Thought about using WP as a criteria:

Griefers have been know to put tremendous effort into their chosen style of play. Should it be possible to keep your WP below the limit by nullifying the +50 from kills through, for example, penalties from team kills you can be sure there *will* be people doing just that.

I love the wp idea I think it ensures truly new players, which is the point after all. I think maybe 100,000 wp would be more than enough to get new players started. They don't need to understand the game, they merely need to be know they like it and want to play more. Plus if its a bit of a challenge, more people will want to play more.

I could see a few issues here: 1 what stops a vet from rolling alts to grief the academy? 2 some players need longer to learn how to play than others. so how to you account for this? 3 is it really a good idea to segregate the new players then suddenly throw them to the bunnies?

While I agree there needs to be a much better way to teach people how to play this game, seperating them off by themselves in special battles is not an ideal way to do it.

The definition of a rookie needs to be simple. If a player can survive well enough to consistently earn war points to achieve veteran status then they'll do fine.

On the subject of matchmaking, I have 2 suggestions.

Match squads against other squads: sometimes you just want to just play by yourself and relax, in those cases being matched against squads provides too much of a challenge to be fun, and too little challenge for the squad. If I'm just playing by myself, don't match me against a full squad of some elite corp.

Match players based on ALLOCATED SP: 1 million (allocated) SP or below players get thrown in one battle, 2 million SP and below players get thrown in another battle, etc. Right now I'm saving my SP before specializing so I'm still using militia starter fits, and I keep getting matched with people with prototype weapons and prototype specialized dropsuits; not a pleasant experience at all. Playing against these highly specialized players is too much of a challenge for most, and not enough of a challenge to the proto wearers.

The instant battle academy is a good start, but I really think basing it off allocated SP would be a really good way to put new players against other new players, and work as a good system for everyone else.

I don't see #1 being a big deal. Granted some like to pubstomp but they'll get to first sp cap and probably be booted out of the baby mercy zone and then it won't matter. Besides it won't do the vet anygood to pubstomp on an alt. What would be the benefit?

I think to discourage the Stat paddlers and bets potentially trying to pad an alter stats, maybe the academy shouldn't track anything except w/l and wp. Or alternately when one "graduates" stats are reset to 0. This would at least discourage a portion of vets.

On Tuesday 14th of May we will be enabling a special instant battle queue for new players called the Instant Battle Academy.

Here's a major problem, seeing as WP and stats STILL aren't recorded in Skirmish matches you can have Protos entering these battles.

Small player base + More game modes = Bad matchmaking.

We should limit the game modes as much as possible until we get a solid player base capable of supporting what this game needs.