| Tiers (drop the % non-sense altogether) | Contributions | Reward (fixed for all CGs no matter what) |
|---|
| Tier 5 | > 50,000. | 50,000,000 |
| Tier 4 | ~ 15,001 to 50,000 | 40,000,000 |
| Tier 3 | ~ 5,001 to 15,000 | 30,000,000 |
| Tier 2 | ~ 1,001 to 5,000 | 20,000,000 |
| Tier 1 | ~ 1 to 1,000 | 10,000,000 |
The main disadvantage is that trade CGs are not created equal. Even just restricting to bubble trade CGs with normal cargo and one-week durations from the restart in 2020 onwards
There's been a slight general upwards trend over time for various reasons, but the size of the ranges and overlap between the ranges is more important.
Even just counting the recent ones:
Rank 5 (top 10%) has varied between 14k and 27k
Rank 4 (top 25%) has varied between 7.5k and 19k
Rank 3 (top 50%) has varied between 3k and 6.5k
Rank 2 (top 75%) has varied between 400t and 1.5k
So the cost of fixing the ranges (your specific suggestion is generous for rank 4 but extremely harsh for rank 5, but sure, the exact numbers are just illustrative) is that they no longer account for the actual difficulty of the CG at all - long supercruises, slight differences in availability of goods, how many other players are draining all the nearby markets, is it a system you can get a FC spot in, etc.
Non-standard CGs - duration, location, weird commodity combinations, etc. - would need to have extremely different targets. For a Colonia Trade CG, 10,000t would get you Rank 5 comfortably almost all the time, and 50,000t would be near impossible because of market exhaustion. Similarly for other CG types - whether or not there's a High Foot CZ available makes a
massive difference to the quantity of bonds collectable in a week; rare allocation rates vary massively; as the parallel CG has found there's a big difference between handing in G3 materials and G1 materials; etc. A single flat target amount would be useless for most of those.
5000t might be psychologically favourable as a fixed target, but the
difficulty of achieving it is going to vary considerably (especially for non-trade CGs), while the difficulty of coming in "top 50%" is going to be relatively consistent between CGs (the size of the % thresholds is virtually independent of the number of participants). So Frontier end up not only having to guess the total deliveries (which is certainly very hit-and-miss) but
also the distribution of them to pick the appropriate "difficulty scale".
Obviously lots of people would rather complain about Frontier setting bad targets than about their fellow players being better than they are at meeting them, so in terms of player satisfaction missing out on the Rank 4 reward because the threshold was mistakenly set so high that only about 15 people met it might make people happier than missing out on it because 1 in 4 participants did more than they did. But it's definitely "pick your poison" rather than one being clearly superior.
