Use cheaper gear if you feel the isk isn't worth it. No one said you had to proto stomp in pubs.

Isk payouts are fine, learn to be strategic and to not overcommit or go full tilt. You have no one to blame but yourself when you lose 3 tanks and 10 proto fits in a single match etc. etc.

I've been having a lot of balanced matches since HF Charlie

Most people afk or redline snipe because their team is full of newberries. Raising the isk payout will do nothing but inflate the already inflated economy. What's the point in even having an isk system if the isk payout compensates for bad play?

Besides if half your team is afking you should be running standard gear. You would have to die like 30 times in a match to lose isk in standard gear.

The only way the half afk/sniping matches will end is if real matchmaking is introduced. This would probably require pubs to become squad prohibited though so be careful what you wish for.

No.

People AFK because you are rewarded for merely being alive in the match instead of for participating. Stop that and AFK'ing dies right away.

Of course, that would also mean that bad players would get almost no SP and their progress would grind to a virtual halt, and that would drive new players out even faster than getting proto stomped.

This toon started out as an alt, and was AFK'd with boosters running for a couple of months to avoid having to go through the trouble of actually earning the SP to become a semi competent member of a team. Why would anyone do it other wise when the penalty for playing with baseline SP is so high, and the cost of AFKing is nil?

You are asking for things that would diminish what little cash influx CCP does see from this game.

CCP relies on the handicapping of younger players to impress upon them the need for Aurum and boosters. That restriction is by design. It will not change, and it will be the biggest roadbloack to the game being viable as a standalone product. In Eve you can overcome superiour SP players through zerging, as anyone who has been caught by a frig gang in a BS can attest. In a fixed player count lobby shooter that doesn't work, but CCP built their incorrect model around their archaic ideas from Eve.

CCP wants new players to be gimped in order to sell them crap. Always keep that in the fore of your mind when trying to figure out how to fix the NPE. Did you think that repetitive tripe in the old warbage was just there as a pleasant voice in the background?