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They are not mutually exclusive. Whether training a human or an animal the best regimen is one that combines both negative and positive reinforcement. Right now we have numerous proposals to affect income in the manner that charitable contributions reduce tax liability, but we lack the other approach, that of fees or fines to shape behavior as an inescapable burden that cannot be shirked.
This game lacks sufficient c-bill sinks. For the long term player with a myriad of mechs it is trivial to accumulate the c-bills in one month to purchase the game's only ongoing new content, new mechs.
The only other thing people voluntarily spend c-bills on are consumables. If one relies solely on consumables as a method of wealth drawdown it may take a good long while to arrive at state of c-bill poverty where incentives must be followed to have enough to buy new content. If all my matches went to zero c-bills it would still take 416 matches to bring 70 million down to 20 million(an amount generally sufficient to purchase at least one variant of a new mech) with a three consumable use per match.
To what degree do you feel players are set in their ways regarding consumables? Its not usual for two or more to be used during a match. Even using four costs only 160k. Because the average earnings for FP vastly exceed this cost they are an unreliable method for behavior shaping.
I do have ideas for more c-bill sinks but many are not appropriate for the gamemode given the current state of the game. For instance if factions mattered and had favored equipment you would have a long term incentive to purchase numerous duplicate mechs to offset the loss of income through using non-favored or rival equipment. Incentives must be paired with perpetual grind or they cannot be used to influence behavior.
A two sided conflict is boring. If each of the thirteen factions had fronts which could contract and expand and if these front had variable payouts depending on their area you would create natural economic reasons to rotate factions. Within this rotation there would be the incentive to buy that faction's favored equipment in search of the linear optimization solution solving for income given the constraints of equipment, team skill and territory.
The player experience is thus a bounded bubble with a vast number of potential solutions and those valid combinations requiring collectively many hundreds or thousands of hours of gameplay. This is my proposal for perpetual grind a mechanism that is absent currently.
Edited by Spheroid, 10 December 2018 - 12:40 PM.
