There's only a handful of people playing the game right now, and we're on 2 maps, instead of 1400-4000 that can be expected on release. There will be PLENTY of places for the carebears to gather once the game goes live. Skill progression will also be much slower once the full game is released. Once this game goes live, instead of a few hundred players, we can easily expect a few million, or at the absolute bare minimum, hundreds of thousands.

Also, the quality of this beta is almost excellent, and I have faith that it will basically be excellent come the 29th (here's hoping).
This is a true beta, not a marketing one. You're here to test, not to be sold.

-Lol @ OP welcome to ur first real beta, after u experience how a game made. You can laugh at these console developers that give u a so called beta 2 weeks before realease. Lol-


This.

It makes me laugh when devs do that, assuming that every console owner is an moron. When it's so close to release what they've really given us is a demo. I wouldn't be surprised if these beta's were just early builds shown at the previous years E3 or something.

To be honest I'm not really enjoying Dust so far, but I'm very excited and I feel privilaged to be involved in a true beta.

Lol for the first time in my life im glad to be an old gamer. If you have any concerns about Dust please go play EVE or speak with Eve players. Better yet I will give You a homework assignment go research CCP and the CEO. So you can see for ur self why good at what they do. If you think the Eve community would allow CCP to provide an expansion to Eve thats garbage you have a lot to learn about the relationship between CCP and its fan base.

Lol idk what this guy is taking about "newbies won't have a chance of killing pub stars" that's not true since this is a team based game , I think your statement there makes me think you play cod a lot where one person who has skill can go around and kill everyone this isn't that type of game and if you can't handle it go back to cod or stay and learn teamwork , also I have assault type 1 or 2 , but I put in militia gear with the mailita mods and weapons and still could kill people with better gear wether it's from help from a partner or by myself, and dude your complaining about quality of this game? This is a very old build and another reason this is just closed beta homie , this game will be perfect at release

This game will take off. Some f2p games, and these are the bottom barrel pay to win f2p's, average well over 20k people. The best of the best f2p's are averaging way more than 20k, and this is years after they've been released. For anyone to post saying that this game will not take off, is purely a naive individual. There is a gigantic market for this game, and all the money deals are either for boosters, or cosmetic items. They aren't selling any sort of I-win items here, just cosmetics and boosters.

This game will easily average, just in my rudimentary estimation and opinion, 50k easy. It will more than likely be well over or under that number. A key thing to remember here, is that there are 10's of millions of people that use the PS3 and PSN alone, couple that together with FPS gamers, casuals and hardcore, altogether with the fact that you get the game for free and can play the entire thing for free, is mind blowing. You get all content free of charge, and that assumes expansions. Knowing how CCP does expansions for Eve, which is free content, I'd expect nothing less from them with this game. Now tell me, you seriously think with all of that put into the same equation equals hardly a following? You are out of your mind if you believe this will have a small following.

Quick news flash, it's still 2013.

Oh please, regale us with tales of your foresight and wisdom... we can't get enough!

Yep. So how are you enjoying the PvE co-op mode that was promised to come out 6 months ago?

Tell me, was it said that it would come out this build? If I remember CCP's expansion plan right we should still have another 1 or 2 major expansions this year.

First of all, the game will include a PvE co-op GÇ£Survival modeGÇ¥ in 2012 (Laurino actually didnGÇÖt specify if the feature will be implemented at launch or not. He just said GÇ£in 2012GǦ). It will be basically Dust 514GǦs Horde Mode and will prompt players to defend outposts from the Rogue Drones that are already established as some of the most prominent PvE enemies in EVE Online. You can see them in a concept design above.

Dust 514 will also support competitive gaming and e-sports with an expansion in 2013.

outside of the mega hits 9k is pretty large number for multiplayer.

outside of the mega hits 9k is pretty large number for multiplayer.

outside of the mega hits 9k is pretty large number for multiplayer.

It never ceases to amaze me how you always find apologists on game forums, no matter the situation. I mean, do any of you have something at stake here if you're wrong? Yes, I know you all hate the imps, and I'm sure the idea of having one stating, "I told you so" is grinding your gears. but what's so wrong about admitting CCP's way behind schedule and has released an unfinished product?

