I agree.
It's just that I've read a LOT of stuff on here, recently, that was patently ne.
Let's face it, if you like doing a given thing, it's not going to matter if you can do one mission at a time or stack 20 missions.
People were doing passenger missions, and mode-flipping, to make heaps of credits.
It wasn't me who first suggested it but, as a stopgap solution, a smarter idea would have just been to just add 50 to the minimum number of economy passengers in a group.
That way you'd have a minimum group-size of, say, 52 and a maximum of around 80, the payments could have been left alone and people could have earned around Cr30m per hour (still a decent return on the effort required) running the missions, restricted by the lack of space for more passengers.
For me at least it actually did with these, same as with the Robigo missions and largely for the same reasons - multiple npc bounty hunters coming after you. That's not to say the increased payday wasn't welcome obviously. Plus as I said I simply didn't need to mode switch because I was running missions from a system with 5 stations and planetary docks within 9ls of each other. Thing is, not only is finding systems like that not any kind of exploit, it's actually pretty enjoyable gameplay for me. I quite often go to check out interesting clusters of systems in the bubble looking for that next great opportunity.
As far as a temporary solution is concerned, that would have worked but I have no idea how easy it would be to do. Really they could have just adjusted the cap though; the payouts for close stations seemed fine to me for bulk passengers, it rocketed to stupid levels in the destinations around 500ls and above away. Cap them to whatever level they deem reasonable for 500ls and above. Yeah nobody would bother going to 36 Ophiuchi for the same pay as a trip to Medb but so what, nobody is going to be doing it anyway when its paying 300k net.
That's what irritates me about the whole mode-switching thing, I really don't lose sleep over whether people do it or not but I despise the fact that it seems to force relatively low rewards for a lot of missions on the basis that if a mission takes 15 minutes and pays 500k, payout x 20 x 4 = 40m per hour, taking little account of the fact that few players will actually do that.
I've been thinking though and I'm pretty sure I've got my new business venture sorted. My mission Corvette is currently split half and half between cargo and bulk passenger cabins; I'm going to strip out the bulk cabins and stick either business or first class ones in, find me a relatively prosperous system with a few stations, close to an anarchy and sharing minor factions, and start doing pirate lord assassination tours. Get a few high class cabins full of liquored-up businessmen heading to a conference in the target system, check in with a few local contacts to get a contract, give the guys in the Corvette's executive lounge a look at some frontier justice on the way to the convention centre. Double the payday, double the fun.
