That is how ALL RARES work in Elite. How is it that you don't know this? You spend a fair amount of time on the forums.
I just did this lavian brandy thing last week. One of the easiest and quickest requirements of all the engineers to be quite honest.
Wait until you need 25 unknown fragments for Palin. Now that is a huge pain that makes you want to bash you head against the nearest wall.
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Delivering 14 tons of lavian brandy 150 ly earns me a profit of about 165k credits. Now let's say I can buy as much as I want and I can have 400 tons of it in my Conda. That would make me a profit of 4.8 Million in about 10 minutes - one way trip. That is why rares are limited. Otherwise you would be here whining that they are worse than Robigo.
'Cause I only do the most efficient way of progress. Anything that falls below a certain requirement is ignored. This includes mining, trading, exploring, bounty hunting without PowerPlay rank 5, 90% of the "money making" missions.
The currently valid options are Powerplay rank 5 and Sothis/Robigo runs. Everything else falls below my personal credit/h - effort requirepent and will therefore be ignored.
Rare runs are now also below my minim requirement as the effort is too high (by effort is usually meant the active time needed at the PC to manouver your ship or simply do actions). Sothis for example allows for passive progressing as you would usually need to wait for new missions to pop up. This allows me to do something else in the mean time, reducing the total time needed to be active effectively. This active time is the ndevided by the total credit profit after the whole tasks has been done, if the result falls below my requirements such task will be ignored. As described above, this contains alot of credit sources in ED.
The minim requirements are calculated by the current assets plus the available resources in form of ships and modules and obviously time. The more resources I have, the higher my demands and therefore my requirements. Things have to scale up with my progress, otherwise I would have to repeat the same simple task 100 times demanding atleast 10 hours active playtime to achieve only a small percentage from what I need. For example if I am able to get 50k credits within an hour to buy a Viper MK III, I would need 3 hours to achieve that. If this rate drops siginificantly to let's say 20 hours, it will be ignored as the source doesn't scale. It should always be "in the line" so let's say I need 6 hours for a Vulture and then 12 for a Anaconda (not that I expect this to happen, these numbers are just examples).
FD designed this game in alot of areas to grind, significantly reducing the reward per time unit and forcing active playtime. Right now this content is ignored (Example: material grinding). By limiting rare goods this also drops the reward per time unit equation.
Anything that is unrealistically "balanced" is just a result of a lack of ideas and then stomped with the excuse "Design". An unrealistic way to balance game content is simply a bad way of design. If a certain decision can't be backed up with realistic arguments compared to whatever imagineable source it is simply bad design. Now if the station would only prodcue 10 brandy a day I would understand but then no palyer should be able to buy those. Right now I just asked soem random dude here to drop me some brandy so I have 50. I effectively avoided this limitation o' design. Again: bad design. It is unrealistic.
Same for the 1 million cr bounty cap. Who cares about bounty hunting?