I think a paid tournament could work, especially for L1 players. If it was more like 50 cents, and it started off 8 games of 8 people and then the top three from each progress, leaving 24 people, so three games of eight people, and the top three from each progress, making 1 game of 9 people. For one, it'd be a way for L1 gamers to play multiple games, and maybe if there was tournament after tournament, then the prize could be an L2 pass until the end of the next tournament (about a month(3 games)). So like, everybody who makes it to the last game could get an L2 pass, and the top three could get an additional prize. One major deal about giving away major prizes for tournaments that alot of games fall victim to though is giving the winners things that permanently help them in gameplay. Giving the people who just proved they have the best skill easier wins pretty quickly widens the gap between the best and average, and artificially at that, making the game a bunch of new players getting stomped on by whoever won the most amount of tournaments early on when things were fairer.
I was also thinking about the idea of adding more specialists to the game, but only in tournament play, like having 12 completely different, although not necessarily better, specialists to use during tournament play, and so those who adapt the best end up doing well. Add a couple specialists a year to the tournament pool and take some out, and people will pay for it just because the experience is always different, and they can go tell their friends how they pulled off this amazing maneuver with a specialist they'd only seen for 4 hours in their life. If this were the case, I could see the top three overall winners, being allowed to choose a specialist, and have the chance to be able to hire it in regular play until the end of the next tournament ends. They could even charge like 10 or 25 cents for a player to add a specific specialist to his/her roster for regular play until the next tournament ends, regardless of whether or not they won the tournament. It would add more complexity to the game, but not everyone would have the full extra roster of characters, so you might only need to think about the implications of two or three extra characters in any given regular game. The key to not making it pay-to-win would be to make each extra specialist focus on being different, instead of better. This could be achieved by making effects activate in different ways, or at different times, or putting timestamps on things based on sonar range or vice versa. Like, instead of a martyr, there could be a specialist who whenever it attacked an outpost, would cause the effects of all the specialists at the outposts to become null for eight hours, and instead of the specialist being captured when it attacked that oupost and lost, it was just sent back to where it came from. A new take on the smuggler could have subs go 3x as fast when attacking enemy outposts. New strategies, players entertained. Admittedly, this idea is far- fetched, and would require the devs to put in even more work, but any idea can be tweaked, so if someone can turn my idea into a money- maker, I'd be happy.