I haven't read past the first two pages of this thread, so forgive me if someone's beaten me to it. There are two issues that I want to address: "better return" and "proof".
BETTER RETURN
We need to clarify what is meant by "better return" before we can debate it.
Two examples:
**********
one
If you invest 100 ped and get 80 ped back, that's an 80% return.
two
If you invest 1000 ped and get 800 ped back, that's an 80% return.
**********
two had ten times as much loot as
one, but it was still the same 80% return. It was not a better return, it was the same return.
Golden swirlies have NOTHING to do with whether a return is better or not.
Sure, if I spend 10ped and get 10 ped of loot, but you spend 10 ped and get 50 ped of loot, then you've got a better return. But what if I only spend 1 ped to get my 10 ped of loot? You've got a nice pretty shiny global and I haven't, but my return's heaps better than yours.
So to me, there is a fundamental issue with this debate, and that's that
success is being measured by the number and size of the golden swirlies. It shouldn't be.
(I'd rather hunt exas and get a whole bunch of 49 ped loots and no globals with a 400% return, than hunt Dasps, get 50 globals every day and be running at a 90% return.)
Swirlies are irrelevant. They just look pretty.
PROOF
Even if this is a fact:
People with more globals get higher globals
...it does not necessarily follow that there is a causal link between the two things.
Joker, you're arguing that it's statistically proven, but I believe any statistician worth his salt will tell you that there is a massive difference between correlation and causality.
Tracker seems to be proving that there is a CORRELATION between two things: "more globals" and "higher globals". It doesn't prove, however, that "more globals" CAUSES "higher globals".
Off the top of my head I can think of at least one thing that could be CAUSING both of these phenomena ("more globals" and "higher globals"). I don't claim it to be true - it's hypothetical:
How about, "as people progress through the game, they spend more per hunt and take on bigger mobs"?
If that were true, then "bigger mobs" would be the cause of both "more globals" and "higher globals".
If I understand you correctly, your argument can be summarised as:
""More globals" is associated with "higher globals", therefore as you progress through the game your loots get higher, therefore the more you hunt, the better return you get".
Given there's at least one thing here that could be causing the correlation, I think it's a massive leap of faith to conclude that since more globals are associated with higher globals, your return gets better the more you play.
For me to agree with you, I would at the very least need evidence that:
a) someone who chips up on day 1 and hunts Dasps gets a lower return than someone with the same equipment who skills up for years to the same level, and hunts Dasps.
b) someone who chips up on day 1 and hunts exas gets a lower return than someone with the same equipment who skills up for years to the same level, and hunts exas.
On the matter of faith:
We really didn't need to bring this up again...
“For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.”
-Stuart Chase
...is to me quite an annoying quote, because it lumps together two distinctly difference groups of people: those who
believe something isn't true, and those who
don't believe something is true.
God is a great example: atheists
believe he doesn't exist. Agnostics
don't believe he exists, but they haven't ruled it out.
So I would like to enhance the Stuart Chase quote:
"For those who believe, proof is irrelevant. For those who believe the believers are wrong, proof is irrelevant. For those who don't believe one way or the other, proof (or lack thereof) is fundamentally important."
