Obviously the example of the 12 Elite Anacondas was a very specific example, the odds of such a string of enemies appearing is pretty much remote. However, the point is that taking down a single weak ship and returning back to cash in is far less work than fighting through dozens of enemy ships.
You're ignoring that doing that is crushingly boring. I know a
lot of BGS-focussed players, and not
one of them does that. I have over 600mcr cash and over 1bcr in ships on my main (I have no need for money) and I'd rather stick bamboo splinters in my eyes than trudge back-and-forth to a station cashing individual bounties. It's not good value per transaction.
If you have a 500 tonne capable ship, then the same work is still done, it just takes less effort. The whole point of industrialisation, economies of scale, automation and mechanisation is to achieve maximum work done for minimum human effort. The work achieved is what matters, not the effort expended to achieve said work.
I see work as being what is actually done, not the effort expended to achieve it. Moving 2000 tonnes of cargo an evening means that the work of "moving 2000 tonnes of cargo" has been done, regardless of the number of trips it takes. To achieve this maximum work for minimal effort should be accessible using non-transparent and intuitive mechanics, rather than hiding this maximum reward behind counterintuitive yet extremely exploitable mechanics. Players should be rewarded for actually playing the game and performing the work-related activities, not for artificially gaming a system by returning to dock after every kill or using a macro to sell cargo a few tonnes at a time while they go off to make themselves a cup of tea.
Sure, but the point is that your definition of work requires a fully quantified economy where every individual action has a specific value attached. If I go bounty hunting in my Sidey, I go out to do a far more challenging activity than if I do it in my FdL. As a case in point, I went to a local HazRES last night to get a faction out of trouble - it had been overtaken during the week when I was unable to play, and was in a conflict in another system so only combat activities would have any effect. I wanted to hand in the bounties in another system. I made 500kcr in less than five minutes. The value of the targets was disproportional to the work involved. It was still only one transaction, so I had to go back and do more. My pixel victims weren't even Anacondas - the biggest was a Dropship. In three sorties, I made about 1.5mcr.
So yeah, unless you want to standardise RES payouts, you're not actually going to change anything positively - I could have stayed in the RES and made even more, but decided to go to bed. As Schlack notes above, it would actually be trivial to use an engineered shield tank ship to utterly
break a value-based system. With a transaction-based system, the arbiter of value is the player -
I can decide how much value
I attach to my transactions.
I can decide if the reward for a mission is worth the effort. The actual unit of currency in the game is enjoyment.
Didn't know I read so bad.
Well, you've failed to appreciate anyone's position but your own in 30-odd pages of thread, so yeah. I'll leave it at that.
And how about moving CGs to transaction base, in the name of Sidewinder's disparity? I am afraid that this won't happen unless Fdev would want everyone to think that they are .
So how this is acceptable here? The fact that yield of your effort is not affected by your skill and/or progression is not disturbing?
Community goals aren't about moving the BGS though - their value lies in focussing player activity on a single system or set of systems and the resulting increase in interactions between players. These are the same CGs where a new player can deliver 1t of cargo in solo and be rewarded with enough cash to upgrade their free starter ship to a Cobra on conclusion of the goal, yes?
