SP gives older players far too great of an advantage on the battlefield over the newbies than it should.

The purpose of SP should be to give players access to a larger selection of equipment and skills so they can expand their role on the battlefield. It should not be rewarding older players with enormous amounts of health and damage bonuses through passive skill bonuses and the modules that SP can unlock.

Look at the competitive games out there that are and have been popular. League of Legends, Halo, Quake, Counter-Strike, Street Fighter, hell even Call of Duty, the list goes on. All of these games have something in common. They are fair to both new players and older players. There are no insane bonuses given to players through leveling up. Bonuses, when there are any, are minimal. For example, League of Legends has a progression system, the "skill tree" but manages to stay fair and competitive. How? The bonuses that are granted to players for leveling up are minimal (percent increases to stats are typically between 2%-5%). The "equipment" you can unlock (in this case new champions) are balanced so that high level champions do not have a significant advantage over low level champions. A new player can jump right into the game and immediately begin having fun.

The progression system in Dust 514, the skillbooks, gives an enormous advantage to older players. I don't think that there has been any shooter in history with such a huge "artificial" skill gap between low level and high level players, and there's a reason for that. This system is not fun.

Being a free, downloadable game on the PS Store, 99% of downloaders will make their mind up about this game within 1 or 2 matches. Do you think players are left with a good first impression when they jump into a match and face opponents with over 200% of their health and can deal over 30% extra damage than they can? Do they have fun when they can barely scratch other players but they themselves can lose all their health and armor in the blink of an eye? No. When newbies have to deal with BS like this, they delete the game off their hard drive. They have no incentive to continue getting stomped on by older players; they didn't play a dime for this game. They won't put up with it. This game was advertised as a competitive FPS set in and connected to the universe of a PC MMO, not a a wannabe role-playing game.

On the other side of the spectrum, older players get extremely bored extremely quickly after having acquired 3-4 mill SP and all the health and damage bonuses that come with it. How can an online game be fun when it provides you with no challenge? Why should a player who wants to be challenged be forced to find a corp and participate in corp battles (in many cases against the same familiar faces over and over) which may only come a few times a week? This isn't a problem in any other online game. You can instantly jump into a pub and face a challenging team in LoL, Halo, COD, etc. The incentive to play these games is for the challenge and competition. Once you've acquired complex shield mods and passive damage bonuses in Dust 514, you're essentially a god in pubs and have reached end-game because nobody can touch you, and therefore there is no incentive to continue playing.

This is a a big reason why player retention is pathetic right now and the playerbase is so small. Fortunately, a fix is easy.

Many skillbooks already do a good job at allowing players to expand their role on the field and rewarding them with small bonuses for continuous play like any progression system should. Many low level equipment are already relatively balanced with their high level counterparts (E.G a proto AR gives just a 10% damage bonus at the cost of a lot of CPU). There are, however, some skills and equipment that go way over the top.

These are shield/armor skills and damage skills.

Health modules, damage modules, and their respective skills should not grant players such an enormous advantage in-game vs. newer players. Please think very carefully about these numbers for a second. A 20% health or damage advantage in any shooter is considered huge advantage. In Dust, you can easily stack enough skills and mods over time to have a 250% health advantage and 30% damage advantage over a new player using a similar role. The unfairness of this is mind-boggling. This is game breaking.

This fact also renders modules that don't boost your health or damage output completely useless. Why would you improve your hacking speed a bit, or increase the distance you can sprint for or running speed a bit, or reduce your signature profile a bit, when you can just stack up on a few health modules and become a god?

Tweak down all health and damage bonuses granted by skillbooks and modules. Here are some suggestions:

-Complex shield mods should grant no more than 30 health max. The progression could go something like this: 10 HP for standard, 20 HP for advanced, 30 HP for prototype.
-Same deal with armor mods. Standard could grant 30 HP, advanced 40 HP, prototype 50 HP.
-Damage mod bonuses should be halved and the stacking penalty fixed.
-Damage bonuses on weapon proficiency skills should be removed and replaced with accuracy bonuses or just the ability to use more weapons.
-Shield control skill should grant 2% extra shields per level, not 5%.
-Weaponry skill should grant 1% extra damage per level, not 2%.

Finally all of these suggestions are intended to only effect infantry. In the few areas where vehicles would be effected (for example, nerfing the shield control skill which effects both infantry and vehicles) simply introducing separate skills for vehicles and tuning them from there would keep them balanced with infantry.