(TL;DR added to the bottom of the post)Hello everyone, your favorite Chromosome poster you love to hate is back with more facts and ideas that will infuriate the masses! That's right, after a long hiatus, trollface has returned to bring the pain to Uprising! Infamous for such things as
suggesting a freeze on all SP boosters until the player market opens and
daring to suggest that a maxed infantry class required more SP than a tank class back in Chromosome, I am back for more! Hero to no one, uber unknown to most and despised by those that do, after a long vacation I have returned to deliver yet another open handed slap of upsetting ideas to the Dust masses! So, without further ado,
ON WITH THE SHOW! People hate proto bears in pub matches. Proto bears hate people hating on them for running their best gear, which they worked long and hard for, in any game mode they choose. After all, PC battles are few and far between for most people. Now then, the way to fix the issue is to find some way to keep higher end gear from being run in pub matches, at least for the most part. There is a fairly simple fix for this, but it comes in three parts. One is simple, another has been done before and needs to happen again, and the last one will require a fair amount of dev work:
The simple first step is to increase the price of everything above MLT tier. Increase the price of everything STD tier by 1.2, ADV tier by 1.5x and everything PRO tier by 2.0x. This will make losing higher level gear sufficiently restrictive and also give people very good reason not to run it regardless of how much money they have. Sure, some people will stockpile their gear and run them anyway with their vast stores of money, and others will save up and run them when they get the chance, and still yet others are good enough that they can go a several games without dying and save enough to make up for the few matches where they loose 1 or 2 suits. However this will help sap off the overflowing amount of money many of the proto bears have stored up by pub stomping, eventually balancing out the number you see on the field. Every suit they loose will take them several matches worth of money to replace, making proto suits a rare and valuable asset rather than a common sight like we see today.
*As an amendment to this first step, vehicles have been largely gypped on tiers, so this cannot be applied to them directly. Therefore vehicle modules/weapons prices increased by 1.3x for ADV and by 1.6x for PRO to balance for the increase to AV prices.
*In addition, increase the ISK payouts in PC by 3.0x to make running high end gear in PC in order to protect assets more manageable.
The second step is a little more involved than simply changing the cost of items in the marketplace, but is just as important. Remove all ISK items purchased and refund all the ISK spent on them. This will give everyone a chance to stockpile what they want, but those stockpiles probably won't last TOO long.
This is because of my last step.....
Step 3, puttin' dem devs to work.
Give WP based on the meta level of the enemy or vehicle destroyed. Start with a meta lvl 0 (straight militia gear) infantry kill rewarding the base 50 WP. For every 5 meta levels above 0 award an additional 10 WP. People will then be awarded more for killing higher threat targets as well as earning more points towards an OB which can wipe out whole groups of them. Wearing high level gear or running high end vehicles then balances itself out by being great but also having drawbacks for using it apart from the risk of loosing it.
Greater power at the cost of much greater risk, that will even out the Dust economy gradually over time and resolve the issue of matches overburdened by high end gear. And yes, this means many people will be more inclined to buy AUR gear. Which is good. CCP get's paid and we get the satisfaction of taking other peoples real life money. Then we'd only need CCP to give us a stat that tracks how much AUR we've cost people over the course of our Dust career
RELEASE THE PROTO-HOUNDS!TL;DR:Increase the price of everything, refund all ISK items and take them all away, give WP based on meta lvl of opponent defeated = balance in pub matches