Anyways. This'll be my last post on this one, because I found out something today that means while I also need to correct my position on this, it's just strengthened further by what I've found.
I'm claiming that either massacre stacking needs to be nerfed or it's rewards reduced because it's huge income for otherwise simple targets which outstrips the potential reward of bigger targets. Of course this has people up in arms like I'm trying to "take away the ladder" from "noobs", and also running around saying "You're a bored vet smashing weak targets, you shouldn't be doing this, it's not a fair comparison". Lol. Well here we go...
Today I fired up my free epic alt today... with all this talk of me being some cashed-up vet who's bored and trying to pull the ladder up, and other claims like "Oh, but a newbie couldn't do that", I decided to just bootstrap a basic Imperial Eagle with ~2m credits from some ELW scans and go straight to my farming location.
Well, I stand corrected. New players can't get the sort of income I'm getting in my tankaconda. But not through lack of ability or ship.
It's because they literally can't get the missions I'm stacking, thanks to low combat rank. Where my crusty old Elite-rank pilot goes to a neutral faction and gets offered a mission to kill 18 targets for 9 million credits or 30 targets for 40m, even with Allied rep my newbie pilot doesn't get offered much more than a hundred thousand credits for a single pilot massacre.
In hindsight what I realise I
did here (inadvertently), and what
@Northpin and
@Cmdr Snuffler have already alluded to, was mix a bunch of expert missions (because for some reason lower rep = offered lower rank missions = easier missions) with Allied rep missions ), meaning a bunch of the USS were spawning novice/competent targets. Nothing targeted, I just grabbed whatever was there. Of course, those weak kills they still count for the allied missions, which normally spawn deadly/dangerous targets. This is all for missions offered to me on account of my Combat Rank of Elite, which are unavailable to newbie commanders[1].
So what's this mean? Well, I'm farming on my alt account right now... I just took dozen assassinations and will earn around 5m from them, enough to get me in a vulture, earn a few combat ranks and progress. It's
actually a decent progression rate for newbies. It also means that my concern and impact of what I want fixed is limited entirely to the missions offered to "vets" at the Elite-rank.
In other words, all that flailing about me wanting to "keep newbs down" is a moot point. The only people able to earn crazy amounts
are vets doing the missions offered to vets
specifically because of their rank.
All this does in my mind is strengthen the argument that massacre stacking needs to be removed. Massacres might actually be a bit more balanced if, like was suggested before:
I agree with this...but something can also be done about stacking missions, for example if you take an Elite ranked 40m mission but instead of killing any pirate you had to kill deadly+ pirates then that would prevent seal clubbing npcs in a res site. The missions would scale with your combat rank...exactly how your combat rank works actually in the fact you get 0 progression by killing much weaker targets.
Not having those novice/competent kills count for my elite rank 30 kill, 40m credit reward would have nixed that earning fast, and having to deal with thirty deadly targets would have slowed that earn rate dramatically... though if i still had five elite-rank missions stacked, that would be a crazy-high earn rate again compared to harder combat.
So this is
even more reason to nix massacre stacking. It hardly affects newbies; massacres at low ranks are for single-digit or even single-ship quotas. The only people who would be impacted by this are combat veterans who should be seeking out harder challenges for credits.
[1] This would also explain discrepancy between claimed commander earn rates.
