Dust 514 slices away it's player base a little more

Updated Dust 514 recently and played.

Found I wasn't getting any skill points for some matches.

Turns out if you don't earn 159 war points in a match, you wont get any skill points.

Okay, time for fun psychology - the macho responces 'if you didn't earn that much, you didn't contribute anything'

Well how about we go back to old school? You lose the match, you get nothing? If you didn't win, then obviously you didn't contribute enough, which is the same as not contributing at all! Right?

It's pretty sad to see macho responces about not needing welfare from people who are are on welfare but not quite bright enough to realise it.

Anyway, I presume this is to stop people idling in the MCC. But really it just flips off solo players some more and CCP shaves down the player base for Dust a little more.

I'd actually be fine if they took up some exclusivity line and said they only wanted players of a certain calibre (and bandwidth).

But you get the stupid mixed message of them always talking about improving the game for everybody, but then closing it off.

Dust 514, it's a jogging simulation (you spend more time watching your stamina bar than you ever do shooting at dudes) and now has the feature of the middle finger if you don't score enough points. And against a skilled and powered up opposing team, which you will repeatedly meet because no matchmaking, you can forget being a solo player in the game, anyway.

Dust 514 Clone Charity Page!

I like coming out of a battle in Dust with a profit. But in the end I'm not really spending any of that money on anything - it just sits there!

So like all blogs, I like traffic and I have idle ISK. So what happens next??

The first two people to give their character names in the comments section below will get a nice, round 5 million ISK sent to them from my character!

And on this initial foray, the next 20 people to post their character names in the comments will get 1 million isk each (in future it may be 500k of ISK each). Since not many people might post, you can post once per day for a million each time (that'll save me on writing in contacts as well!). But if you post more than once per day, it doesn't count, sorry! :)

That still wont drop my bank acount below 100 million. It was nice to get over a 100 mil (I know others have alot more!) but if I don't spend any, what's the point?

Dust 514: Proto Stomp Romp

In dust there are top of the line armours and weapons called prototypes.

Supposedly there's a disincentive to use them in public matches (as opposed to planetary conquest), because they cost alot to replace (when you die, you lose all gear on you. You can buy replacements, but they cost money/isk).

Today I ran into someone who had said public matches don't matter. To which I said, 'yet you bring the proto'. Turns out I guess right - they say they have an f' ton of money and still make money in proto. Presumably it's more powerful therefore they lose it less in battle.

So, there's another entry in this blog apparently becoming a 'look at the ugly welts and lumps of Dust 514'. It's kind of a wierd game - perhaps not even qualifying as 'game' in some respects.

Dust 514: Unlock the gun game at operation 4, sharp shooting 3?

In games I'm used to (which granted are often the single player persuasion), when you add skill points, you get better at shooting.

In Dust 514, with the assault rifle and using a dual shock controller, it feels more like you can actually hit guys once you get your operation up to about 4 and sharp shooting to about 3. You see little shield and armour bars actually slide down.

I'm not sure I've gotten that much better at aiming with the dual shock - I'd say this comes from statistics only, not from player skill.

Granted it may be like this for many weapons. But if you go for the overall workhorse that is the assault rifle, it seems to unlock the potential to hit about here.

I guess that's why they start you off with about 500,000 skill points - so you sink it all instantly into one type of weapon.

But if you don't (and nothing stops you from doing this), you might find you pretty much hit nothing at any range.

Though if you find there's a particularly good newbie weapon (the mass driver, maybe? I haven't tried it yet), feel free to comment!

Dust 514 tip : Heavy from the start

I just kind of realised you can use a heavy suit right from the start of play!

Go to dropsuit fittings, make a new fitting, go to market for the drop suit and find the militia amarr heavy suit.

You don't need to fill the heavy slot of it with a heavy weapon - you can use an assault rifle or whatever. Or you can stick a militia forge gun in there - kind of found them to be cool if someones covering your back. They do alot of damage and seem to have a wide hit circumfrence (and can also be used to destroy turrets). But if you're sitting there with one charged up and someone runs

If you're using a controller and/or have a slower connection, the extra protection will give you more time to learn how to play - instead of dying in an instant and learning nothing, you'll die in a few instants - but atleast you'll learn where your enemy came from.

It's not actually a fitting that's given at the start, yet it may make the game alot more fun for alot of people when they start play, if they knew about it.

Dust 514: Meaning crushed into a first person spread sheet manipulation program?

There's a weird see-saw of values in Dust 514. Maybe it applies to alot of PVP first person shooter games, I dunno.

But like being killed is supposed to be a big deal.

And yet even in a heavy suit you are essentially paper thin and will just pop at the slightest breeze of bullets (never mind how you'll get behind a corner but lag means you're actually still out in the open (ie, you started running behind cover maybe a half or quater a second latter than events seem to depict)).

