You make, imo, a mistake in somehow viewing your own experience/situation as being somehow isolated, some sort of singleplayer. And it's not. Your playstyle, your actions, your choices must fit, one way or another, into a system with many participants (thousands or whatever is nowadays). There are limits of things which can be done/achieved, for the sake of other things being possible for the rest of participants.
I am actually very close to your numbers, if I we'd divide them. Been on a long break for personal reasons, only playing since march, in last 3 weeks - 1 month I netted 7k tt loss per 110k turnover in hunting. A big part of my results are due to switching between alot of setups and mobs, because I am probing around to see what changed etc However this is very erratic mathwise, I am bound to have a couple of better % upwards were I to be more stable and also some MU would have probably helped, if would exist (this is by far my biggest quarrel with the game).
On the first, loot is not fair. Math, this type of math is not fair, it functions under other parameters. I've had a 5 figures hunting, 11k maffoid clan warlord in 2008. And I took it over a few people camping them for weeks. Eve never had a 5 figure as loot, but faring better. Odds are I dropped a multiple of the probes you did, but I haven't hit an ATH. I've hit tho a 17k tower in 2017 when the consensus was that multipliers are only possible until x (far below what I got). Neither of these situations are "fair", and you should abandon this perspective, for your own personal wellness (via expectations, which are a big thing in depression, addiction and other situations). Loot simply is and that is all to it. Does it bring something to you, some opportunity, some joy or anything which can qualify as motivation? What's the purpose/the sense of what you're doing, is it bringing anything at all, are you going somewhere? That's what should be fair, to yourself, what you're doing and why. Respectively I will most likely f'off soon back to mining, because that makes more sense to me.
On the second, yes, to some extent. MA is not a company isolated in an ideal context, without challenges and so on. I understand them if sometimes they might need to cut 1% or something extra for who knows what reason (but that shouldn't have an impact were it to be an actual economy). But overall the loot return which they talked about in devnotes is not about you or me or other Joe. It's an average of sorts, a calculation for an archetypal player, not for you personally. Because let me ask you the other way around, was your ATH within expected limits? Because it doesn't look like that to me. And since it had to come from somewhere, not from MA, your ATh came, in the proportion of, say, 1,7 peds from my pockets. I mean, try to think at this return both at your highs and at your lows, not only at your lows. So maybe the expected return sometimes is not 97% at high turnover, maybe sometimes is 95%, but largely is *there*.
Also take note that these days the hofs grew alot. Maybe somebody will hit tomorrow 200k. Those money can't possibly come from the tooth fairy.
Lastly. Entropia was always a fairly free game. No classes, no gating & sh*t (hence my other quarel with them, how they implemented high eff weaponry). No railroads, no obligation, no nothing. You're seriously free to do whatever you want. Paying 10k usd for a game can mean buying a mothership, a LA, trading, whatnot. Do I think people should be able to do that? Absolutely. Once that amount is transformed from USD into PED is your responsibility what you do with them.
And by the way, Entropia is actually very cheap noawadys in tt terms. What increased dramatically is our turnover, and 1 PED is still 0,1 USD, both when you're sweating punies at Icarus and when you're farming the gorgon or whatnot. If I were to hunt now as I was in 2006-2007, I should hunt with LP-25 or something like this. I am using a peashooter by any standards, emik L2. Just drop in a couple of dmg enhancers and I can put down a trox stalker with minimal effort, and that was the measure of uberness for me when I started. And I am barely lvl69 pistoleer, plenty of 100s++ around. Is seriously your duty to be aware that a turnover of 10k peds per day means 1k$ and what can 1-2-3% do at those amounts.
Can Entropia be extraordianrly expensive? Yes, absolutely. This is another thing which I hold them responsible, they have no anti-addiction measure in place. To me, those ep4 and shrap clicks don't look ok, there should be a limitation to them. E.g. in the country I live in if you're to go to play at slot machines you can only put in 20€ and then it allows you some 20 cents every dunno how many seconds. So imo there should be a kind of limit. But then what you do with the responsible crafter who's seriously doing some 10k run fishing for bps or doing some comps for further use? Pretty hard to handle, but I still think there should be something, maybe a cooling off period at certain cost/click, or something like this. But overall, still player's responsibility. This is a 18+ medium.
