't ***** and moan that you can't compete against Lionel Messi because he gets to play 24/7.

Now I obviously understand that the way Dust works at the moment it is quite easy for a premiership player to be chucked in a game with a bunch of randoms in a park but that is not the ultimate vision, so give it time. Besides, no one would whine about Robin Van Persie scoring a bunch of goals in a game with randoms - they'd just accept that he's better because he's been doing it more for longer.

Your 'one MAJOR flaw' is totally irrelevant. You only get paid to play sport at the upper levels. At the low levels you actually have to put your own money in, pay for training, buy your own kit, pay your own gym memberships, etc. Besides the MAJOR point that this is a free to play game - you don't have to pay anything at all to play.

And I will be honest - I don't care about SP. I like the fact that I'm limited to how much time I can productively play each day otherwise I would waste so much time that I could spend on more worthwhile things.

The entire point of my analogy is that people who play a sport all the time for thousands of hours deserve to be better than the people that can only manage to play a few hours a week. If you really want to devote your life to playing Dust, fair play to you, whatever happens there will never be a way to stop you. Just because you can't or won't play as much as the 'no-lifers' doesn't mean you should have some magic way of catching them up in the few hours you play - that would be like taking drugs to become a stronger cyclist!