Its a war game for christ sakes. Do you know what war is? War is getting your side to win by making the other poor SOB die for his side.

This isnt organized sports, this isnt monopoly with friends. You were hired to participate in a battle. As a soldier of fortune, Your supposed to be making your fortune throwing down the heavy hits your contractor asked you to.

Lets say you finished a battle and the NPC corp decided not to pay you? What if halfway through the battle the NPC corp called off the attack and refused payout? If the NPC corp breached its contract with you, youd be livid.

Yet you reserve the right to break the contract with them on a whim with no penalty?

Sounds like a pretty bad idea to me, Dennie.

Carrot > Stick.

I love the game, I buy boosters and respecs often, and I try to play as regularly as I can. I also leave matches every day for lots of different reasons; lag/stability is chief among them. If you were to hit me with a stick for leaving a match when it lagged, I can assure you that I'd turn the game off instead of trying to find a playable battle. The less I play, the less likely I'll be to buy boosters and respecs. Pushing away paying customers doesn't seem like a sound business strategy. Further, and perhaps more importantly, with headcounts seldom topping 3k/day, I don't think that now would be a good time to whip out the stick.

Here are my suggestions:

1) Improve gameplay performance and stability. Cut graphics. Convert socket maps to static maps. Reduce players per battle. Do whatever it takes. Making cuts is acceptable; instability is not.

2) Remove server selection. Set everyone's battleserver to automatic. Group players by region and ping when PCU permits; otherwise, group players by ping. Boot players beyond permissible lag thresholds from match. Abort matches if/when the lag cannot be remedied (so players don't have to).

3) Add an ISK/SP bonus for completing consecutive matches.

4) Fix what's wrong with pub pay. Coming into a match late should not guarantee a paycheck of pennies. Same goes for being put on a team with a disproportionately high number of rep logis. Err on the side of your customers. Too much pay is better than not enough.

5) Reward personal effort and achievement. Try keep-what-you-kill and see how it works. People might not like the idea, but it's a whole lot less risky than whipping out the stick.

This sounds highly exploitable in my opinion and would probably make lag switches a real thing. Forcing yourself into that lower group and then bumping your connection back up to normal to farm those who have lower connections would be the padding of all padding.

Between net code, server side hit detection, and an insane amount of calculations I see the whole thing as a cluster **** which personally I am glad I am not one of the ones trying to fix it. I feel like step 1 should be damage normalization, reducing the load on the server when it comes to applying damage would be a big help. It does not sound like much but when you are dealing with ping times as low as 20 - 30ms for some people a simple 10ms extra time processing on the server suddenly becomes huge.

Going beyond that I really do not see any great way to handle high latency players without either punishing them or hurting game play for everyone. I feel like pretty good work has been done reducing the benefit of fast suits used in conjunction with a slow connection and whatever was done we could use a lot more of.