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There is an issue with people farming in ways that negatively impact their team, we have all seen the mechs firing at the sky until their heat buildup destroys them, we have all seen players quit the match 3 seconds after it starts. At the moment they will receive the set win/loss rewards when the match finishes.
PGI have stated that they will deal with such problems if tickets are raised, but that means PGI will need to spend the time investigating each report and dealing with the problem.
A better solution is to make such methods of farming uneconomic in the first place, that mean less people will do it and PGI will have to deal with fewer reports.
They need to change the reward system, that's all and its not a huge change. People who DC won't be penalised that much but people can't exploit farm as they do know. The system below would make it more expensive if you CTD early in a match though.
The same type of approach can be applied to the c-bill reward and the xp reward. For now I will only suggest how PGI could change the c-bill reward.
Alter the set awards for win/loss to be based on performance.
Win/loss reward starts at 0
For Damage done apply a multiplier of 2.5k for Lights, 2k for mediums, 1.5k for heavies and 1k for assaults. Add this amount to the win/loss reward.
For Spot assist, Kill assist, Cap assist and kills multiply the award by 5. Add this to the win/loss reward.
Limit the Win/loss C-Bill reward to 100k/75k respectively (as now).
This approach means that a minimum contribution to the battle gets you the base reward you get now, anything above that is still rewarded in the current way. AFK, heat suicide, rush suicide, out of bounds suicide all drastically reduce income to near 0. As this system is about income rather than costs it can apply to trial mechs and non-trial mechs equally.
So a Light that does 32 damage and gets 2 spot assists gets 100k on a win. An assault would need 80 damage plus two assists. Someone who AFKs might get 10-20k for spot assists if they are lucky. Someone who overheat suicides straight away gets 0 income for the win/loss, pretty much all they can hope for is a Cap win reward.
This approach of simply limiting the reward rather than doing something like multiplying by .75 if you lose does not penalise an unlucky game as much as it would otherwise. If the light above wanders into the main enemy force and does 10 damage before dying they still get 25k on a loss or win, a single spot assist adds another 10k. They would only need 26 damage and 1 assist to get 75k which is the same as the loss reward that we get now and not a huge amount less than the win reward.
The benefit of this system is that it is much easier to tweak. If people are not getting enough out on losses then they could increase the multipliers for the amount applied to a loss reward but keep the limit at 75k , The light that only managed 10 damage could then get 40k added to the reward rather than 25. Other possibilities include changing how much each element is multiplied by (either up or down) for both a win and a loss.
The downside of this is that an unopposed base cap rush would get very little reward. The 2.5k for a Cap assist only gives you 12.5k as the win game reward with the numbers proposed above (of course they could just change the multiplier for that single element). Of course some people might feel that discouraging that tactic as a way gaining c-bills/xp is not a disadvantage.
ETA - Just to reiterate the numbers I use for the multipliers above are just suggestions, its more the general idea of implementing this I would like to focus on.
Edited by Naeron66, 29 November 2012 - 04:37 PM.
