As a new player here I am trying to wrap my head around the point of the SP cap. Pretty much the only reason I have heard for the cap has come from Vets worrying about losing their massive advantage they have over new players. There is not a need for a SP cap when you have a passive SP mechanic in the game, and here is why.

From what I observed I would get 1 passive SP every 3 seconds.
3 sec = 1sp
1 min = 20sp
1 hour = 1200sp
1 day = 28,800 sp
1 week = 201,600 sp

Currently the SP cap for playing matches is at 190k sp per WEEK.

If a player created an account or character 5 months (round down to 4 weeks a month=20 weeks) ago and NEVER played a single match, this player would have 4,032,000 sp accumulated without ever having played a match. In order for a new player to "catch up" sp wise to the player that never played a match, assuming the new player only plays up to the weekly sp cap, it would take this new player over 5 months (21.2 weeks) of playing to catch up to the sp amount of the inactive player. This isn't unfair... it is just stupid.



Vets have an advantage over new players because of the % modifiers applied by their trained skills. Vets also have much better equipment that they can use. Add the % modifiers to the better equipment it becomes obvious that us new players are in for a difficult uphill battle. This is all ok until you tell us new players that our progression is limited not by our contributions to the team, nor is it limited by how much time we put into the game, but it is limited by a static figure imposed on us. It's not like new players are even informed of a SP cap, we simply see after we hit cap that we get between 0-1000sp (maybe 6 out of 32 players reach 1000+ wp per game).

Pretty much all I see with the SP cap is a protection for the small group of people that want to keep going 25/1 or 48/0. If you are looking to reward people for participating in the closed beta then give them a free 30-day sp booster augment or a shiny dropsuit that says "I survived whatever glitch and all I got was this T-shirt". If you want this game to be long-term then you will need to attract new people and you will also need to retain them. Good luck doing that if you require them to wait several weeks before they can get meaningful gear to survive being spawncamped by heavy machineguns or mass driv or blaster tanks with 10k hp.