Wait, wait, you are making me worried. I am currently exploring in deep space, which means that I won't sell any data before a while and exploration is going to be my only source of ARX since I can't trade, do missions or anything else. Am I screwed? Frontier, tell me that you don't need to be in the bubble or near civilization to earn ARX.
Well, I've earned 4 ARX in several hours of Exploration.
And (apparently) 3 of those originated from Composition-Scanning two generic Fumaroles and Collecting Elements off them after landing on a Planet with Polonium.
The way I see it, 99% of Exploration-earned ARX will be from selling
only
So one will return after months of Exploration with a low number of ARX, only to be greeted by the 400 Cap.
Assuming ~1000 Systems visited and good Planets mapped, that'd mean the potential for some (very roughly) ~9600 more ARX would go wasted entirely.
If my assumption is correct, ARX vs. Exploration would need a
very healthy re-balance pass.
The Alternative would be to sell ~50M in Data once a week. Over the course of a total of 10 weeks in above example - which obviously is 100% unfeasible and unrealistic.
It'd also mean blowing up (or getting blown up i.e. in a GvP encounter) now costs Explorers
even more
Returning Explorers now seem a juicier Ganking Target than ever before, being effectively able to lose real money (if you planned on a purchase with earned in-game ARX).
I'd really like to be wrong on that one, but currently it looks like that's the case...