It's quite possible to win a battle on a clone pack against a tier 2 corp though.

The idea is to wage war with your district clones, not drop clone packs like they're the bass at a Skrillex concert.

Clone packs are meant to be a bad choice, only used to get a foothold into PC territory.

All this does nothing to change the fact that a few dozen players can completely dominate an entire game mode. As I understand it, PC became completely broken when corporations were able to rise to the top by taking on the role of mercenaries to the point where hiring them almost guaranteed a victory. Corporations lose a real sense of purpose if you're not even going to be fighting in a mode that's supposed to pit corporation v corporation and instead hire someone to do most of the heavy lifting.

In my opinion, there should be a penalty for fielding players outside of your own corporation in a battle (with a reduced penalty for fielding members of an alliance member.) What if your side was reduced by 5 clones for each ringer (2 or 3 for alliance members)? Could that be enough to prohibit corps from relying on the top 1% to win their battles for them?

I'm new to the PC business, so feel free to correct any wrong assumptions that I have made.

Or
Greatly decrease price of clone packs
Done

[It's a good thought imo, but the real problem doesn't lie there

Already did the same with district locking- why not with clones selling. What about changing the reinforcement windows mechanics among with Auto Sale and Clone Packs? Why shouldn't CCP extend reinforcement windows from 1 to 3 hours? This way you are forced to choose the reinforcement window wisely and you cannot own too much land if you don't actually have a big amount of mercs ready to defend your districts.

If you can, find out how robust/flexible the current implementation of PC is: what do we have access to in a hot fix? what is easily changeable server side?

This is a serious no brainer and no one can argue against these changes being a good idea, whatever your opinion of Kane or DNS.

I would also go further and say that if both of the above are done, clone packs could easily be made much much cheaper because locking would be of no benefit to anyone. Yes, you could still make lots of isk by going in and killing off your own self-attacking clone pack but you'd still at least have to go into the battle, meaning that having dozens of districts would become a major pain to make any isk from.

And you think CCP would listen this time because...?