A militia only variant would be nice, but where else are you supposed to try out your new and better gear? You don't make money from Corp Battles, and those aren't exactly the place to try something new. PVE would be a good place to try new gear and rock the new proto suit you finally unlocked, but it doesn't exist yet. Vets stomping newberries in pubs aren't the only folks rocking a proto suit from time to time. I for one look forward to finally unlocking my proto logi suit and giving it a whirl in a pub match. Granted I'll save them for more important FW and PC battles, but I'm going to have to try it in a pub first, lol.

So a lot of people who run proto and stomp in pub matches aren't really going to like this idea, but I'd like there to be a gear limit in pub matches. The reasoning for this is as follows. Basically, the new player experience sucks. They spawn a new character, if they're patient they spend their remaining sp, if they don't they jump into a match. Either way, they're probably mis-spending their sp. Then they jump into an instant battle after maybe looking at some fits w/ under 500k effective SP, and get roflstomped by a squad of 4 protos. This is not a fun new player experience. It's, in fact, the shittiest new player experience I can think of. They're confused, and then they die a lot and become either angry or sad. A lot of good console FPS players are just going to go back to BLOPS. They're not going to stick around, and get into the game and skill trees, they're just going to leave and never come back.

A solution is to limit gear in pub matches. Ban the use of proto & advanced gear from pub matches and this instantly becomes not a problem. Most of them are already going to be halfway decent at shooters, and if everyone is gear limited, they'll actually stand a chance. Now they'll still probably not do very well, but they'll do okay, and they may come back and start building decent fits. If you want to take this one step further you can ban proto gear from something else (maybe Faction Warfare?), so there's an intermediate level where everyone is using advanced gear. This will allow people to progress, and not just get roflstomped the first time they play (and for weeks after...)

If there needs to be a lore reason, there can be an armistice between the governments where proto gear is banned from high and low sec battles, and advanced gear is banned from high sec battles.

Obviously SP & ISK rewards would have to be scaled for each battle type so that the proto level battles would be high-risk high-reward, and the standard level battles would be low-risk, low-reward. I don't think this is a huge hurdle to overcome though, and would greatly increase the new player retention, which is a very important thing to consider when thinking not only about the life of the game, but also CCP's profit margins. If you're unconvinced of what I'm saying about the new player experience, try to get a K/D above 1 with a fresh character (and no buying gear from the market, most new players aren't going to bother to take the time and build good militia fits before their first match; most will just play with those 5 BPOs you start with).