Originally Posted by Firefly
Yeah but the thing is, you're basically saying "I want some sort of XP for something that might not happen". Which involves predictions and Miss Cleo and shit. If I were a PS dev and you suggested to me that you get XP for hanging around the generator room for guard duty, I'd tell you to pound sand. There's no fucking way to predict what Joe Q. Account-holder is going to do. Sorry. You get XP for other support roles. If they did that, you'd cry about not getting XP when they don't show, or bitch about the amount of XP you DID get when one random jackass with a boomer collection showed up. Your "reward" for guarding the generator room is called "not getting fucked in the ass and losing your base". The end.
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I've never advocated xp for doing nothing, or for being "present," as it were, when nothing is happening.
Instead, what I'd like to see is that when you make a prediction of future action, and move to counter it -- when that action does show up, you're rewarded more (because you took the gamble and risked wasting your time if it didn't show up) than if you had shown up after the action arrived.
I wouldn't give xp for patrolling an empty SOI. I'd give a 200% xp bonus for the first 1, maybe 2 minutes of kills within the SOI after a long lull. The bonus goes away after the first interior door is crossed through, or whatever (so if you are first on the scene, but after the attackers have penetrated the outer defenses, you don't get the bonus).
That stacks with a 35% bonus to BEP for defensive kills (remember, attackers get hack xp in addition to kill xp), and commanders get CEP at a rate of 10% per kill while in a friendly SOI, as well as a "resecure" xp bonus of 10% of the capture CEP bonus as a reward for stopping a hack.
Once the hack has been made, the bonuses reverse -- the people guarding the hack get the 35% bonus to BEP.
This incentivizes "good" empire-based play habits that are not rewarded by the current system, and are thus ignored by most players. So often and consistently ignored, at some points in the game's history, that zergs of people would swarm around a continent on pure offense, with only token defenses, capturing bases in circles as they willingly gave up ones behind them. Or commanders would allow bases to be hacked and captured, so they could immediately retake them because defending the base in the first place wasn't worth CEP.