It's very easy to get your renown out of sync with your actual abilities - lose a battle or two, or just don't grind much, and you can soon find the routine missions very easy. More, it's easy to get your renown out of sync with other relevant difficulty levels: just keep advancing the main plot and you'll soon find your grinding missions fight a buru buru or two while your story missions are four chameleons and one custom mech. Arena missions are the same way. And in either case, they advance your renown by only one for a victory. I suppose there's some optimal ratio - ten grinding missions per story mission, perhaps. But especially if you've lost a battle or two, it's easy to spend hours fighting hopelessly weak enemies for pitiful rewards waiting for your renown to go up. I'd like to make two suggestions, one easy, one a little harder:
* Offer grinding missions that are harder but raise your renown more. These need not have any different story to them (i.e. no new content/mission structure necessary) but their rewards should be higher, so that the player can see they're getting into something tougher. This also means the player now has an actual decision to make when presented with the mission description: do I have what it takes to handle such a tough mission? The rewards, in money, renown, and salvage will be great, but I don't want to get blown away... As for how much harder they should be, well, perhaps four times as hard for four times the reward? Or a distribution generated by an open-ended d2 roll, perhaps? Story-wise, these could be explained as people who are desperate, or very confident in your abilities, or setting you up to get killed. But don't make the player pass a check of any kind to get at them; the point is for players who have (e.g.) somehow become hopelessly wangtta to be able to quickly pull themselves back to their appropriate level (by fighting difficult enemies). These offers need not be too frequent, so that becoming wangtta means you have to suffer a period of boring fights, but the current very long and painful ascent is too much, I think.
* Reward the player with more renown when they win harder story or arena battles. This way a player who's just beaten the above-mentioned four chameleons and a custom but realizes they're out of their depth and need to start grinding doesn't have to fight thirty battles with thirty single Buru Burus before they start getting useful difficulty from their grinding. The reward could be something like PV you fought divided by PV your renown says you should be fighting. In-story, of course, defeating a tough enemy should help your renown more than shooting a couple of rats in a basement.
It seems to me that this is a cheap way to give missions more variety that matters to the player, plus it reduces the amount of time players spend fighting boring easy battles (unless they want to). It lets people just pelt on ahead through the main plot as long as they can hack the battles, then start grinding at a reasonable level if they need to. And it doesn't take away anyone's ability to grind for hours to get those last few skill levels they need.