You dont seem to realise how devoted ccp fans can be, if ccp were to sell toilet paper bpo for 50k aurum, it would hit top sellers in no time.

I share some of the OP's disappointment with the pace of how things have progressed.
I've been playing Dust for nearly a year now, and in all honesty not much has really changed.
I used to convince myself that each new release was just a test of specific features & functions, which were then plugged into the all encompassing version that CCP were working on ready for release, which would be awesome, spectacular & exceed my dreams. Those dreams that were born from all the talk, ideas from CCP & more importantly, the 'actual' in game footage of huge battles involving everything we could think of related to a futuristic MMOFPS crossing platforms.

However, release date came and .... Meh. Same old games types, FW battles that don't really matter or have consequence, & a flawed Planetary Conquest model designed for only the largest, wealthiest, EVE based corps.
As with others on the forums, I do feel like I was sold a lie & they took my money for Merc Packs only to return broken promises.

BUT ... I do actually love this game, and still have hope that all those promises will be fulfilled.
CCP need to realise though that we, the console crowd, are a different crowd to the EVE/PC & our patience runs a lot thinner & we can easily be distracted by new shiny things...The Last of Us has a rather nice gleam to it & then when the South Park RPG is released .....

Hopefully though with the CPM now instigated, we can actually get some idea on time scales & what is happening on the mysterious road map.

Didn't Eve Online start with only 5,000 players or less and had graphics so bad that their old publisher thought CCP was joking with the graphics? Also, the gameplay was thought to be unfinished and had soooooooooo many things wrong at the time.

You expect the console gamers to wait several years before it gets "good"? Please.

The skill gap isn't why the game doesn't have 50K members signed on at any given time.

Hey, here's an idea, maybe the EVE folks have a bit of experience with how CCP works and the non-EVE FPS folks have a bit of experience with first person shooters.

The Imps may act Elitest for the most part, but when they are right they are right.

Wow never seen so many people upset about aFREE game....

outside of the mega hits 9k is pretty large number for multiplayer.

No it's not... 9k is actually poor for a only multiplayer game.

Are you going to offer some solutions or are just here to point fingers.

No 24 people is poor for a multiplayer game. (cough* Jump Gate)

outside of the mega hits 9k is pretty large number for multiplayer.

Looking back it seems the number of blind optimists has decreased in the last month. That's kinda dispiriting, I guess their misguided faith was almost uplifting.

Though since I'm still here I guess that also makes me misguided.

I remember only a month ago the blind optimists were telling me this is no the game for me. !0 years, not a CoD clone, RPG style Sp/level system is what makes an MMO or whatever.

Dust is down 4000 players since then despite good numbers of new players trying it. Looks like it is not the game for lots of people.

The OP's post is looking more and more like divine prescience.

Actually, the OP posts again now simply because in another 6 months he's going to look just as stupid as he did with the original post. There's a lot of work to be done on Dust, but it will be done.

The release was a bust because marketing trumped development.

Releasing on 5/14 *harharhar see what we did there* won out over making sure the game was at a stage where it wouldn't get mocked for basic game play and performance issues.

Actually, the OP posts again now simply because in another 6 months he's going to look just as stupid as he did with the original post. There's a lot of work to be done on Dust, but it will be done.

Sure loves to hear himself talk.

See the monocle scandal. You know nothing (Jon Snow).

Outside of mega hit RETAIL games. This game is FREE, and not even 1% of PS3 users want to play it.

Oh please, regale us with tales of your foresight and wisdom... we can't get enough!

Chinese developers
Okay, this one can be a bit fishy and questionable, some might call it racist. I don't know for how long their Chinese team have been around. My experience is that generally Chinese programmers are good at crunching out the bulk, but they lack the feeling and ability to make high quality products all the way out like we are used to.

Whilst most of what you've said in the rest of your post is tenuous and debateable, I only want to focus on this part, which makes everything else you've said highly dubious. Do you know that the china office is full only of chinese devs? Well, it's not. CCP have devs from all over the world in all their offices.

