A long time ago in an Internet Spaceship game you're all familiar with, pilots were unable to directly warp onto gates. Instead they could only warp 15km distance from them. The reasoning behind this decision was that CCP wanted to make travel hazardous, provide opportunity for those that wished to fight and kill, make the galaxy seem larger, and gates were that natural chokepoint that would allow this.

People, however, have an inherent tendency for risk aversion and to seek any and all advantages to survival and time, and so some enterprising pilot soon came up with the idea of bookmarks that would allow him to warp directly onto gates. The mechanics of how bookmarks worked are not as important as the effect on the game. Bookmarks sucked up server/database resources, and as more and more pilots learnt of the advantages of bookmarks the number of them in game grew exponentially until the load on the server became catastrophic.

The devs of course tried various workarounds to prevent the use of these bookmarks, but without success. Just as soon as a stopgap solution had been implemented the players found a way around it, until eventually CCP learnt an important lesson about player behaviour and allowed warping directly onto gates and removed the bookmarks. Overnight the lag reduced and EVE is a much better, faster game for it.

Dust has a similar problem in AFKing.

AFKing exists because mercs are able to draw an advantage from it, increase their rewards while minimizing their risks, making use of their limited time for competing tasks. Currently, the problem with AFKing is mostly limited to the irritation it causes the other players on the AFKers team. However, any merc in game is using server resources, and as the total number of Dust mercs (hopefully) grows, the amount of load that these inactives put on the server will also grow.

CCP will of course attempt to fix the problem in various ways, as they tried with bookmarks in EVE. First they will remove skillpoint gain for mercs in the MCC. So players will simply AFK on the ground beneath the MCC. Then to counter that CCP will remove skillpoint gain for those in the redline. So players will simply AFK one step outside the redline, behind a rock. After that, there's nowhere else to go really, other than to remove skillpoint gain for time spent in game. This, of course, would increase the perception of Dust's grind. So you might increase warpoints to counter that, but this would increase the skillpoint gap between active good and organised players and casuals.

My point is, as with bookmarks in EVE there is no way to keep time linked skillpoint gain in Dust without players finding a simple workaround, whilst removing it altogether and increasing the rewards for activity just increases the gap between the better and older mercs versus newbies. Newbies, of course, are the lifeblood of any game and if they stop coming the game dies a slow but certain death. So, rather than jump through the million hoops that CCP did with bookmarks in EVE before capitulating to the logical thing, CCP ought to do it with Dust early on in its history. And just what is that logical thing?

Remove in-game time based skillpoint gain and add that 'lost' weekly 190k to passive skillpoint gain. No more AFKers. Reduced load on server. Reduced teammate irritation. No greater increase in the gap between better and older mercs versus newbies than exists currently. Players log on because they WANT to, not because they feel they HAVE to in order to stay competitive, which reduces the perception of grind and thereby burnout