Yea, I have always felt Planetside needs something else to keep to people most people hooked, personally I'm happy if there is something like planetsidesidestats, we all need something to play for a goal. "Winning at Planetside" as stupid as it sounds, everybody wants that sense of victory. I think overall planetside domination by territory is a discussion for another thread, but yea I think there could be alot added to planetside in terms of "grinds" essentially thats all you're adding, but unlike MMORPG's I dont think PSN's should be required, they could perhaps offer more than cosmetic changes, but still keep them all balanced, how an FPS should be.
Keep the current merit system from PS, that's for sure, but for each merit offer a cosmetic armour upgrade or weapon mod, though we dont know how PS is played, but offcourse you have the option of the regular FPS stuff of, red dot sighs, scope etc, or take a path similar to TF2 and offer weapon mods that say increase the damage per shot, but reduce range or decrease ROF. So a high level character maybe more specialised at a role or a situation, but the game still remains a skill based game.
Planetside really has nothing in terms of customisation, your armour changes colour as you level, we could scrap that and change your armour colour and skin based off the merits you have achieved, specific merits, even for example HA bronze, could unlock an armour skin upgrade. They could also add more merits for killing people while wearing a specific armour.
heres an example of customisation in GA:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cf...357159#3357159
Also we have the options of actual rep grinds, for example:
you could have different reps for the different continents themselves, their terrain(desert, frozen, temperate, tropical) or specific to base design. Have offensive or defensive reps based of if you're attacking or defending a base or have them based off what contents you're fighting on eg: home, neutral, enemy .
There is always the option for crafting, though how that would work with looting in a 100% pvp environment, with a loot system like planetside. You could have something like people have mentioned where CR5s give quests at bases, these quests would then give XP and crafting items (EG: at the base Dagda, a CR5 could give the quest, attack Gwydion, timer, 1 hour, quest rewards would be based of usual base capture XP multiplier, after all we want to encourage PvP. These rewards would then be available at your sanctuary for crafting.