FGS.... it was BROKEN before!........ and you are being presumably dishonest... the devs have said multiple times they will re-implement the distance scaling asap, this is just an interim bodge (which should have been put in place months ago) whilst the devs presumably get beta ready to go.
it was nonsence the payments before, for ECONOMY missions...... the highest paying missions need to be the luxury cabin missions to give the actual luxury ships purpose and not refugees or what ever who are some how all multi millionaires.
so yes right now they may still be broken, but, you either trust the devs that they made an honest mistake which unbalanced the game and are wanting to fix or assume they are liars. I choose the former... and as for the cry babies crap...... I suggest you look in a mirror
As others have said, the big ships in the game were MEANT to take years to get, spanned out over 100s (1000s) of hrs play.... I have a child, house (which is a money pit) a job as well... but so what if it means i cant ever afford everything, cest la vie..... but giving player what was always meant to be long goal stuff in a mere few 100 hrs (actually far less lately) definitely ruins the game for some of us..... you have your own view and that is fine, but less of the personal digs.
for many of us the goal of elite is to try to maximise our earnings as a CMDR trying to get by in a harsh universe - not deliberately be inefficient to stop us being millionaires in 10 mins- but at the same time many of us want the game to be a challenge as well.
Personally i would love to see the game much closer to the earnings at launch, and preferred the launch price of the vulture and FDL... but I accept that there needs to be a compromise, something that some on here have no concept of.
You make some good points
The problem though is that the devs nerfed long distance smuggling and delivering patch after patch after patch after patch because people were getting 20-50mil an hour
We used to get random back end nerfs to specific stations all the times where the devs would "fix" (ie bypass) the BGS to make it not as profitable.
Now these types of missions are basically dead because for over a year the devs tried to push everyone to passenger missions - and they succeeded! But they let people earn a lot more per hour from them for MORE THAN A YEAR than they ever accepted from deliveries without saying "it's wrong, we'll fix it" or actually back end breaking the BGS!
The BGS is such an awful broken mess it isn't even funny! You can go to a boom system that is a producer of stuff they should be exporting and you can be allied and if you are lucky you will be offered a mission for 120t of somthing for a mil or two.
Or you can click passengers and you can find less than 10 economy passengers going somewhere for 10's of millions! Its like the old slave missions back in the day only a lot more exploitable due to the size of the stations (in general) the fact they all go to the same place, rather than 10 destinations +, the significantly less number of interdictions and the fact the devs mostly just ignored it because they wanted people to buy horizons!
And the BGS for passenger missions seems even more broken than the one for delivery missions! Last week I picked up some refugees going from a to b, a was in a state of civil war. at b there were refugees wanting to go to A! What refugees go to a war zone? I mean really?
And these aren't new issues.
These are longstanding, delivery missions had them first too, but the devs didn't learn from those! Didn't want to learn, didn't want to listen!
Now you say "trust the devs" now? Ok fine, I say trust but verify.
And in several years of experiance of the devs trying to fix the BGS for different missions do I have confidence they will this time finally get it right?
No. No I don't!
And I say this as someone who "took the long road" I had almost a 1000 hours on my game clock before I got a conda...I only just recently got the rank for a cutter at 1600 hours, I generally avoid passenger missions because IMO they suck, but in all honesty...the devs did this! They broke the game, they skewed everything towards passenger missions deliberately and on purpose. They think that 5mil an hour is too much for basically any other activity no matter how dangerous, but have been fine for 50+ from passengers for over a year! They quite simply have no concept of risk v reward and what their target "earnings per hour" should be for various activites!
You want to go back to how it used to be? Me too!
I want it back when doing illegal stuff actually (sensibly) paid more! I want low risk activities like running passengers 1 stop with no interdictions to pay very little! Most passengers are actually pathetic amounts of risk so only those that take a longish amount of time should pay, I want combat to pay more to account for the risk you are taking! I'd like elite in exploration to actually mean somthing again rather than these days where people who've only done one trip and maybe to colonia at that have it! (though i think the payments should be kept as they are just the rank requirements re done) We need interdictions to be dialled up to make stacking missions more risky...remember when you'd be interdicted and you'd have 5+ ships drop down trying to get you? We need mission refreshing canned but we also need boards to generate PROPER MISSIONS!
I'll say it again: The number of systems producing goods I've been too in the last 6 months that are in boom that I'm allied with that have no or very few poorly paying missions is frankly moronic.
The entire system needs canning and redoing from scratch!
But that's not "sexy" is it? That doesn't sell game units, or skins so the odds that will be done?
Trust but verify....my verification experiance says "don't trust, believe it when you see it"