On Tuesday 14th of May we will be enabling a special instant battle queue for new players called the Instant Battle Academy. Entry to these battles will be limited by total war points earned per character and will prevent older players from joining. New players will not be presented with the existing instant battle queues however they can join a squad with veteran players and be pulled into other battles. Faction warfare and planetary conquest battles will also still be available to new players.

This is a first step at improving the new player experience. We are also working on a vastly improved matchmaking system which is designed to better separate players based on their actual skill level instead of just isolating new players. We will hopefully be rolling that out in an expansion later this year.

You may notice I have not mentioned the exact criteria for being a new player and I am very interested in hearing how many skill points, war points, battles or any other metric you would use to determine what constitutes a "newbie". Remember the goal is to give new players enough time to understand the game not necessarily become proficient at it. So if you have any thoughts on that please reply here.