Posted 01 September 2014 - 09:00 PM
The grind is terrible for moderately skilled players, and abysmal for anyone worse (and that includes most of the new player population, really).
Several things could be done to mitigate this:
1 - Double current salvage pay rates. Since salvage is only collected by the winning team, it'd incentivize a win more. Also, since salvage rewards efficient kills (it pays based on the surviving equipment of destroyed mechs), it'd help reduce the damage farming mentality that so many players have.
2 - Real and meaningful rewards for alternative objective wins. Conquest needs double the c-bills per resource point collected, in addition to Conquest Capture Assists that reward a player for being in a box when it changes color (red to yellow, and yellow to blue). A player can get an arbitrary number of CCAs, depending on how much capping or uncapping he does. Make this a meaningful c-bill reward for each CCA credit. At 5k per, you'd see objective play on Conquest really take off (instead of 9 games out of 10 being glorified Skirmish matches). Assault needs drastically boosted turret kill rewards, as well as turret assists. Say, 5k divided among all players who damage the turret, distributed proportionally to the damage done, as well as a 1k bounty to the kill shot. Throw in 20k to each teammate for a capture win and the base in Assault suddenly means something.
3 - Far better rewards for things like spotting, counter ECM, TAG/NARC, etc. They already have token bounties, but until a spotter can make similar amounts of money to the LRM carrier he's enabling, we won't see team play properly rewarded.
There are other changes that should be made as well, especially to the new player experience (a few unlockable mechbays, for instance, and maybe a free mech under 10 million c-bills of the player's choice after completing some appropriate achievement). However, the ones above are some of the most important that could have the most immediate positive impact on overall gameplay and the general player experience.