First of all, I don't think the rare goods should be nerfed. The better way would be bringing other activities to parity. If the nerfing does happen nevertheless, I suggest the following method: Make it so that each player can earn merits from hauling each type of rare goods only once per weekly cycle, or only for the first 50, 24 or whatever amount of tons if you want a stronger nerf. That way, CMDRs would get some benefit from them, but it wouldn't be the main PP activity for many. Not that many would go after dozens of different rare goods every week. I also think that hauling hundreds of thousands of tons of the same rare good goes against the theme of them being rare.
Possible way to nerf rares for PowerPlay 2.0 a bit
- Thread starter Kissamies
- Start date
I suspect the problem here isn't the "normal" earning rate of rares, but some massively out-of-line way to use them, just looking at what Frontier did yesterday:
- data downloads: well-known and unambiguous exploit of a bug which can get you tens of times the normal amount of data
- escape pods: less-well-known but still widely shared situations which aren't bugs as such (more just previous bits of design which were absolutely fine and maybe even desirable until someone other than Etienne Dorn started asking for lots of escape pods with no questions about how they were obtained) but give tens of times the escape pods per hour
...but...
- SLF kills: obviously no circumstance at all where they should be paying out as much or more than the ship which launched them, whether that's a SC defence fleet or just one that an Anaconda in a power signal source happened to launch; Frontier just cut their base payout to something more reflective of the effort involved in shooting one.
I think therefore the actual shut down implies that there's some means of using rares - possibly not one that's widely known [1] - which is incredibly effective compared to what normal players are doing with rares. They can't just balance to that niche method because then everyone playing "normally" finds that rares are 2 merits per tonne or something otherwise useless - but hopefully if they can quickly find a way to close off whatever the loophole is, the normal payouts can be restored for everyone else.
[1] I've not heard either.
- data downloads: well-known and unambiguous exploit of a bug which can get you tens of times the normal amount of data
- escape pods: less-well-known but still widely shared situations which aren't bugs as such (more just previous bits of design which were absolutely fine and maybe even desirable until someone other than Etienne Dorn started asking for lots of escape pods with no questions about how they were obtained) but give tens of times the escape pods per hour
...but...
- SLF kills: obviously no circumstance at all where they should be paying out as much or more than the ship which launched them, whether that's a SC defence fleet or just one that an Anaconda in a power signal source happened to launch; Frontier just cut their base payout to something more reflective of the effort involved in shooting one.
I think therefore the actual shut down implies that there's some means of using rares - possibly not one that's widely known [1] - which is incredibly effective compared to what normal players are doing with rares. They can't just balance to that niche method because then everyone playing "normally" finds that rares are 2 merits per tonne or something otherwise useless - but hopefully if they can quickly find a way to close off whatever the loophole is, the normal payouts can be restored for everyone else.
[1] I've not heard either.