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

[Jmanis]

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?

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.

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.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

I solo landed 80 kills in 50 minutes last night

A lot hangs on this number: I haven’t done much of this, but I’m pretty sure it will take longer, and that you are near the high end of the scale, but I’ll test it again.

 

[Jmanis]

A lot hangs on this number: I haven’t done much of this, but I’m pretty sure it will take longer, and that you are near the high end of the scale, but I’ll test it again.

I was timing it to be sure today. ~2 minutes to get to the USS, 2-3 minutes to rack up 7-8 kills.

Occasionally it took 4 or 5 minutes, but that was because for funsies i stack assassinations too, and a target would drop in, which take at least a minute.

Edit: its worth noting this can be tight; too many enemies with chaff and it can blow out. Switching targets and making sure you get a good line on them is important in that regard... at novice/ competent rank they go fast and you down them easily between cooldowns.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

I was timing it to be sure today. ~2 minutes to get to the USS, 2-3 minutes to rack up 7-8 kills.

Occasionally it took 4 or 5 minutes, but that was because for funsies i stack assassinations too, and a target would drop in, which take at least a minute.

Edit: its worth noting this can be tight; too many enemies with chaff and it can blow out. Switching targets and making sure you get a good line on them is important in that regard... at novice/ competent rank they go fast and you down them easily between cooldowns.

What was the ship (just for science)? I’ll probably try it with a rail conda.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

I was timing it to be sure today. ~2 minutes to get to the USS, 2-3 minutes to rack up 7-8 kills.

Occasionally it took 4 or 5 minutes, but that was because for funsies i stack assassinations too, and a target would drop in, which take at least a minute.

Edit: its worth noting this can be tight; too many enemies with chaff and it can blow out. Switching targets and making sure you get a good line on them is important in that regard... at novice/ competent rank they go fast and you down them easily between cooldowns.

So just did a test run in my local system, and it's quite obvious why it takes me so much longer: the POIs spawn at a regular15,000ls from one another, so I'm spending about 8 mins to get to each one, where I normally get 4 kills of deadly level pythons/chieftains/cobras. So the grand total after an hour was 17 kills.
The question is, how many of the system where you can stack these missions place the POIs close enough?

 

[Chaparral]

All calls to nerf a game feature should incur a 1,000,000,000 in game credit tax.

You want it nerfed, prove it by sacrificing your own credits.

 

[Jmanis]

What was the ship (just for science)? I’ll probably try it with a rail conda.

Anaconda... It's got some engineering. but for the most part it's a bunch of Overcharged multicannons and an Overcharged beam laser (all gimballed), some Heavy-Duty modded HRPs/armour. It's got a few things which just wouldn't normally be on a combat build (Collector Limpet, Supercruise assist, even Guardian shard cannons)

I will admit that a build like that might be a barrier to entry, but you could get by with G3 mods; my own build is hardly optimal, and what's actually most important is the tanking.

So just did a test run in my local system, and it's quite obvious why it takes me so much longer: the POIs spawn at a regular15,000ls from one another, so I'm spending about 8 mins to get to each one, where I normally get 4 kills of deadly level pythons/chieftains/cobras. So the grand total after an hour was 17 kills.
The question is, how many of the system where you can stack these missions place the POIs close enough?

So there's a couple problems going on there.
1. Yeah, POIs are too far apart. The system(s) I use are Sveit and Tripitaka, targeting San Yax. The POI are never more than 7,000ls apart there, and most spawn in deep space. The deep space bit is really important; ones close to planets will slow you down both on approach and, critically, when moving to the next[1]... means you can start at a much higher supercruise speed. For some reason, there's a significant... i dunno... performance dropoff?... past about 10,000ls... I don't know exactly why it's such a drastic difference... but I suspect it's that after about 5,000ls the max supercruise speed starts to taper off.

2. You said 4 Deadly pythons/chietains/cobras. That tells me you've gone to a Threat 4 site. Killing them is too slow, and that's the clincher... you gotta mix in some of the expert-rank (non-wing) missions which will spawn when you're Elite/Allied rank, but are more forthcoming if you're Friendly only. You can tell because instead of a 40-50m payout, targeting 30 ships, they'll be for 5-15m (rank-dependent) for 7-15 kills. You can tell which they are because they're Threat 3 USS, not Threat 4.

