I understand why they decided to do what they did with merits for exploration, but I think it was an overreaction.
The problem is, a player out in the black for months could potentially create an unwinnable situation when they dumped all their merits on one system on their return, which isn't very fun. At the same time though, exploration is pretty well not worth it for powerplay at the moment.
So what if instead, we returned to the OG values, but data more than a few weeks old started to diminish in terms of merit value? Like, maybe between 2 and 6 weeks the value of data degrades 25% per week, to the current values?
This would be justified by the fact that Powerplay is an active thing, and they kinda need up to date data. After all, who knows what happened in those systems since you left?
Also, there should probably be somewhat diminishing returns on a per-system basis. You know, the first 100k merits gets full value, but maybe it degrades after that. There's only so much a system can use exploration data, after all.
That way, you get the full joy of merits for exploration, but with less of the frustration of the other power getting suddenly overwhelmed.
The problem is, a player out in the black for months could potentially create an unwinnable situation when they dumped all their merits on one system on their return, which isn't very fun. At the same time though, exploration is pretty well not worth it for powerplay at the moment.
So what if instead, we returned to the OG values, but data more than a few weeks old started to diminish in terms of merit value? Like, maybe between 2 and 6 weeks the value of data degrades 25% per week, to the current values?
This would be justified by the fact that Powerplay is an active thing, and they kinda need up to date data. After all, who knows what happened in those systems since you left?
Also, there should probably be somewhat diminishing returns on a per-system basis. You know, the first 100k merits gets full value, but maybe it degrades after that. There's only so much a system can use exploration data, after all.
That way, you get the full joy of merits for exploration, but with less of the frustration of the other power getting suddenly overwhelmed.