This is about 3h 10 mins a day.
Do you think the progression feels about right? (when not using exploits or gamy things like misson stacking)
If I'm being honest, I would have to say that even without so-called exploits, making money in the game is a little too easy.
If I may use EVE as an example, money was just as easy to get - in fact, easier as there were more ways to earn it and you could transfer money, equipment and ships between players - but it was tempered by the skill training system. It didn't matter how much money you had, if you wanted to fly a battleship you had to train the race-specific battleship skill for the ship you wanted, and this first meant training for frigates, destroyers, cruisers and battlecruisers. In other words, by the time you had trained the skill to *allow* you to fly a ship, the game had tried to force you to become experienced enough to be *capable* of flying it (I say "tried" as skills trained offline whether you played during that 3 months or not - you just had to log in once in a while to start the next skill training).
Another EVE comparison (apologies) is to do with ship classes. In ED, there is no clear class system. Yes, some ships are obviously better for combat, trading or exploration, but most ships can be used for most purposes, and so there is less reason to build up a fleet of ships, thus spending more money, thus needing to make more money. In EVE, there were fairly clear benefits to picking the right class of ship, and in some cases, it was forced upon you (for example, particular mission levels would only allow you to enter with ships up to a certain class). And so having a fleet of ships was more of a necessity, and so a bigger money-sink.
In ED, money trumps all. There is no skill or experience requirement to get into a new type of ship, just the money to buy it. Hence, with no checks or balances, the temptation for many is to make as much money as quickly as possible using any available mechanism.
In summary, balance the game a bit better. Remove mechanisms for making ridiculous amounts of money, and force people to qualify (insert method of choice) to fly ship classes.
