You keep saying that YOUR experience is lessened because others can make credits at a different rate than you choose to.
No I didn't, and never have. I said my experience is substantially (negatively) impacted because more challenging combat pays significantly less than whacking easymode NPCs. I have never compared my experience to that of other players, only to the experience offered up by the game. And your "translations" are so far off the radar it's not funny.
As I've
repeatedly been saying I don't give a hoot how much any other player earns. I care that when I think about "What's some fun, rewarding combat I can do today?" that the most difficult, temporally and state-restricted NPC enemies don't even register a thought because I can shoot fish in a barrel for a day and earn literal billions.
I can reliably, solo, go to my usual haunt one jump away and casually earn anywhere from 300-600m an hour with stacked massacres. Do I have fun sitting there aggroing an entire room of weak NPCs and raking in that sort of cash? Absolutely, otherwise I wouldn't do it.
Would I like to chop it up and go seek out a Civil Unrest/Lockdown system for the controlling faction, potentially taking up to an hour to get to (depending on if I ship transfer or not), seeking out a Threat 5/6 Pirate Activity site and line up against the hardest pirates the game has to offer? Absolutely. Heck, I throw assassination missions in to my stacks in the hopes they drop in randomly... reduces efficiency but keeps it lively.
Is it still something I want to do when I consider that, after going to the effort of seeking out such a system, and even if I lucked out got a holy grail of stacked massacres targeting the faction spawning in the Threat 5/6 PA sites, thanks to TTK of the harder targets I might at-most get 50m, 100m after a couple hours, if I'm really, really lucky?
Absolutely not.
More realistically you're not going to be able to easily stack massacres for targets appearing in the PA sites, so your payout is going to be closer to 20m/h
if you're lucky. It's abysmal game design and a complete lack of incentivisation for that activity. It's simply not fun in the slightest.
If you don't want to touch the potential billion-a-day earnings from massacre stacking (personally I think it's much higher than that), then everything else needs to get balanced around that. And for the effort involved locating, moving to and destroying these enemies, I'd want that figure to sit around the 2b, maybe 3b mark. But I can guarantee... doing that wouldn't work... instead, everyone who stacks massacres would simply pivot over to that activity instead, and then nobody would blink twice about nerfing massacre stacking.
And that's the problem with this. You can't reasonably balance the more difficult combat while massacre stacking to shoot fish in a barrel is so lucrative. And that's the biggest issue with these stand-out cash cows... balancing other activities and future activities becomes an utter nightmare, and you only need to look at those "rebalance" attempts last year to see how that's going.
As someone who happily takes advantage of this game loop because it's so ridiculously broken, but also one of the few sources of high-volume fights, I think there's plenty that can be done to make both activities fun and reasonably incentivised without raining on anyone's parade.... but using novice-level kills to satisfy Elite-rank missions (which themselves spawn deadly/elite rank ships which are the intended target), among other bad elements to this, is trash-bin game design. And fixing that is gonna result in that cash cow getting nerfed.
