I never read any of those "printing money" threads - this is the exploit they were talking about? Wouldn't a better way to fix it be to not allow a carrier to buy back goods it just sold at a higher price? I believe cargo already has a "bought from" variable under-the-hood, for the sake of BGS. It seems trivial enough to code. No need to punish regular, valid trading
There would be a few ways to actually solve it yeah, pros and cons to them all.
Frontier went with the easiest and worse fix though.
The problem was, you could have your wing member buy your own goods at a low price, then sell them at a higher one.
With you in the wing, you get an extra 15% of the profit (created from nowhere, because that's how FD set up trade dividends in the first place - which was probably silly)
I think you can figure out what happens from there.
Basically, you get a lot of LTD's, and buy/sell while in wings/crew, and you get a lot of large 15%'s from nowhere.
If Frontier had just, been ok with people being able to transfer credits to some small extent in the past (as you totally can now using carriers anyway!) then, they could have set up trade dividends very differently.
You could have actually set your own % of YOUR OWN profits that you actually made through the trade, to be split between the other wing members - this would have allowed people to pay escorts properly (which was the stated intent of the system when they implemented it)
This way, the credits wouldn't have materialised from no where, rather they would have been taken from the actual profits, making this exploit never exist, while giving players more interesting interaction tools.
Oh well?