Fdev ! stop the 1 billion a day shared wing pirate massacres bonanza

The rewards are completely borked for combat, harder stuff pays worse than easy stuff. The worst money of all is CZs..

Id care, but credits swiftly become meaningless when you have billions, so it doesnt really matter if whatever im doing pays badly.
 
I agree czs should pay alot more

If there's a war I need to fight in I'll just go out on foot. Holding the fire button on my Corvette for ages (excluding the frequent occasions when the enemies are spamming their bottomless pit of chaff) to earn a 25k bond is less than thrilling. I've tried tackling CZ in a Vulture with fixed weapons, but it's nowhere near as much fun as popping pirates.

I don't even care about the credits, as I have more than I can spend. It's just that the reward for effort and time spent feels way off.
 
Fwiw, if instead of making cash you're trying to get BGS outcomes, you're often fighting the tide of good/bad environmental conditions to work the area you need to, making the best fist of a bad situation to do whatever will turn the dial, fill different buckets - bounty hunting with no res sites, having to trade to a small outpost, even doing stuff that costs you money. I don't chase credits and after 2 years have less than 5 bil - just been busy v0v. It short-circuits a lot of the borked cows by directing you to diverse activities in specific locations, and BGS influence is a little better balanced than credits. As a result of this and a general attitude of a buck earned is worth more than a buck cheesed, I've had a more organic development curve credits wise.

That said, I'd rather the stupidness of the economy was fixed, because who wants to play a game that disappoints their intelligence with nonsensical reward balance. Or asks them to hop around backwards with one hand patting their head in order to maximise earnings (or whatever borked thing it is people are doing).
 
They (fdev) need a real PhD economist to come in and redress the whole market/mats/ship purchases etc thing.
It's possible to fix. Just very complicated.
 
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.
LOL, the only thing "off the radar" is your assertion that the game can't have more than one way of being played without screwing up other ways of playing it. Too bad really.
 
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