Postby Senex VII » Thu Apr 09, 2015 4:47 am
In line with other community goals I've seen (though I can't say I've been involved with that many so far), it seems the events end when either (a) the highest tier goal is reached, or (b) the end date happens, whichever is the earlier. In this case, option (a) was achieved (with at least 1 million records logged, or so it seems), a full two days early as I mentioned in my previous post, so the event ended.
Because I knew this may happen, and because I tracked tier goal progress daily in my Transactions panel, I made sure that I always went out and returned the same day, logging maybe 200 reports per 6 hour journey. I was preparing to do a quick top-up run today to see if I could scrape into the top 5%, but it was already all over.
So that was fine, and I'm OK with it. I'll get my first Asp on discount and pimp it out as an explorer exactly as desired with the rewards, plus data sales, plus downgrade of the type-6 I used for the event, plus some spare cash I had.
However, if I were to bitch about it at all, it wouldn't be about the early finish - which, as I say, I think is consistent with the way they're running other community goals. No - the problem about this exploration event was that it didn't encourage good exploring practices.
Why was that a problem? Because the event's reward thresholds seemed to be based on number of records brought back, not on the exploration profit that Elite rank is based on. The event did not count one record per stellar object but instead as one record per star system. This means that although it may have been more profitable when selling data to surface scan all the good stuff in each system, doing that would actually have penalized you in reward ranking because it 'wasted time', time you could have used to get to the next star.
Thus the way to maximize reward % ranking in this event was as follows: engage your Advanced Discovery Scanner while slowing down from a jump, surface scan the star at the same time, hit the corona to scoop fuel, head away at right angles to cool a little, and then away to the next star - and ignore any juicy stuff in the system! I was averaging one star system every 70 to 120 seconds this way. That's not good exploring practice, neither for profit, nor for Elite rank, nor for the sheer enjoyment of exploring star systems - which arguably is what it's all about.