Let's be careful not to cross the wires for a moment.
Are you asking about A to B hauling CGs? Or are you asking about relogging?
Typical A to B hauling has nothing to do with relogging issues, and does not require relogging to be done. Personally I find them absolutely boring, but people looking to be space truckers going back and forth, having to find new supply sources when existing ones dry up, weighing up whether to target the items with higher profit margins but potentially contributing less overall to the CG... some people find that interesting, and there's fundamentally nothing wrong with the activity design which results in relogging being the best avenue of approach.
tl;dr there's nothing that needs fixing with A to B hauling; I just find it boring[1].
But this is not an A-B hauling CG where you go somewhere, fill your cargohold with a click or two and go back. Guardian Item (and Meta Alloy) CGs are more akin to salvage or search and rescue[2] CGs, and these have historically had major issues with relogging being at the center of effective contributions and gameplay. At the crux of salvage and comparable CGs and activities is, imo, the need to seek out the goods.
The problem of instancing/reinstancing to regenerate a static site isn't a new one. Plenty of games have had to deal with this sort of thing in the past, and there's no shortage of solutions. So here's what you do:
Assumption: Using limpets plus relogging gets you, by some claims, approx 200 units in 1 hour (which is about 10-15 relogs, as I understand).
- Instead of that, you design your sites such that there's an hour of activity to undertake, and the result of which is a total of 200 units, which are gradually loosed as you progress the site through interacting with things, accessing buried caches or bunkers and what not. If you look closely though, you'll notice that means no less than 100 trips back to your ship if you're in an SRV. It's almost as if FD need to introduce new types of SRV that, among other designs, have a high-capacity hauling variant.
Just take a quick look at Odyssey. We have combat and Salvage suits. The salvage suit can carry an order of magnitude more widgets from a base than the combat suit can, so it's not unusual to clear threats using your combat suit, then flush out the site in your salvage suit in a single run... if not doable in the base model, it's definitely doable in an engineered one. Why that methodology couldn't have been applied to our SRVs before Odyssey did it with suits I have no idea, but w/e.
- USS and Planetary USS gameplay are sorely overlooked and under-utilised by FD. This planet was once a Thargoid/Guardian battlefield? Why is the planet not littered with bunkers/caches which can be sought out and looted for goods, up to 20-30 at a time... the critical element being that these need to be able to outstrip that at the static sites in terms of volume of goods.
Why dyanmic planetary POI became short-term persistent in Odyssey I have no idea... if they just removed that we'd be solid. Then a core activity loop becomes actively seeking out planetary surface POI, and when you flush a planet, you can go out and seek more on other planets/systems, and they procedurally regenerate in different locations, in slower time like usual.
- Mission-based gameplay is equally overlooked. Why doesn't Ram Tah, or the two Megaships we've got stationed in the location offer missions to recover this sort of stuff? Then we get mission USS/planetary POIs which are one-use, and then we also get a more meaningful metric; number of support activities conducted for a particular side, rather than number of widgets recovered.
Then you could go down the path of multi-discipline CGs if you wanted, where there's missions to recover goods, sites to salvage, heck, even missions to respond to a stricken hauler carrying guardian artefacts, and you need to repel pirates and repair the ship with a repair limpet.
- Scenario-based gameplay is also overlooked. What if, say, scanning an obelisk while picking over a ruin had a high chance to uncover the location of a guardian cache lost to time, that comes in the form of a mission offer to allow spawning the target USS where there could be a substantial cache of goods or some other equally rewarding thing.
- Recognition that "not all contributions are equal". We've already seen in the past FD have the ability to make, say, Ammonia worlds, count triple towards a CG compared to other scans. Maybe that was happy coincidence in the mechanics, but we know all non-relic guardian items are easy-come with collector limpets. We know Guardian Relics are harder as you need to dismount in your SRV to spawn them, and shoot them out before they become scoopable.
We also know Guardian Ship/Module/Weapon blueprints from the Guardian Structures need you to completely solve the puzzle, but what if we made Relics count 10 times as much as the standard loot, and if you wanted to "cross the streams" so to speak, a blueprint (which requires solving the towers for each set of ruins) could be worth 30-50 times as much. This is a general hygeine factor you could apply across all the suggestions above to ensure relogging/reinstancing is not as effective as simply getting on, playing the game and going to different sites/systems. I acknowledge this particular one wouldn't fix the relogging per-se, but at least there would be emphasis on sitting down with the site and actually doing them in-full rather than just blitzing with a bunch of limpets in low-orbit
That's just a brain dump of immediate solutions, most of which use mechanics which are currently available to FD to use. Fixing relogging/reinstancing is in some cases a tricky problem to solve, but if it's hard to remove, just make it the least useful thing to do. There's heaps of options here.
The whole point of an event which has game-world-wide effects is to get people playing your game. Relogging is not playing the game.
[1] I mean, you could spice it up by requiring certain quantities of the different required goods to be needed, so you can't just spam the most readily available good. You could also have multiple places requiring delivery of goods, more akin to how station repairs work. Would that be more interesting? Sure, would I find that interesting though? Still probably not, but that's fine from a game design perspective; there's nothing I think needs major overhauling there.
[2] Where Search and Rescue CGs usually consist of "Deliver Escape Pods" or other similar salvage items, and usually consist of relogging at static sites like burning stations/megaships and farming said items repeatedly.
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