In those Threat 3 sites, you get seven ships, usually a mix of sidewinders up to chieftains/pythons... but critically they're all competent/novice rank, so they go down like flies. I know I link this video often, but in it I take down three in one minute, but there's a lot I "got wrong" in that video... even so, you can see how it averages out a bit. The key is to aggro the whole room[2]... otherwise if you take them one at a time, the unaggroed ones will just fly out of range. Use a fighter as well... the fighter is actually enough to kill targets in the time you get the others... but never recover it, just leave it. Cheap to replace.

Also, one for the side if you aren't, use the nav beacon to scan all the USS instantly when you get into the system. That way you're not faffing around with the FSS finding them (if you have lots of stacks, there will be lots of USS)

[1] It's the same source of grievance people have with APEX travel times... going from star jump-in to planet, easy. Going from deep space to planet, not a problem. Going planet to planet... big problems.
[2] They're only competent/novice ships, so tanking isn't a big issue for any combat ship. My tank isn't even complete and they rarely down shields.

EDIT: I'd argue, there's also a "lead up" to this. You start by taking whatever is on the boards. This might not be an optimal stack, and for funsies, throw some assassinations on there too. This won't be that hundreds of millions an hour...but get on a good roll and it'll come in faster.

All calls to nerf a game feature should incur a 1,000,000,000 in game credit tax.

You want it nerfed, prove it by sacrificing your own credits.

I mean, sure. We can not nerf this... but I want fighting Threat 6/7 Pirate Attack sites, where the enemies are fully engineered and genuinely difficult, to pay out closer to 2b an hour, to balance plus incentivise more difficult activities, progression and staying mobile to track down these sites. GG all the rest of the careers in the game, but who cares about the economy right? Not ED players usually.

 

[Jmanis]

So just did a test run in my local system, and it's quite obvious why it takes me so much longer: the POIs spawn at a regular15,000ls from one another, so I'm spending about 8 mins to get to each one, where I normally get 4 kills of deadly level pythons/chieftains/cobras. So the grand total after an hour was 17 kills.
The question is, how many of the system where you can stack these missions place the POIs close enough?

Just to follow up as well, here's a very casual 30 minutes of playing, earning just over 100m from ~30 kills.. It's not optimal for a variety of reasons:

• I just grabbed what was on the mission boards (one generation). Normally I'd spend 10 minutes to get four total board generations across two stations. The benefit is more USS opportunities
• I didn't stack any wing massacres. They're really only useful if you're going at it for an hour or more... and they do make things more complicated (as they can introduce 'bad' Threat 3 USS)
• I also stacked assassinations (for funsies), which are very inefficient.
• One USS was a total write-off, being just an assassination target mission, so that's a ~ 7 kill loss within that time
• Some USS had times blown out because an assassination target dropped in. It's not as bad as the previous point, but you can see that makes it 4-5m, due to the effort involved in those targets and frankly, plopping into the middle of 7 other ships wailing on you does cause target reprioritisation and evasives.
• I botch getting aggro for all targets. This is mostly due to the enemy scanner bug... it's not a huge deal, but does result in chasing enemies here and there.

A little bit of planning would easily double that income, and add another 30 minutes of playing like that and I'd be happily raking nearly 400m/h.

Contrast that against 30 minutes in a Threat 6 PA site, I might take down four, maybe five ships? And walk away with 6 million, 25 million if I happened to stack massacres for that too? It's just no comparison.

 

[Chaparral]

I mean, sure. We can not nerf this... but I want fighting Threat 6/7 Pirate Attack sites, where the enemies are fully engineered and genuinely difficult, to pay out closer to 2b an hour, to balance plus incentivise more difficult activities, progression and staying mobile to track down these sites. GG all the rest of the careers in the game, but who cares about the economy right? Not ED players usually.

So what you want is more challenging activities to pay on par with Pirate massacre missions or better, not really to nerf pirate massacre missions?

Solo (in Open) I killed about 60 pirates in an hour with 4 missions active. Maybe the res zone spawn rate wasn't what you were used to? I was not playing coop / wing / team and my payout was no where near 2B. More like 60 million. It seems like the real reward FDEV is building in is for coop play.

The other gold rush activities from Robigo, to Sothis, to Quince, to skimmers, to long ranger passenger missions, to wing transport missions, to LTDs, to etc. etc. etc. pretty much got wacked as someone whined about it.

Can we not scream nerf as soon as something makes the base spaceship game play a bit more progression consistent time wise with other games? Exactly how many hours should a solo player have to grind to get a fully engineered G5 vette? maybe 200 hours? Isn't that abusive enough?

