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Throughout the entire history of “Faction Play” the advantage has clearly been with the mercenary career path. Mercenaries can jump to the most successful faction or over faction to reap the best rewards. In the past they could do mech bay tours by constantly switching factions to get the tier 2 mech bay. In my opinion this helped spread the mercs out a bit. Under the current system they can choose contracts with low population factions to get even better rewards while faction loyalist cannot. As someone who has played almost entirely as a mercenary I think this is wrong. Loyalist deserve rewards specific to being a loyalist and those rewards should continue throughout their career without capping out at level 20. I think the biggest reason that the original vision of faction play failed.
[House Bills: Mercenaries fight for c-bills. Factions pay their soldiers in house bills. Now I would not suggest that Loyalist only be paid in house script. C-bills are too intrical to the game. Base pay for Loyalist and Mercenaries should be in C-bills and they should have the same base pay but bonus pay for Loyalist should come in House Bills and be based on the mechwarriors house rank. In fact I think it would be nice if every month active Loyalist who have played a certain number of faction matches should get a payout based on how many matches they played that month. A “payday” for loyalist if you will. Mercenaries could also receive house bills which they could exchange and at 50% exchange rate for C-bills if/when they break their contracts or if they just wanted to use them in the regular Mechwarrior store. Loyalist could also make that same exchange if they wanted to buy items from the regular Mechwarrior store. Say for instance a Kurita Loyalist wanted to buy a Timber Wolf for quick play or comp play and he/she wanted to exchange some house bills to help pay for it.
The Faction Store: Loyalist should be able to use House Bills to buy items from their Faction Store. Pretty much any and all over faction technology should be available in the Faction stores. All Inner Sphere tech should be available to all IS factions and the same with their Clan counterparts. However mechs and mech variants associated with specific factions should come at a substantial discount perhaps even up to 50%. For Instance a Federated Suns player should be able to purchase Blackjacks for much less than the loyalist of other IS factions. A merc working for the Fed Suns should be able to spend their house bills at the same store to buy the same Blackjack but they would pay the same amount as that Blackjack would cost in C-bills from the mechwarrior store.
Loyalty points: In addition to gaining rank loyalist players should be able to spend Loyalty points on faction specific Items. A few faction specific mech variants in every weight class should be available to be purchased in this fashion. These mechs should confer the same bonus as Hero Mechs do but in House Bills instead of C-bills. They should also have fixed faction specific camo specs as the Hero mechs used to. No customization of their appearance. These are mechs earned by the player as rewards for fighting for their faction. Players should not be able to use Loyalty point mechs for factions they no longer belong to and perhaps they should even revert to the faction whenever a player leaves that faction.
In addition to mechs other faction items should be available. Faction colors, and specific decals should be able to be purchased with Loyalty points. Rank decals specific to the faction should be available as well. A Lyran Hauptmann should be able to purchase a decal to display their rank for a reasonable amount of LP. I don’t think PGI should simply copy over the faction items from their store for each faction but perhaps have a few items available specifically for LP so as not to cut too deeply into their profits from selling these items for MC. Perhaps all LP items should be stripped from a player should they change factions.
Mercs should not be able to access anything like LP rewards.
Commendations: I think a commendation system for faction play would really help across the board. Nearly every faction has lore specific commendations to choose from. Some are even given to mercs. Commendations could be given by accumulating specific objectives during faction play. Successful defenses during Siege mode. Intel gathered during scouting missions. Any number of things. Commendations should take some considerable work and should reward players for a wide variety of things. Commendations could come with decals or cockpit item rewards so that players could show off their achievements. A place to display them in the interactive mech bays alluded to in the Production Update would be a great thing as well. Adding ribbons to a player's forum profile would also be nice.
I think these items could really revitalize the game experience for Faction Loyalist. Different things could be done for mercs through the M.R.B.C. however at this time it is far more rewarding to be a merc than a loyalist already. One bucket game play does not make for an interesting faction play system. It may “work” but it is mostly pointless. I think if PGI can stabilize the faction populations they could make Faction Play interesting again but if they can’t offer decent incentives to Loyalist players I can’t see FP ever getting out of the one bucket rutt.
Edited by Iron Buccaneer, 23 August 2017 - 10:37 AM.
