So, ISK payouts. They've been in roughly their current incarnation for... a very long time. There've been little tweaks over time but they've never really left the ~200k average zone.

Let's talk about that.


ISK is a key part of this game. Using most gear costs ISK. When you die, you lose this gear and as a result lose ISK. As a result, using most gear is tied into how much ISK you can get. This also provides a significant incentive to not die.

Here's the thing, though - If the ISK payout is too low, you get a massive aversion to risk because nobody wants to die because if they do they'll lose precious ISK and be unable to run gear they like. In a way this means that people can't run their best gear all the time, and that's probably a good thing. What isn't a good thing, though, is the balance between how much people are rewarded for risk and how much they are punished for it.

Sticking all the way through a match without doing anything will earn something like 80-160k ISK. I get this number from my AFKing 'efforts'. That is to say, if you do absolutely nothing in a match, you'll earn ISK in that range.

If you take out a couple of mediocre fits at 30k ISK in a match and go out into the fray, you can start earning more WP and therefore more ISK. If you're a logi or someone able to farm lots of warpoints, that can help your ISK payout noticeably.

But is that worth doing?
With said 30k fits, which I'm using as an average because that's what a cheap ADV fit (which ought to be pretty much average) will cost you, can you earn enough with them to make it worth risking? By charging into the fray and pushing objectives/making a serious effort at changing the game flow, you are inevitably going to lose several of these. If you lose half a dozen of these, will you earn enough ISK to make it worth doing that?

The problem is that you won't. A better than average match may earn you 300k if you make a serious effort and are in the top few slots on the board. In the process of doing this, you'll have lost several suits. Losing half a dozen or so, which I imagine is lower than the average deaths per match, will put your net profit down to the ~100k range.
That's similar to AFK profits! And that's using cheap fits, doing very well in matches, and not dying a huge amount.

This naturally means that people aren't going to want to take risks and this means that there is no incentive to make a serious attempt at fighting.



TL;DR

People are risk averse because ISK payouts for taking risks are too low to justify taking those risks.
This leads to gameplay stagnating people people are unwilling to seriously fight.


I propose increasing the ISK payout and the share of the ISK payout for earning warpoints. Ultimately, those changes should mean that doing nothing earns you either what it does currently or less, but gives significantly more ISK for those who make a genuine effort at winning the match.