Also, some might call your comment racist - that's because it is.

outside of the mega hits 9k is pretty large number for multiplayer.

You obviously have not played any other games besides mega-hits and dust.

It's funny to read this whole thread - there are a lot of good points on both sides of the debate but almost no one has mentioned the first point and title of the thread: the skill gap is certainly not the reason this game is not doing better than it is. That's just nonsense.

He makes a good point... Everyone wants to put their 2 cents in which caused us to move off the topic at hand in this thread

Pretty sure 9k population is at the level of "We are about to go out of business"

If everyone bought the elite pack @ $100 = $900,000. The team working on dust is at least 40 people large with varying pay grades, though maybe the chinese employed work for significantly less (just sayin). That gives an mean salary of 22,500 per employee. Some make more and some make less - the game is a losing battle at this point unless they do something drastic.

Edit: forgot about overhead like the 8 chefs CCP has or material costs for computer software, renting the Unreal Engine, having an office building, elecricity, water, etc. By some rough estimations, this game is hemoraging money and sucking the life out of CCPs EVE wallet.

How long will this game stay afloat? The money we are sinking into it now has the risk of never paying off because the game is about to shutoff in 1 year.

Congrats you are a profit

dont you think you are expecting too much from a free game? I thought this was just an experiment to see if p2p type games would work on psn so i personally think they did well

Pretty sure 9k population is at the level of "We are about to go out of business"

If everyone bought the elite pack @ $100 = $900,000. The team working on dust is at least 40 people large with varying pay grades, though maybe the chinese employed work for significantly less (just sayin). That gives an mean salary of 22,500 per employee. Some make more and some make less - the game is a losing battle at this point unless they do something drastic.

Edit: forgot about overhead like the 8 chefs CCP has or material costs for computer software, renting the Unreal Engine, having an office building, elecricity, water, etc. By some rough estimations, this game is hemoraging money and sucking the life out of CCPs EVE wallet.

How long will this game stay afloat? The money we are sinking into it now has the risk of never paying off because the game is about to shutoff in 1 year.

So... You predicted something that was actually fairly obvious?

It was also kind of obvious that this game wasn't going to attract a lot of the CoD/BF crowd, as they're so busy playing those games itself, and the fact that no advertising was actually DONE for this game all kind of points to low player count. Despite all this, 8.5k on opening weekend is not bad at all. Almost a 5k jump from peak times before Uprising.

Okay OP.. I'm going to stay as neutral as possible in this response, and I want you to understand that I am not attacking you or disagreeing with you or anything else. I'm just going to ask a simple question from the sideline.

If you hate the game so much, if you proclaimed the downfall of this game years ago, if you don't enjoy it, as your post seems to convey that you indeed don't... why are you still here, on the forums, spreading a toxic environment and circle jerking likes with all the other malcontents?

I get it, you're not having fun and you think by raising these issues you're somehow doing us and CCP a favor. You think, however incorrect and ill informed you may be, that this post will change something. Anything. And that CCP will laud you as a hero for your most insightful post... they won't. The only people who will agree positively with this thread will be other unhappy players. The 'Fanbois' as you eloquently put it, will continue to rage against you and any point you want to make, no matter how valid they may be, perceive or otherwise, while all the other 'haters' will stand behind you simply going "Yeah!~" like something from a primary school playground.

The point of this thread is a typical post from an Imperfect, i'm afraid. Chest-Thumping and bragging going "I SAID SO" from anyone with that tag under their name causes 90% of the player base to roll their eyes now. Being good at the game does not make you an expert in game development.

Of course CCP are not blameless. They themselves have made broken promises and we're all aware of how far behind DUST has fallen in development. But you're still here. Probably still playing, certainly still posting and probably still using Aurum based gear and items. So they're doing something right.

To touch on your posts about costs... CCP are not a no-mark company. They can very easily bankroll this game from the (Monumental) profits they make from EVE. Of course the game might prove too much of a sink, but 50K Concurrent in EVE and 9K Concurrent in Dust (Assuming 4-5K pay) is MORE than enough to keep this game alive.

Again, I reiterate, what was the point in this post?