 

[Jaguarious]

Time to close this gameloop?
4 cmdrs in a team (don't have to be winged up till hand in), set off to their local haz res they farm.
Once they've visited the neighbouring systems asset and all stacked a dozen or more wing pirate massacres (same pirate faction is a must) each, they arrive together at the hazrez and proceed to farm it.
An hour or 2 later their all done as each kill counts towards each cmdrs wing missions as much as 1 kill = 28+ kills in stacked winged up missions. Remember it's important when stacking the missions you take one from each faction hence having to be allied with em all.
They then head back to the neighbouring asset and hand in as a winged up group.
And I Poo u not, assumption a dozen each x4 cmdrs =48 missions to share each averaging 20 mill each that's a billion or so credits per hand in per cmdr.
And if the missions run dry as the neighbouring systems state changes then yup, your groups already got another farm elsewhere...or even a third.
It's the new meta as senior cmdrs well know.
Just don't think the devs know cos they'd nerf it sharpish.
Sorry in advance everyone.
Any suggestions as to making it harder or whatever pls post.

Please explain why this effects your game in any way.
What's more... explain why you would object to someone making credits in any number at all?
Is there some law of nature that says unless you yourself are making the profit - no one should? I'm confused. Please clarify.

Thanks.

 

[Jmanis]

So what you want is more challenging activities to pay on par with Pirate massacre missions or better, not really to nerf pirate massacre missions?

No, I want a sane economy.

Solo (in Open) I killed about 60 pirates in an hour with 4 missions active. Maybe the res zone spawn rate wasn't what you were used to? I was not playing coop / wing / team and my payout was no where near 2B. More like 60 million. It seems like the real reward FDEV is building in is for coop play.

As explained and demonstrated above, I got 100m in 30 minutes solo, unprepared, and could've got closer to 400m in an hour with some minor preparation. The "guides" people seem to follow about how to stack massacres are outdated and, frankly, wrong.

Conversely, I was trash at mining and didn't get anywhere near the incomes some people got from Borann. Didn't mean it didn't need to be brought down.

The other gold rush activities from Robigo, to Sothis, to Quince

Both oversight edge-cases in the BGS, which needed fixing.

to skimmers,

The stacking nerf was reasonable. Also dropping their spawn rate to 0 was not.

to long ranger passenger missions,

Also an oversight, though more closely aligned to the oversight which occurred post-mineral price rebalance.

to wing transport missions

Not entirely sure what you're talking about there... as far as I'm aware that's still in the game as-is because transport missions are still busted, primarily rewarding on cargo value, not cargo volume, or distance to system or station. If you're talking about the hard-cap at 50m credits, that's a hard-cap because anything beyond a 50m credit will crash the game. That last bit really needs to be fixed because it screws with wing source mission payouts something shocking.

to LTDs, to etc. etc. etc.

I don't agree with the way they nerfed things like triple hotspots... their issue was they were static and unchanging. Hotspots were meant to come and go as they were exhausted by players, but becaise FD couldn't address that

Can we not scream nerf as soon as something makes the base spaceship game play a bit more progression consistent time wise with other games? Exactly how many hours should a solo player have to grind to get a fully engineered G5 vette? maybe 200 hours? Isn't that abusive enough?

Corvette's a bad example. Your upper bound here is not cash, or even materials. It's the rank grind... but ranks are stuffed and need a total overhaul of mechanics and game effects anyway.

But ignoring that, if you're taking 200 hours to get a vette, you're doing something seriously wrong. Consider this for a second: Solo assassinations will pay out up to 5 million credits (6m including a bounty). Personally, I think that's kinda fine. Just 20 of those would get you 100m, and you could take a vulture and clear that stack in a couple hours.... especially if you spend a debatable amount of time getting some baseline G1-3 engineering. A smidge more than that will get you into, say a vanilla python or Krait MK2, and from there, it's easy-street. Slap on a pure combat build (even without engineering) and it's smooth sailing, and smashing a few more assassinations, farming haz res or doing many other things (except massacres) will get you to an A-Rate, Military Grade big ship maybe in 10-20 hours of play, tops? Seems reasonable to me.

But this? A coordinated team can each get an FC in a day, if they really wanted. A solo player in 2-3 days maybe. In the course of fiddling with this over the weekend, I've earned ~500m... comprising one hour to familiarise myself again since it's been a while. Another hour to confirm, and then the above half hour recording. It's nuts.

But the thing is, the game isn't on hold until you get there. You can still do literally whatever you want in between; a python with G1-3 mods is more than adequate to do literally anything in the game. Too many people fixate on an A-Rate, G5 Vette as if they can't start the game until that happens. It's just icing at that point.

