I agree that people like Regulas get to exploit this the most. Can be fighting on the other side of the map. Pop one snipe on a guy in a 1v1 and go back to farming. Then the guy who got sniped dies, free 600 or so gold for Reg for the "Assist". Its just like if he snipes everyone who gets in a fight he always gets money. I've done this before... and ended up at war-rank 8 with 12k gold. Bought straight to catapultasari... gg thanks for playing.
Edit: Also its just the fact that getting the assist gives you free money, and doesn't take it from anyone. I'm not sure if its a bad thing or not though. Like its a game mechanic that everyone knows and should exploit. Hmmm...
I hate playing with Reg. With a passion. Most selfish demigod (and this is coming from a UB player. At least Ooze debuffs AoE), can't do anything in a fight, so I have to take all the damage (which is okay, I'm a tank, but not okay when they run away to snipe when they are at 90% hp), they almost always run around and farm some other useless lane.
That said, across-map sniping is okay. They get the assist. Kill-stealing is annoying, but it's okay if they were running away. (Spit usually gets them anyway).
But it's the MENTALITY of the Reg players. Here I am, pushing lanes, buying citadel upgrades, etc etc... "lol guys, I'm getting Akashandor!" Literally, the last ten seconds of the game he says "just got Mageslayer + Ak" ... thank you. Your amazing kiting DPS build with tons of artifacts will win. Yes. And it's great against the comp. But I'd like to try to end the game before level 20 kthx.
/rant
I'm also guilty of tapping an almost dead enemy for an assist, with the occasional killsteal.
Contributing information:
The assist mechanism is nice, but... I think it should be good for two players, bad for three or more. Eg:
1 person kill: 100 == 100
2 person kill : 80 - 40 == 120
3 person kill : 40 - 25 - 25 == 90
4 person kill : 30 - 20 - 20 - 20 == 90
5 person kill (oh god): 25 - 15 - 15 - 15 - 15 == 85
As the team gets larger, the final-kill gets less and less, which makes sense: you likely contributed the least. Plus, this dilutes the gold, making it more difficult for the killing team to gear up (since after 3 they would only get a few hundred) and while this encourages pair-play, it discourages mob-ganking.
Changing the gold-reward to be percentile-based off of 'effort' would probably require a decent amount of code-rewriting, since the current reward code is probably very simplistic. You would have to add some sort of linked-list that contained all the hits at a given time, and having it expire after 10 seconds of sim time and such... Though maybe a PSet or something could work too. I just know the "I did 80% of the damage so I get 80% of the gold" would be a bit more difficult, and it's already taking GPG 3 weeks to change a '3' to a '2' (Sedna monks).