I agree with everything you said, with one exception - they should stamp rares stored on carriers as not counting for merits. Why?
- Using the "dump rares on carrier, pick up more, repeat" and then delivering violates the spirit of the rares. You're not allowed to buy more then X from the station and put in your hold; you have to sell it before you can by more. Dumping in your carrier storage violates this and your exploiting (not game exploit, but market exploit) the rare commodity limitation.
- Allowing carriers for this has led to a HUGE increase in carrier jumps. That means delayed carrier jump times for all carrier owners.
- Using carriers for this greatly exacerbated the problem of merits being earned from rares. I've spent a lot of time in my Type 8 doing loops for the past 2-3 weeks and I'm only rank 67. In the first week, one guy got to rank 118 by using his carrier to mass deliver rares.
Look, it's pretty simple. Frontier offered a range of ways to unlock ranks. They have scolded explorers, now it's scolding traders. It will not stop until every single merit option is systematically nerfed.
While carriers may have increased efficiency, it was absolutely possible to run a loop within 10 minutes.
That some folks can dedicated 12+ hours to the game and thus be able to capitalize is never not going to be represented as a result. There are always going to be outliers
The only issue that needed addressing is the data point exploit. Commanders using carriers, trading rares is all legitimate activity. Is it distorting powerplay system acquisition? Almost certainly. However I'd argue this is something that frontier should have considered, when developing a 100+ rank wall with truly asinine merit amounts.
People engaging with the game and sticking to the rules, isn't something you punish. If players are creative, well then good for them. Frontier are fixated on powerplay being a giant time gate. And all this scolding over investing time and effort is weird and should be viewed as weird.
Frontier is going to rapidly undo all the good will gained from the powerplay update, whilst desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
What is truly mind boggling, is that if you change powers, your rank and merit count is reset. Imagine having to unlock all 100 ranks again.