Please explain why this effects your game in any way.

As I said before, a player earning 1b credits a day doesn't affect my game.

A broken game economy that fails to incentivise increasing challenge correctly, and fails to have natural game objectives fall out of it, simply makes those activities not fun. Chasing down Threat 5&6 PA sites knowing I'm going to get peanuts for any of the kills is pretty soul crushing. That's how it affects my game. And it also affects further sane development of the game.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

Just to follow up as well, here's a very casual 30 minutes of playing, earning just over 100m from ~30 kills.. It's not optimal for a variety of reasons:

• I just grabbed what was on the mission boards (one generation). Normally I'd spend 10 minutes to get four total board generations across two stations. The benefit is more USS opportunities
• I didn't stack any wing massacres. They're really only useful if you're going at it for an hour or more... and they do make things more complicated (as they can introduce 'bad' Threat 3 USS)
• I also stacked assassinations (for funsies), which are very inefficient.
• One USS was a total write-off, being just an assassination target mission, so that's a ~ 7 kill loss within that time
• Some USS had times blown out because an assassination target dropped in. It's not as bad as the previous point, but you can see that makes it 4-5m, due to the effort involved in those targets and frankly, plopping into the middle of 7 other ships wailing on you does cause target reprioritisation and evasives.
• I botch getting aggro for all targets. This is mostly due to the enemy scanner bug... it's not a huge deal, but does result in chasing enemies here and there.

A little bit of planning would easily double that income, and add another 30 minutes of playing like that and I'd be happily raking nearly 400m/h.

Contrast that against 30 minutes in a Threat 6 PA site, I might take down four, maybe five ships? And walk away with 6 million, 25 million if I happened to stack massacres for that too? It's just no comparison.

The fact still remains that there are probably only a few systems in the bubble that allow such high profits, due (presumably) to the distance from the furthest planet to the star. Can you confirm this? I would be ok with nerfing the very high earning systems, but with an average of 150,000ls between POIs my test system needs no nerfing, and I would be wary of how fdev would implement it.

 

[Jmanis]

The fact still remains that there are probably only a few systems in the bubble that allow such high profits, due (presumably) to the distance from the furthest planet to the star. Can you confirm this? I would be ok with nerfing the very high earning systems, but with an average of 150,000ls between POIs my test system needs no nerfing, and I would be wary of how fdev would implement it.

In this case, this was simply the first set i picked using the tool. Prior to that I've had three systems within the 20Ly bubble i play around in (in the middle of the bubble) with good farming conditions. With literal thousands of systems meeting the conditions to at least generate readily stackable missions, i would suggest these situations are very common.

More common than original Borann at least.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

In this case, this was simply the first set i picked using the tool. Prior to that I've had three systems within the 20Ly bubble i play around in (in the middle of the bubble) with good farming conditions. With literal thousands of systems meeting the conditions to at least generate readily stackable missions, i would suggest these situations are very common.

More common than original Borann at least.

Fair enough, maybe I was unlucky, but I would still be wary of how they would nerf this.

 

[Jmanis]

Fair enough, maybe I was unlucky, but I would still be wary of how they would nerf this.

There's heaps of ways, tbh.
- Only allow the correct kill type to associate with the correct mission. A lynchpin of what i'm doing above (and of any guide) is using low- difficulty kills to fulfil high rank missions. You could do this as either:
1. Only allow USS kills to count; unfortunately rules out going to RES and such for targets.
2. Require kills to match or be higher than the rank of the mission; If it's an elite mission, only elite kills count. Mission USS would be a source of the correct kill type.

- Just remove stacking. Actually wouldn't fix anything, but w/e

- Nerf the pay. Again, probably unpopular, but at the time FD changed stacking rules, massacres paid 2-3m... they "bumped" the pay post- stacking changes, by an order of magnitude... that's dumb. 20 stacked massacres would have got you 50-60m under the old system. Four good cross stacked gets you 160m.

- increase kill counts required. Synonymous with a payout nerf, implemented differently.

- allow missions to target uninhabited systems, using current local factions as targets, just like how missions. This completely addresses the continued occurrence of "edge case" systems like those good for massacre stacking, without actually removing stacking. There's also numerous other positive outcomes here that are unrelated to this topic, and it would fix some otherwise "bgs- locked" systems.

- replace massacres with wave- based scenarios and bring them more in line with most mission designs . Clear the uss, clear a mission. The current massacre missions are blend, uninspired non- missions.

And of course...

- significantly buff payouts for engineered pirate targets.

