Nope, no incentive anymore especially if your side is short a player. You could run in and try to fight and win but the odds are you'll get nothing for your time. So you might as well just leave the WZ so now your team is down two players. Either way, you'll have no xp, comms, or credits, so why waste your time?

I just joined a Voidstar match that was already under way. The enemy had just breached the 1st set of doors so I ran in with my marauder and did the best I could to help. We fought hard and it took the enemy about 5 minutes to cap the core. Then we attacked and got through the 2nd set of doors and the forcefields before we ran out of time. And what did I get for all this effort? Nothing. Nothing at all for my time and effort. I only got 72k damage and didn't get 2.5k in one hit and didn't personally cap a door, I just protected people who did cap it while I CC'd the enemy. So thanks to the new system I got nothing. "But wait!" you cry! We're going to change it so you only need one medal to get something. Well I didn't get any medals in that match so I still would have gotten nothing. And on the flipside, once they make that change, I could hop on my sorceror, sit back from a fight, then pop recklessness to get a high chance of critting, and throw a few heals and get one for over 2.5k in a single heal and then pretty much afk for one match after another and get plenty of rewards. Just sit there and watch tv and occasionally move my character to keep from getting booted. Even if the other players report me Bioware gives me plenty of time to run in, get in one attack, and then go back to watching TV. Other players will be furious to watch me get rewards from their effort but I won't care because it's better than doing my best and getting nothing. Good job Bioware and putting forth another weak and token attempt to cut down on afkers in PvP.

What is Bioware trying to accomplish with this reward system? Discourage people from afking? Well it's not going to work because you're not seriously penalizing them for afking. What happens if someone gets caught afking? Nothing really. So, you might as well do it. This isn't a new problem with MMOs. This has been an issue for years and until you inflict SERIOUS penalities on afkers, they're always going to do it. Give them a week long ban from pvp and they'll stop, or only be able to do it once a week. And it's really not that hard to catch them at it, if you put a little effort into it. But if it means spending a few extra $ on some GMs to monitor WZs or something like that, then apparently no MMO company is willing to do it. They'd rather just hope that a few token efforts towards discouraging AFKers will pay off enough to keep people from quitting because they're sick of that kind of crap. Will players quit over one thing they don't like? No, but those "one things" add up with other things and then players quit and you're losing subscriptions because you don't want to put forth a serious effort to fix things. And here we have the issue of dealing with the NEW problem Bioware has created which is the decent odds of getting nothing from a WZ you join late. For one thing, if a match ends after a player has only been in it for two minutes, and ergo has had very little chance to get a medal, then they should still get a reward for their time and effort. This is not hard to program. I could write a program using BASIC that could accomplish that. I've jsut stopped pvping after getting burned too many times this week. My sorceror has a 55 in Valor, so I'm obviously a fan of pvp. But my computer is a bit slow and it takes about 2 minutes to load a planet like Hoth after I leave a WZ. So if you put in the minute of loading time to get into the WZ, the 2 minutes there, and the 2 minutes to load my planet again, I just spent 5 minutes and got nothing for my time. Of course that's not as bad as when I spend 10 minutes and get nothing for my time when I'm on my marauder. Because I am dps my options for getting medals are pretty limited. At least on my sorceror I can pop recklessness and get a crit on a heal for more than 2.5k and get an easy medal. That's not on option on most of the other classes. Right now, if I enter a WZ that's even a quarter of the way done, I just leave again. Especially if we're short a person on the team and losing. Why even try to help anyone when the odds are I'll get nothing for my efforts? Oh, that'll get a bit better for me once it only takes one medal to get some rewards but I could easily go on my sorceror, do the above named trick for an easy medal, and then afk the whole rest of the match. So what has Bioware accomplished with this little idea? Not a damn thing except to piss a lot of people off.