Deal wrote:But the practical equation is fairly simple since there are more missions available if you take the 1M donations, you will rank faster if you take them, even if they grant the same amount, and if they don't grant the same amount, it is far from being a proportional difference, so it's always more cost effective to take the cheaper ones.
I will agree with this: taking more Donation missions means ranking faster. I haven't seen any numbers to support anything beyond that, though.
Deal wrote:If you exploit the board, time taken should fall dramatically and it's only sensible to line up some cheaper ones. (though I suppose you'd have to do this several times given the innate board refresh even if you don't flip)
I'm one of those weirdos that won't use the board-flipping exploit.
Deal wrote:There's so much money to be made now that it's not really an issue anyway. I'd much rather have a balanced progression system with engaging content than inane get rich/rank schemes, but since E:D doesn't seem to have the former to any degree, I'd rather be able to get into some cool ships and try different things than grind out some mercilessly dreary low effort game design to get there.
I agree that credits flow like water these days. That aside, I've never been in a hurry to get to an "end-game" ship, so I haven't gotten myself involved with any of those get-rich quick schemes. That's more of a gray area, though. I have done some passenger missions and a few CGs, which can sometimes result in quick influx of credits. I've been taking the game as it comes, enjoying being part of the universe rather than running a race. I did finally get a big ship (Corvette), but that was after about 3 years of playing. Still, I didn't really consider much of that time to be "grinding" (except when I was involved with PP). I did spend a bit of time a couple of months ago working on increasing my Fed rank, but even that was mostly me doing whatever I would have been doing anyway, but making sure I do it in Fed systems. I even took time out in the middle of that to hop down to Exioce, Cardea, & Azrael to help out when John Luke sent up the alarm.
Deal wrote:If I'd done this the hard way after months of grindy grind and now witnessed clowns like me walking into the game and tooling around in multiple vettes and cutters within a week or so of hard lazyness, I'd probably be spitting vitriol though.
I did do this the hard way, and it only bothers me a little. One particular example of this is that I took a couple of long exploration trips, and finally earned my Elite Explorer rank. Not too long after that, FD buffed the payouts for exploration data.
If I were involved in PvP this easy money might bother me a lot more, I guess. But, I'm essentially playing this game like a solo game, which probably isn't surprising since I've been playing Elite that way for 30+ years now.