So when it gets to the point where the other team (because they actually team up) keep blasting you and then they park a sniper over your side so you spawn, run out, then die anyway - well, what is it? Are we supposed to think it's a big deal to get killed? If so, it's so big a deal that actually it's just shit gameplay.

Or we retract - say it's not a big deal? Well then the whole thing becomes an esoteric exercise.

It's like it could really do with some in between ground, instead of being a hard binary between continuing and dead. Like maybe some kind of retreat option (maybe at a certain level of damage a retreat button becomes available) - it'd still count as a defeat inflicted by the other guy. But your character wouldn't have actually died - thus preserving the idea that continuing to live matters.

Maybe you'd say that respawning is like a retreat - but you are depicted as dying to do so.

Maybe you'd say it doesn't matter - except it does. Drain all the 'big deal' out of it and the whole thing is essentially a first person spread sheet manipulation program.

Oh wait, spread sheet manipulation....Eve....

Maybe you have a point....

Dust 514 : First mil' sp is the deepest...

Okay, I heard this said on their forum and maybe to a degree it's true - the first million skill points (after you leave battle academy) is the hardest. After that you've probably invested in both the armour skills (unlocking the slightly better basic armour plates and basic repair) and shield skills, as well as maybe putting assault rifles to three or so and using the GEK rifle.

You'll still run into tough stuff, but it's probably mostly a co-ordination thing - the other side actually uses mikes and keeps together as a group, heals the heavies, etc. When your own side likes to run in various random directions at once, you are usually fodder for a co-ordinated group.

It's also worth going into the explosive tree if you want to try out anti shield grenades or AV grenades - which are really just anti vehicle landmines which apparently float toward vehicles (but are useless against people).

Also I enjoyed a bunny hopping enemy today who bunny hopped into the path of his own grenade and died. Mostly dudes stay on the ground in this game, thankfully.

Stutter Dust 514 - crappily shaken like a polaroid picture

This just in - a character being able to move from left to right faster than I can move my own hand (let alone my whole body) from left to right so as to screw up sniping aim is crap. It's crap when you try to drop a whole lot of other physics principles in (eg, your car hits the merest bump and has to spaz out everywhere) and make it all look serious, then have this really, really bad physics screw up what the game is really about!

Dust 514 / Eve seems to be under DDOS attack

Dust 514 resides on the same server Eve - that server seems to be suffering a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack at the moment.

I wonder if such an attack is still in the area of amateur theatrics, or has moved on to organised extortion from various criminal groups?

Even their front pages are gone, unable to provide that service. Still able to get updates from the developers through twitter.

Slender Dust 514

It doesn't matter if you have a shot gun. If you shoot, he will yet live and your second shot will miss. If you try to aim for the head, he will sense you and move, spotting you! He will kill you - his back is your death, not his! The horror is in the not understanding!

So, they brought out a new slender game - that was quick! And this one is set in space, with guns! The guns are there to break your spirit, of course, because like the goggles, the guns, they do nothing!

No, you will stand two meters away and shot gun the slender man as he types things on the interwebs. He will simply sidle backwards and although you will plant another half of a shotgun blast, he will end you like the slender man ends everything!

Oh, they pretend these are other players. But that's just part of it - this is the future, and the future is multiple slender men, all able to kill you as soon as they can see you! Oh god, don't be seen!!!1!

Sometimes when the slender man kills you, you don't die straight away. There's a mechanic there that lets you call for help from the not-slenders (your team). And...you guessed it, it's there to break your spirit! It'll even say that someone with a revival unit is near you - and then they go away. You call for help and nobody comes - this is how much the slender man kills you! Right inside!

It ties in to the whole hunting around for scraps of paper - here you find yourself hacking various pieces of machinery, some which are objectives, others which help your side of not-slenders. You 'hack' them because that's to remind you of what the slender man will do to your body if he sees you.

At first the game seemed a fairly uninteresting excursion to death land (even at the academy stage) and I had assumed you probably need to be elbow deep in the skill system before you can hack. But no, everyone can hack. And the thing is, you get the same points for hacking (or more!) as you do for when the slender man lets you think you killed him! This is a game changer! Clearly the who gun thing is what we all knew it was - there to raise your hopes, simply to dash them to the ground! No, you are instead to go to various pieces of machinery and if you have the skills to hold the circle button down for a period of time and watching a progress button, you can get just as many points as if you managed to pretend kill the slender man! 50 points! 50 of what, I do not know? I have no idea - but 50 sounds good!

So, dash on through, find various machines that will put your heavy thumb skills to the test! And lose the scenario anyway! It's okay, you get a fair wack of cash and skill points even if you lose - because the slender man wants you to know, you're not going anywhere!