There are quite a few activities that are currently pretty low in terms of efficacy, to the point where basically nobody does them. Megaship scanning, bounty hunting, salvaging, exploration, etc.
I'd like to propose a simple system that could make these activities relevant. 'Showing the Flag'. Essentially, we justify the merit decay as the local population drifting away from your Power. Never entirely, but enough that you should stop by now and then to remind them what's up.
How?
When a system is recovering from the weekly merit decay, all activities get a 10x boost to merits.
For example, say a system experiences 10k merits worth of system point decay that week. For the first 40k merits, all activities get a 10x boost, until the decay is gone. Now, you COULD do this via 'meta' activities like mining, but crucially, it'd only take a few hours of a fun activity to achieve the same results. It would actually be better to just have a bounty hunting ship and fly around doing a little bounty hunting in lots of systems, rather than mining and selling a few dozen tons of core minerals everywhere. Each pirate you kill gives you 2k-4k merits, so you really only need to kill a few dozen pirates to finish up for that week.
This heavily ENCOURAGES the smaller players who are most discouraged by the merit decay. Meanwhile, the players who are regularly earning hundreds of thousands of merits each week won't be much bothered either way! AND the merit decay is canonically justified!
Everyone wins!
I'd like to propose a simple system that could make these activities relevant. 'Showing the Flag'. Essentially, we justify the merit decay as the local population drifting away from your Power. Never entirely, but enough that you should stop by now and then to remind them what's up.
How?
When a system is recovering from the weekly merit decay, all activities get a 10x boost to merits.
For example, say a system experiences 10k merits worth of system point decay that week. For the first 40k merits, all activities get a 10x boost, until the decay is gone. Now, you COULD do this via 'meta' activities like mining, but crucially, it'd only take a few hours of a fun activity to achieve the same results. It would actually be better to just have a bounty hunting ship and fly around doing a little bounty hunting in lots of systems, rather than mining and selling a few dozen tons of core minerals everywhere. Each pirate you kill gives you 2k-4k merits, so you really only need to kill a few dozen pirates to finish up for that week.
This heavily ENCOURAGES the smaller players who are most discouraged by the merit decay. Meanwhile, the players who are regularly earning hundreds of thousands of merits each week won't be much bothered either way! AND the merit decay is canonically justified!
Everyone wins!