Ok, can we try and look at this at least logically from our poorly informed position?
Beginning with gut (basic, primeval) feeling, performing a basic task and making a tt profit from it certainly sounds like this would not be intended in an RCE game. However, shops in RL (also an RCE?
) often have so-called loss-leaders to get people to come in and hopefully buy other stuff too. The pps certainly have these, most notably maybe the Ark Moon daily that has zero costs associated with it if you run around, and minimal costs if you use a vehicle to save time.
If you are going to enter the realm of cheating then cycling through alts on the moon could probably net you something like an initial 8 peds per hour, but you have to be active and cannot afk. You'd also have to 'launder' the universal ammo at some point, but whatever inefficiencies that involves it is only lowering that pure profit margin. The profits from EP1s on Toulan is suggested to currently be at around 38 peds a day in theory in the OP (no electricity consumption considered) and as an afk task could be run in parallel with alts (who would each need an EP1 bp, however). No laundering would currently be needed per se, as everything is tt-able. The situation CAN definitely thus be exploited. If it got out of hand, MA could decide to take some kind of action, whether or not the basic activity itself was intended or not.
If just a solo, rule-abiding player, would doing many hours of EP1 constitute exploitation? Is running around oil wells for hours exploitation? Potentially different answers would require a difference in the starting premise: intent or not by MA or the PP. Even if not actually intended when implemented (shrap change springs to mind), then MA might have decided that this anomaly in their system is either not currently a problem or actually has other benefits, or isn't worth fixing. Logging off when travelling on a space ship has long been seen by MA as not really desirable, but 'fixing' the mechanics may be pretty complicated, so they have come out and said this is not an exploit. With the Toulan EP1 issue they may wish to keep the shrap implementation in crafting and don't wish to tweak this irregularity. They could very easily do so if they wanted to, however. Maybe the balancing manager isn't up to it, who knows?
The bottom line is that I have put forward suggestions as to how this situation may even actually be intended, let alone merely 'accepted for now with no action, not even communication, taken'. And no, I haven't been afk in parallel to writing this - this is time entirely lost when I could have been turning over peds in EU!
Edit: my gut, by the way, hates doing 'distasteful' stuff, but I also hate unfairness just as I hate sloppiness and probably loads of things when I come to think about it
. I also hate judging others wrongly and unfairly, so I like to know what I'm talking about. However, we have to shed our own lights on things in EU, as MA relatively rarely lets us know their standpoint.
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