 

[Shir]

Try to actually do the 400 million run you speak about, and you'll find out it's not really that easy, nor that common. You did a 100 million missions run, and now based on speculations and hyperboles you create a thread that makes a buzz trying to destroy a fun party of the game for many.

Whenever something new is introduced to the game, usually Frontier presents some money making opportunity to lure players. Surface missions, mining metas, passenger missions, massacres, to name a few.

Last big one was when the carrier tax was introduced, with all the ways mining was profitable, only to be nerfed later.

There are much better ways to get rich in the game compared to the one you describe. The only reason credits matter is because our balance keeps bleeding due to the carrier weekly expenses..

 

[Dragsham]

Looking back over some of the replies....
I'm asked repeatedly why would l expose this?
It's a stupid question.
The answer is simple, because its not as intended.
If we're supposed to circumvent the threat 4 or 3 or 6 signals that stacking these missions generates, and sit in a hazres with 2 or 3 others or even alone, or even in unattended turret boats, IF that's what you all think fdev designed it to do, then of course I'm wrong.
I've already stated I'd happily reset.
As long as everyone else does too.
But that's not what I've asked.
I've pointed out that it's what it is.
Some of you aught to grow up a bit, grow a pair.
The trolling and flaming is a big disappointment, some here who don't even play anymore, posting their crap replys.
Yeah it's hard, losing the mining, losing gameloops that were clearly broken.
We all want the same thing.
A game that's solid, isn't broken. And works as intended.

 

[LeoBartlet]

The lady doth protest too much.

 

[Jmanis]

Try to actually do the 400 million run you speak about,

Have done it on several occasions.

and you'll find out it's not really that easy, nor that common.

It's really common, and really easy. EDIT: In fact, the system I do it in is one of the less ideal ones.

You did a 100 million missions run,

In just half an hour, with no preparation, as a comparative to someone making 17 kills in an hour.

and now based on speculations and hyperboles

Where?

you create a thread

Not my thread?

that makes a buzz trying to destroy a fun party of the game for many.

Wouldn't remove the activity at all, would just rebalance the ridiculous payments down for fly-swatting, and up for more challenging combat. Like I have repeatedly said, whatever ends up being the situation, I've got no problems if it's a billion an hour, day, whatever, provided it's for the more challenging combat.

Everyone complains about the grind. Wouldn't it be more fun if the best rewards came from more than just gaming mission boards and swatting novice ships?

Whenever something new is introduced to the game, usually Frontier presents some money making opportunity to lure players. Surface missions, mining metas, passenger missions, massacres, to name a few.

Now... that's some hyperbole and speculation right there.

Last big one was when the carrier tax was introduced, with all the ways mining was profitable, only to be nerfed later.

There are much better ways to get rich in the game compared to the one you describe. The only reason credits matter is because our balance keeps bleeding due to the carrier weekly expenses..

.... sounds like a carrier isn't for you then? Not sure what that's got to do with this thread.

 

[CaptainPugwash]

There's heaps of ways, tbh.
- Only allow the correct kill type to associate with the correct mission. A lynchpin of what i'm doing above (and of any guide) is using low- difficulty kills to fulfil high rank missions. You could do this as either:
1. Only allow USS kills to count; unfortunately rules out going to RES and such for targets.
2. Require kills to match or be higher than the rank of the mission; If it's an elite mission, only elite kills count. Mission USS would be a source of the correct kill type.

- Just remove stacking. Actually wouldn't fix anything, but w/e

- Nerf the pay. Again, probably unpopular, but at the time FD changed stacking rules, massacres paid 2-3m... they "bumped" the pay post- stacking changes, by an order of magnitude... that's dumb. 20 stacked massacres would have got you 50-60m under the old system. Four good cross stacked gets you 160m.

- increase kill counts required. Synonymous with a payout nerf, implemented differently.

- allow missions to target uninhabited systems, using current local factions as targets, just like how missions. This completely addresses the continued occurrence of "edge case" systems like those good for massacre stacking, without actually removing stacking. There's also numerous other positive outcomes here that are unrelated to this topic, and it would fix some otherwise "bgs- locked" systems.

- replace massacres with wave- based scenarios and bring them more in line with most mission designs . Clear the uss, clear a mission. The current massacre missions are blend, uninspired non- missions.

And of course...

- significantly buff payouts for engineered pirate targets.

I especially agree with the last point, and I would nerf the current pirate mission sources by making the pirates fight back as a group. Currently they just sit there and watch while their mates get blown up - is this how fdev see the piracy fraternity?? ;-)