What is an outfit?
"Informal An association of persons, especially a military unit or a business organization."
Source:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/outfit
My idea of an outfit is that it's like a US military division. I do think the idea is that you are to join up and coordinate with the rest of the faction (empire for you new to PS2) in order to take over land. We could probably use some more tools to facilitate or at least educate people on how to coordinate better.
The problem is that the "zerg" (rest of the factlion) won't always agree with each other and the really big issue that I think you and I (in my smaller current outfit) are seeing is that people do not stay around and defend because they are chasing the cert thirst in a reactionary way.
It truly does become a cat and mouse game. Too much offense, not enough defense. Too much re-action, not enough pre-thought action. Personally, I do not mind sitting around defending a point in order to prevent our resources from being cut off. It's a forward thinking non-reactive strategy. You become the thermostat, not the thermometer, in the temperature of battle.
Most people are not so patient and most outfit leaders don't want want their troops getting bored, so we see a lot of running in circles. I recently lead a random public squad and I felt this pressure internally, not from the reactions of my squad members, but in my thoughts, I wanted to give these guys a good fight but also do what was best for the Vanu Sovereignty.
It may be advisable to reward defenders more. Yet, it is upon the outfit, platoon, and squad leaders to balance what's good for their faction with that's fun for the moment. This is emergent sandbox gameplay and I would presume that we don't want any artificial silly defense reward when in the mind of the strategic, their is honor for holding the defense.
What I propose is rewarding the end game objective a bit more. Make it advantageous to work toward the final goal of a continent lock (or even planetary lock). Give people a bit more visual fluff (patches, player stats, etc) and maybe up or vary the rewards besides the 10% reduction on price of infantry, vehicle items.
TLDR:
It's up to the players to balance between defense and offense in an emergent sandbox style of gameplay. Do we need artificial means to accomplish balance? Do we need more tools to help people understand the strategies that help the entire faction? Do we need to reward the end-game more so that the rest of the faction aids the smaller outfits?