The two in game currencies are steel and iron, and you get them by scavenging a battlefield and breaking down gear. I thought I’d suggest taking this idea of scavenging metals from the battlefield and using it to expand the currency system, by tying an element of it directly to the armour materials that characters unlock as they go up in renown levels. That way when you play against a high renown character, they drop higher quality metal and the lower the level, the lower the tier.

I suggest this in the hopes that it may encourage people to want to fight up, not stomp down.

I think I noticed a slight increase to my end of game rewards upon fighting higher lvl bots and players, but not enough to make it any less frustrating for new players losing to enemies that outclass them.

With different metals, as a hypothetical, you'd see an enemy with gold armor and get stomped, but you'd know at least at the end of the round you’ll get some gold. Likewise a gold player may not need to fight bronze opponents since they don't need bronze for their good armors. So low level players always have a good reason to fight up, and high players have less and less reason to fight down as they progress. (And the metals would be based on the characters renown level, not the specific armor that they were wearing in game to ensure a dressed down opponent wouldn't yield less rewards)

Of course this would only work if the playerbase was huge – it’s good to state the obvious sometimes. With a low playerbase this would just be annoying, ie. 'There haven’t been any golds on in weeks'.

And I’m not suggesting replacing the existing currency systems. This could be an addition that’s tied to customization, perhaps even used exclusively for appearance changes. If you wanted to change any item’s appearance, you’d need the metal of both the original item and the appearance you were changing it to. So if you wanted to change a gold tier helmet to the appearance of a silver tier helmet, you’d need both gold and silver metals for example.

Or, it could be tied exclusively to the quality of scavenger packs. A pack bought with gold will get higher yields than one with one with silver. Or perhaps for just for upgrades, so upgrading an item with gold will produce better results than steel. It could be an incentive to win matches against higher tier players with lower tier characters, if you added a multiplier based on the difference, so someone with a high level kensei who needs material for that armor might switch to a low level alternative to get it faster. The inverse could be true for high level players beating low level players, they'd get less. And losses could result in a flat rate.

These are all just suggestions.

I don't know how you'd implement it or what for, but the basic idea is that when you see a rep 8 about to flawlessly decapitate you, you can at least think 'Heck yes, I'm getting something special after this' or something along those lines. Things would be less frustrating for beginners, and beginners would make boring targets.