Well, nice to hear that there's a semi-legitimate reason for the decrease in even mediocre loot drops for the last year. Even if it took 3 years to be noticed by the devs ( or if they even investigated) this before your post, that would explain a great deal. However, this is nothing new either (although it is on a much greater scale). Mining I think has always been the most exploitable of all professions because it's the sketchiest of all professions.
And before all u ubers and masters out there start up, allow me to explain.
I started playing 7 years ago and during my many days sweating at the 'old' swamp engage in several discussions about the way the game worked. Back then, about 5K sweat would get you a TT Opallo, and about 1K of ammo to go and hunt with. Roughly 3 weeks work for 15 mins of pleasure....then it was back to the swamps...unless of course u were lucky enough to get a global on some wildly lucky bery or daik kill. And of course, after 3 weeks you'd have heard rumors of some other place or even talked with some familiar players that had been to a fantastical place called Nea's. And so began the sweating in earnest, just to make enough PED for flight there just to see what it was all about (walking slugs the size of a bus that gave 100's of sweat !)
But of course during all this came the simplest and most basic of questions. Why do i have to die so many times (even though I'm not really even there) ? Why can't I fight these mobs even just bare handed ? Why isn't there a rock or tree-limb or bone to pickup to use as a weapon? The logic was faulty from the start....and this translates all through the Entropia Universe.
If we are meant to be settlers from a dying Earth, where is the permanency? Why can't I stake a claim, have my own tiny LA and live there (As opposed to some bs Land-Grab where all the ubers are gauranteed to get the land and anyone with less then 10K skills is cannon fodder)? Why can't I live off the land ? Since we don't need food or drink(?) why do we need water on the world ? To support the hostile life forms ? Why do I need molisk teeth to make a button...maybe I want Daik teeth buttons (one tusk would make about 50 buttons compared to 50 teeth to make one button)... Why is the planet so small (roughly 50 miles in diameter) ? How can such a small planet be so diverse (impossible)?
And then we come to mining... why do I need bombs and a 'finder', did shovels and eyeballs all magically disappear ? If I'm nothing but a simulacrum, why can't I set myself to 'dig' one spot all day and come back and collect the loot ? No interaction required, just dig in one spot for 8, 10, 1000 hrs....??? But wait, I might never find anything ? What there's no guarantee i'll hit anything of value ? Why not ? How was the planet formed ? No geologic record ? No ice ages ? No continental drift ? No volcanic activity ? No asteroid strikes ? All these minerals just magically formed ? And what, they move around too ?? Amazing, a planet with an impossibly varied mineral content (and of course half the periodic table is missing) that is in constant migration although there are no earthquakes, tectonic movement or volcanic activity (and yes there are volcanoes but not active (DUH !)) ?
Now for all those out there who 'accept' the world this way without question..more power to ya..I'm sure the 'Tooth fairy' and the Easter Bunny still visit you every year and Publisher's Clearing House has your address on their Navstar. Entropia or MA has started (after raising these questions 7 years ago) begun to come around and is slowly (glacially) coming around to these problems..I figure by the time they actually make a functioning world we'll actually be able to go there.. For all you programmers and developers out there, if u want to make a world, make it, don't fart around, half-ass it and say it's a world. Why can't mobs be looted for more than what they are looted for? And how the frak does a mob drop a rifle or armor piece ? Were they eaten ? How is it functionable after that ? Because if it ate the person in armor and I got one piece of the armor back how good can the armor be ?
Why can't I harvest more from a Daikiba or Exarsaur than 1 or 2 pieces of hide ? Size wise an Exar would yield enough hide for an outfit while a Daik would maybe yield a shirt worth...and forget about an Ambu, u kill one of those and you could get 5 trenchcoats and still have hide left for boots...Why don't we have a salvage skill ? Or a scavanger skill ? Or a tanner skill ? Or a leatherworker skill ? What about a lumberjack skill ? Why do I need this, that and the other thing to make a simple stool ( four pieces of wood or a chunk of wood and a knife and u can make one) ? And of course why do we need crafting machines (other than to basically have slot machines) ?
All these questions may seem invalid and pointless to most of you but they go to the heart of the problem...EU is a completely flawed system and always has been. Exploits are few and far between but they're there. If you came to make money, you should've cashed out long ago. I gave up even trying to break even long ago. Back in 09 before the graphics reboot I knew of a player that could go to Camp Caravan; go out and hunt for 2-3 hours (Exar, Bery and Daik) bring back his loot to storage; hard boot his computer, log back on and have all his ammo back. And the same worked for mining he said. He told me he'd mined out there for 3 months on the same mines he'd bought back in the spring. Now wether this was true or not I don't know, but that's what I was told.
Are there others ? Probably. Maybe there are a few under-paid devs who are logging on and making accounts and goin on uber hunts and looting mobs like crazy. The thing is EU is trying to run this as a business so their going to need to make money wether you play or not. So, as players old and new leave, the loot pool decreases, and since EU decided to open up Planet partners and have their players go to other worlds, their loot pool has decreased even more. Yes, MA makes money from the planet partners, but not compared to the lost revenue of the ubers jumping from Caly over to Toulon. The game is now broken and failing, overcome by it's own successes and being drug down by it's shortcomings....and if there is any truth to the exploit post, then MA needs to address it immediately.
MA needs to recoup as much of it's losses from those individuals by whatever means, or needs to fold up its tents and go home. Because, if the exploits happened and they missed it, it'll happen again. Which means that the success of those individuals will embolden others to find more. If MA is unable to regain it's losses from the exploiters, the players in-game now will suffer, or else MA will have to eat the losses (which won't stand well with the planet partners and stockholders). All of this came about because MA chose to make a game that was flawed from the beginning. If it wasn't for the illogical system of mining anywhere for any mineral, this wouldn't have gone unnoticed so long. One would've seen immediately that players were hitting the motherlode way too often and that they were doing it way to cheaply (the 3 hits at once and the lack of decay respectively).
Is MA going to fix it ? maybe. Depends on what your definition of 'fix' is. More than likely, MA will continue to allow random mining, increase decay rates on amps and finders, and lower hit rates and also lower the HOF chance, that way the recoup losses, and not make any obvious change. But, the underlying problems are still there. And unless they are addressed, more exploits will be found as MA continually will bring in more equipment to keep the ubers interested. And the more equipment you introduce the more chances for exploitation in some way.