In short: Neither, there's much better ways to do it, and your suggestion lacks the necessary nuance. I'd also suggest the "billion a day" is a lowball figure considering I solo landed 80 kills in 50 minutes last night. A wing of 4, stacking their missions correctly should be earning around 600m each in that time, if not a billion if they're doing it right.[1] That's insane.Some companies earn a small profit on low end/cost product but make up with volume whereas others earn a large profit from high end/cost/bespoke product but sell comparatively small volume. Which is right and which is wrong? If it takes a day to earn a billion killing x amount of easily farmed pirates, then it should be ok to earn a billion killing two or three of the hardest challenging pirates, but that should also take a day, roughly speaking, though I wonder how that would be received overall?
Longer version: I get what you're saying, but you're comparing apples and oranges. Your initial example would be much better applied (and should be applied) to mining; if we kept how mining currently works, but applied actual market pricing variations, Methanol Monohydrate Crystals (avg 2.4k cr/t) would be priced orders of magnitude higher than void opals, LTDs and all other high-end minerals, simply because the effort to collect is the same, but demand for MMC's is orders of magnitude larger (looking at a market where both are in demand; demand for LTDs sits at 321 tonnes, while demand for MMCs sits at 230,000 tonnes.
That would sit much better if the effort to collect MMCs was a fraction of the effort to collect the same amount of minerals... then you get a large volume of cheap minerals, or a small volume of more expensive ones, and get a choice to focus builds on either:
- Bulk-harvesting cheap minerals, perhaps even at the exclusion of collecting high value minerals, where the key to success is making collection as efficient as possible; or
- Rapid-searching via some sane mechanics for high value minerals, where the key to success is optimising search times.
But that's not really relevant to Combat. The issue comes about because the game's combat reward mechanic is very much structured around harder target == higher reward, with one notable exception... anacondas pay lots more than sideys, haz res pays more than low res, High CZ pays more than Low CZ, Hydra pays more than Cyclops. The notable exception is fitting. Vanilla fittings pay the same as engineered fittings, and that's kinda dumb, but not critical here.
The problem is that massacre stacking doesn't respect that. It just "tops up" your kill. So where I can wipe five massacre targets @ 200k a pop in the same time it takes me to knock a 1m bounty assassination target. That on it's own would be balanced. The problem is (properly) stacked massacres add ~4m per kill. For an assassination target, even factoring in the assasination reward plus massacre top up, that's 10m. For those five kills in the same time, that's 25m.
So, without massacres, it's actually already balanced. But massacre stacking isn't rewarding "getting kills faster" falsely balanced against "killing less, but harder targets", it's rewarding simple metagaming. In some instances, metagaming is fine... but on this occasion it significantly detracts from progression.
Again, the core issue is that massacres as they're currently implemented break the core reward system for combat, by overly-rewarding cheap kills, which is why they should be re-implemented to function more as wave-based combat where you have to clear a USS to clear that massacre mission.
But to go a bit deeper, it doesn't have to be "kill lots of small targets per day, or kill one or two big targets a day". A way mining could work is that, in the course of doing your everyday mining, you stumble across a rare clutch of expensive minerals, and that day happens to pay off really well, compared to the usual. Conversely, while in the course of destroying your standard enemies, you could get the opportunity (through scenario/Tip off mechanics) to pursue a significantly more high paying target. This doesn't have to be an either-or situation. Elite is meant to be all about it's procedural generation, but the use of this to generate escalating reward for an increasing challenge is sorely missing.
[1] 4 players, 80 kills each, that's 240 kills total in almost 1 hour. Each player should therefore have 3 stacked 81-kill wing missions to share with the wing, rewarding ~= 40m each, which is 480m, plus their own 20-30 kill solo massacres to farm easy kills... at ~40m a pop that should be another 120m, so that's 600m an hour. If those solo massacres are stacked across, let's be conservative and say four different factions, 3 x 4 = 12 missions, 40m a pop = 480m as well, so that should make 960m/hour per person.
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