What if the stats you have on your weapons in the Clockworks was changed when you entered LD?
By tracking which armors and weapons are most used in LD OOO can hand out buffs and nerfs to items based on how much they are used. As a note of importance these changes would not affect your item's performance in the Clockworks.
For example: Lets say that the Polaris is being used over other guns, what OOO could do is nerf it by dropping it's power, fire rate, status strength or change, or by buffing the related gun lines in some of those areas.
Well, I mean, one way to nerf/buff weapons in PvP would be to introduce PvP-specific mechanics, such as "damage vs strikers" and "damage vs players" buff/debuffs. Just tag those onto weapons or classes, and you can have a bit of additional game balance through a tracking system.
Here's a quick list of potential stat changes that could be made specifically for lockdown, and future PvP games as well:
Damage bonuses- Damage vs Striker
- Damage vs Recon
- Damage vs Guardian
- Damage vs Players
- Striker/Recon/Guardian/Player ASI/ASD
- Striker/Recon/Guardian/Player MSI/MSD
- Striker/Recon/Guardian/Player CTR/CTI
- Status resistance vs Striker/Recon/Guardian/Player
- Damage resistance vs Striker/Recon/Guardian/Player
- Striker/Recon/Guardian/Player range increase/decrease
Misc stat increases
New stats
All mentionings of "Striker/Recon/Guardian/Player" refer to the bonus being applied to a certain class, or a buff against those classes(ie, recon ASI means if you're a recon you get ASI on the weapon, whereas status resistance vs striker means that a striker will deal less potent statuses against you, effectively giving you bonus status resistance when being hit by a status weapon by a striker).
All of these bonuses would not be acquirable via Punch, and would be assigned to individual weapons and armors by the development team. These bonuses would appear to players on loadouts marked for PvP, but disappear when marked for PvE (and on a similar note, loadouts marked for PvP would not show the bonuses VS monster families). A way to make this not broken would be allowing players to toggle their "current equipment" icon at the top of loadouts to switch between views of weapons(and also default loadout state, so a new loadout you make will mirror that of what you have toggled instead of defaulting to PvP), so when crafting weapons you can switch between viewing their usefulness in PvP and in PvE.
Using a system like this means that Three Rings can balance out weapons in a PvP environment without compromising their usefulness in PvE, and vise versa.