Mercenary - Prestige *Loss* when joining side with higher numbers

Mercenary - Prestige *Loss* when joining side with higher numbers
This idea/suggestion is Open. You can respond to ask questions or discuss the idea and either vote it up or down if you believe it should or should not be implemented, respectively. Popular suggestions and ideas will be considered by the development team to become reality in-game.

Thondorr

Proposal
In the current iteration of the mercenary system, it was expected for the mercenaries to join a side with fewer numbers in order to gain rewards. While this has helped the current state of numbers balancing a bit, with the caveat that there are rarely enough mercenaries on to make battles fully even, in some cases including in space we have seen mercenaries join the side with higher numbers. The current system punishes this by decreasing the rewards for mercenaries.
What I am proposing is a change to how the system incentivizes mercenaries to join the side with fewer numbers by losing mercenary prestige for joining the sides with higher numbers, scaling based on how many players there are. Since this system will be more punishing, increasing the rewards for being on the side with fewer numbers should be considered.
A pitfall of this approach is that numbers are unpredictable, and a massive backfill can cause mercenaries to not gain rewards. To address this, I would suggest removing the punishment 5m reward decrease for mercenaries only, allowing them to swap over to another side without penalties.

Secondarily, mercenaries in space do not lose rewards for being on the side with higher numbers, which should be changed to reflect the changes on the ground. This also comes with unintended benefits, as mercenaries do not ping on the warpad in space unless they flag on the ground as well.
Justification
The mercenary system is meant to incentivize joining the side with fewer numbers, and de-incentivize joining the side with higher numbers. In practice, this only happens some of the time, so rather than de-incentivizing by reducing rewards, joining the side with higher numbers would be punished by loss of mercenary prestige to further promote balancing.
Motivation
The decrease in rewards in the ground are helping balance to an extent, but this system has also not extended to space. During this voidfest, we have seen time and time again that since rewards are not decreased in space mercenaries will flag on the side with higher likelihood to win to maximize payouts. For ground mercenaries, in some cases people just want to play with their friends, but in that case access to unique rewards (merc token vendor) should not be given.
Open to any and all suggestions, including clarity on the mercenary system
 
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I think working on the carrot is more effective than adding a stick. I fear a stick will just move people off mercenary entirely.
 
I cannot support this.
I have a neutral character who is neutral solely to be able to assist others with any AoA content. But I only fly for the Rebels when it comes to pvp. Losing rewards, nay *being penalized* for supporting the faction I want to support is a big no-no.
 
Sounds like the better fix would be implementing the reward reduction to ground to apply for space as well, rather than affecting current prestige.
 
I think the mercenary system as it stands is completely broken, but this is not the way to fix it. I think time constraints on flashpoints and space battles do not help for one thing, because mercs often need to deal with late influxes of players by either faction, making switching useless as it would not be worth the effort for only a few minutes worth of content. I think also numbers isn't a way to deal with balance, because there is more to what makes a group effective in either ground or space PvP (gear, comp, organization etc.) than just numbers. I agree with Rason's point and think that further penalizing mercs in a broken system will incentivize them to not play, and that further discussion is needed to actually fix the way merc is currently implemented.
 
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