Go and look at the maths yourself, you will see that you can, if this decay went properly, after 5-6 weeks, start pulling in 12.5M per week for 20 trips in a type 9. And considering 20 trips in a t9 vs 300-400 undermine kills that will net you millions worth of bounties.
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actually, I was the guy who was telling everyone it wasn't possible to exploit powerplay, now with confirmation from MANY people of their decay this week, it has been apperent, you can profit by just buying your merits every week.
I did do the math. My decay was exactly 50% of my merits. I am operating on the assumption that decay is the same for everyone. If your decay is based on participation within your faction, then it makes sense that profit can be made. My activity during this past cycle was non existant meaning I received the full decay amount.
If decay is not a constant 50% for everyone involved, it means that Frontier partially kept their competitive framework for PowerPlay. Initially your rating was going to be determined entirely by your participation against other Commanders within your power, similar to community goals. Merit decays were also part of this framework. They removed the fact of rating being determined by how you stack up to others, and based it off of a raw amount of merits. I suspect they kept the competitive nature in place for merit decay.
If that's the case then I am wrong. However, if it's the case, it's also by design and intentional. Until we see actual documentation that proves the existence of the feature (either in terms of the devs outlining how the decay works, or screenshot evidence of a commanders merit balance at the start of, prior to the end, and after the reset of a cycle we will not know for sure. Even then, one Commanders information will not be enough. We would need to merit balances of many commanders of various activity levels within the
same power to compare and calculate against each other.
Obviously, developer documentation is sorely needed in this department as planning your PowerPlay activities around other game play areas would be a nice capability to have. I however still rebuke your statement of the 12.5m "profit" being anything even close to an "exploit". No matter how you cut the pie, you will always make more profit trading when compared to the profit earned by maintaining your rank with collect actions.
Also, I have no idea where you are pulling the statement "vs 300-400 undermine kills that will net you millions worth of bounties"... I've not seen a single NPC ship flying for a power with a bounty, even in their enemies territory. In fact, it most cases you earn a bounty for these. To my knowledge no power earns merits through bounty hunting.
What I would REALLY like to know is whether or not decay is based on your performance against others. If it is judged that way; is it calculated off of your total merits at the end of the cycle, or the total merits you earned
during that cycle? If it'sbased on total merits with no regard to actual activity during the cycle then you have an argument for exploitation, and only then.