Many people have complained that the new PVE elements such as FOB and RW failed because they do not provide any worthy rewards. I recalled a legacy mechanic that may be obsolete by now. Many years ago, it is said that mission payout, before affected by skills and security status of agent’s system, is dynamically balanced by the system over time.
Quote from CCP Fozzie:
https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=367639&find=unread#post4936696
Mission isk and lp rewards use a system that autocalculates them based on a number of factors (including how quickly people complete the mission on average and how often they decline it). Unfortunately this means that the mission completion rewards will be a bit wonky on Sisi, and for the first couple days on TQ.
We’ve set the reward multipliers to a level that should work pretty well after a few downtimes on TQ, but we are also committed to tweaking them as we go. It’s very possible that these numbers could see several tweaks in the first few weeks after Hyperion launches.
There were posts about burner missions having very low rewards “like 200k and 800 LP.” when they first came out(Burner Mission Rewards are Horrible! - EVE General Discussion - EVE Online Forums). I believed if this level of reward persists, nobody will bother spending time creating content on it. But fortunately, the dynamic reward system played a part in that, and at the time I started EVE in Aug 2015, the reward was like what it is today–higher than any other normal missions, with the exception of Blood Raider Anomic Base, which was like less than half of normal burner payout, and was buffed to normal level sometime around 2017. Guristas Agent is still about 10% less than other burners till today.
I don’t know how the dynamic reward system was like before, but as far as I can remember, I haven’t seen changes in mission rewards except the Blood Raider Anomic Base since I played, even though everyone knows how to beat burners nowadays, and burners are regularly farmed and no longer a challenge.
Still, I doubt if the system is properly responsive to the difficulties of a mission. For example, the Guristas Anomic Base is not recommended by most players because its too tedious and dangerous, while Serpentis Anomic Base is much easier. But they all have similar rewards–maybe the reward function is just calculated or overridden to its max output.
Dynamic reward system is still in FW–the faction tier affects level of LP supply. So would it be a good idea if various PVE activities, not only missions, but also activities like Incursion, FOB, RW, are balanced through a dynamic reward system so people are always encouraged to swap their focus, not just doing the only “highest profit” ones?