PSA: This is the obligatory 50th-page thread summary that the community is obligated to render for those who haven't been immersed in this snake pit of a discussion since somewhere around post #100, and who have just now skipped to the vicinity of post #2500 to see what's been resolved and whether their sage input is needed. Here's the current status:
(1) Board flipping: The community is split (albeit not evenly) between three groups:
(a) Those who've adopted emotionally charged verbiage like "exploit" and "mission board molestation" to describe the practice of relogging and/or board flipping to stack missions and unbalance a game economy that, until mid-2017, had always been perfectly in balance, or was at least potentially recoverable, making credit-accumulation rates still somehow important. Generally, this "side" of the debate is pro-nerf, though many acknowledge shortcomings in the underlying mission-generating code base as being partially to blame for evilly tempting the other players into pursuing game-economy-destroying behaviors. Using logic, argumentative exposition, arcane references, authoritative citations, and (if memory serves) a couple chicken sacrifices, this segment stakes their position on the unshakeable conviction that human nature, and not INARA, is the greatest problem facing the Elite Dangerous community. Their position seems grounded in the fact that even though FDev has (repeatedly) addressed imbalances caused by the mission/passenger boards with "rebalancing" rather than "bug-fixing," ultimately the blame for this entire debacle lies squarely upon any human that's ever made more than one pass through whatever presentation RNGesus first chose to bestow upon entry to any given station -- and any players so guilty should do 1000 pushups and accept a pox upon all their houses! ...and maybe a permanent application of corrosive Thargoid spit upon their hull, or at least their pilot's seat.
(b) Those who believe board-hopping is such an obvious approach to the game, given the game client's architecture (years after launch and unchanged approaching v3.0's release), that it must have been (or at least currently is), an FDev design and use expectation. This group's position is largely based ultimately on ipso-facto arguments and a significant use of behavioral adverbs. They claim support for their beliefs with arguments like, (1) the lack of this being addressed in previous releases, or in the upcoming v3.0 release, or even with a bit of scratchy handwriting in the margins of the game's ToS, creates an implicit acknowledgement that board flipping is allowable game play. This segment further cites game events like this week's Community Goal ("Ram Tah's Last Hurrrah" [sic]) -- one of the few areas created by either FDev employees (or at least by t-shirt wearing satanic spawn working within the FDev aegis) (see what I did there?), where FDev literally puts players into direct competition with each other, awarding significant prize money to the strongest performers -- both endorses run-on sentences like this AND creates game play where you'd have to be a self-flagellating masochist to collect CG relics using "intended gameplay" instead of relogging with every 2T SRV load. This community segment says: FDev are pretty smart folks and you'd not be giving them any credit at all for naively believing that players should and would self-police their behavior, even when it puts them at (quite literally) a 10X disadvantage in competition with players who actively use a years-old feature of the game client.
(c) Those who're sitting back with a giant cup o' soda and a large buttered popcorn, marveling at all the sturm und drang, happy to have something to read while they continue to run the occasional passenger mission for the paltry 30-90M Cr per run (depending on location and the fickle favor of RNGesus). This community segment seems to be characterized by the philosophy, "Seriously dude? You can still make more than 30M Cr per run, 100M Cr per DAY, easy, post-nerf, and you're STILL belly-aching, despite FDev demonstrating that any future items or accomplishment of any real value (or advantage) in the game will NOT be tied to or purchased with Galactic Credits?" It's worth noting, this community group is believed to have the lowest blood pressure.
NOTE: Like most debates, both the (a) and (b) sides of this debate remain unshakeable in their belief that one can (and should!) change others' mind in an Internet argument, and that all doing so requires is the patience to present their perspective clearly and repeatedly, at least every tenth post.
There, did I leave anything out? ;-)
