So, I've made my way through all five pages of this thread, and I've seen people complaining, raging and throwing out opinions, but very rarely giving an alternative solution to stop SP farming other than the SP cap proposed by CCP. I think a cap can be a very sensible solution, and I can't see any suggestion made in this thread that would solve the problem in a better way or by introducing less problems. Here's why:

What have people suggested in this thread to solve the problem of SP farming?

• turning on friendly fire
• removing SP gained from repairing team damage
• making the game more fun to play

I'm not saying those points wouldn't help in combating SP farming, but they never will fix the problem for good. Because in the long run, Dust will be a game about controlling territory and holding sovereignty over parts of the game world, just like in Eve Online. In fact, we all know that Dust is meant to be a major factor in deciding about the sovereignty of large corporations and alliances in Eve. Most of those corporations don't bother with honor or fair play, they just want to win fights and increase their influence, and that also means winning matches in Dust. If having more SP helps to win matches, and farming SP can be done, then most corps will do it. Does anyone really think big corps will not set up fake corp battles for the sole purpose of farming SP by repeatedly hacking and re-hacking objectives? How can friendly fire help in this situation, how does it help that they don't receive SP for repairing team damage? How does it help that the game is fun to play? It will make those people want to win even more, not make them quit farming precious SP.

The fact is, being an MMO, advancing the skill tree of Dust unlocks a big part of the actual content of the game. People play the game to experience this content, and they want to experience it rather sooner than later. That's why people will always be willing to grab easy SP and they will always be inclined to farm SP if it's feasible. The only thing that could deter them from doing this would be CCP declaring SP farming a bannable offence and actually starting to bann people for it. That would require CCP to actually detect this kind of activity, which means investing huge amounts of time, money and man power during the whole lifetime of the game that could be used to improve the game instead. It would be an endless battle that could never be won, always tilted in favour of the offender, just like the fight against cheaters, botters and real money traders.

Introducing a SP cap for matches has the potential to really marginalize the effect of SP farming on the game, without fighting that endless battle. Of course the perfect solution has already been found by Eve Online, a 100% time based SP gain that is equal for everyone, but it's easy to see why this does not translate well to an FPS environment.

So to summarize, I think the SP cap really makes sense, and no feasible alternative has been brought up yet. Well, except for this:

I actually like this idea, but the same people that complain now about not getting enough SP for being good because of a SP cap will then moan about not getting the massive 'you win'-bonus just because their noob team didn't win the match. I also think it will make it harder for less talented players to advance in the game, because they'll find themselves on the loosing side more often than not. Additionally, organized groups and clans/corps will be swimming in SP because they tend to own unorganized teams in public matches, even those without top players. So all in all I think it would introduce an imbalance that the SP cap can avoid, since it affects every player equally.

Wow, your post is just as unhelpful as the rest of the posts you were complaining about except yours actually wasted 3 minutes of my life span.

Every single FPS deals with this problem. All of them have it. All of them deal with it the same way. You report them and move on.