Oh, there are all sorts of things that FDev should probably have expected that they completely missed. This is perfectly understandable, in of itself, but I do wish they'd fix the issues they find sooner rather than later.
I'm not as incensed about this particular form of stacking as I was about the old form long range trade (with non-unique commodities), or the skimmers, or anything that required mode switching to game the mission boards, and I'm not going to go around blowing people up if I think they are doing these missions, but I still think it's a pretty cheesy and I avoid taking missions where each kill would count more than once for each faction.
Everything everyone does in a multiplayer only game with a shared setting/background sim affects everyone else, to some degree or another.
FDev has also been setting prices and implementing credit sinks taking the incomes and assets possible into account. More money being injected into what passes for an economy devalues everything that came before it.
I also believe Engineers was implemented the way it was specifically to avoid the credit economy that FDev allowed to become broken so easily.
Let's just remove any form of stacking and only allow 1 mission at a time so we can stop lamenting over what other people do already then eh? The way I see it, if they don't count toward all the missions then there's no point in allowing us to stack them at all. It makes perfect sense the way it is, the employer posts jobs that could be form multiple people wanting you to do the same thing. If there's a bounty on John, you're not going to have to kill multiple Johns, you're going to kill one John and get the credit from multiple people wanting John dead. If 10 people want you to kill 20 ships in a conflict zone, they aren't going to care if they are unique kills and force you to kill 200, they all just want 20 less ships in the conflict zone.
What others do in this game don't have nearly the impact that people would like the rest of us to believe. There's not one specific case I can mention where I was personally prevented or otherwise slowed down by what other people are doing. There's an argument for UA bombing (yet to affect me) and there's an argument for player groups helping factions take over other systems (yet to affect me), but other than that, what
you do in this game doesn't affect
me, not even a little bit. Let's face it, what this
really is about is forcing your morals on how the game should be played on everyone else. You're one of those that thinks the game should be slow as a glacier and earning something means you spent years on it, the old up hill both ways in the snow barefoot deal. That's fine if that's how you want to play the game, you are certainly able to even with the game as is. You are already self regulating yourself because you don't want to go any faster or more efficient. You aren't bothered until you see other people speed past you, doing things you don't approve of, and
that is the problem. People are playing the game as designed, not cheating.
These things that people want changed and removed were put into the game on purpose, if they weren't, they are usually removed or changed faster if really unintended. Otherwise, things only change with months of grief from louder parts of the community that are only having fun when the game is at a snails pace. Magically, one of the devs pop up and agree that maybe it should change, yea right. That's not them finally admitting to something, that's them changing their minds on something. It's not about everyone blazing their own trail anymore, it's about everyone blazing the arduous 1.0 Oregon Trail.
I will not believe for one second that after this long what people have been doing is unintended game play and they now are getting around to 'fixing' it. What I would believe is that they are taking the development of missions in a different direction now, for whatever reason, perhaps the incessant bi-polar community that can't ever seem to fully agree on what sort of game it's actually looking for. Even the idea that the game is evolving and a few things need to change to avoid spinning out of control is better than trying to tell me that mission stacking and mode switching were something that snuck past the development team and has been unintended for this long. They knew, they developed it and they haven't changed the way it works... They didn't even mention changing it until a boiling point of the constant counting of other people's credits. They're caving, not fixing.
None of this is news, it's been going on since release and before... Not enough credits, too many credits, not enough damage, too much damage, AI too hard, AI too easy... The circle of 'I want the game this way and you should too' (AKA balancing) continues.
