... I appreciate your pain, but I do have a single thought for you to consider...
I think you meant to add the word "years" at the end there. And yes - I fully appreciate and accept your position that you may feel that 6-7 years of grinding should have given you something "tangible" - ie (if I'm guessing your intention right?) at least one decent item or something.
Assuming I do understand your position correctly though, my thought for you is as follows:
This forum and other locations should have provided you with the information that high-end and "generally uber" equipment is a fairly carefully "balanced" resource. And if you study the various limits that MA have mentioned regarding planet partners and so on, you should have been able to understand that one of the core balancing figures is the "number of registered players" (or something similar to this).
What that should tell you is: the NORMAL balancing system has settings for each item in game that indicate how many of them should be in the game, and that that setting is something along the lines of 1 per 100 players, 1 per 1000 players, 1 per 10 000 players etc...
This makes (L) items a good idea because when they are used up they are usually TT'd - and so the number of them in the game drops, and so one likely becomes available to be looted again on the creatures that drop them.
As has been mentioned in a number of other threads though, we the user-base suspect that the number of active accounts is "not huge" and additionally I suspect that the "rate of newcomers" to Calypso is perhaps not quite high enough to see the items that are for example 1 in 10000 being added to the lootpool every year.
But MA are quite correct in saying that these items CAN still be looted - what needs to happen is just that the player base needs to grow so that we unlock another slot for these rare items.
What I believe you are seeing is the inevitable result of arriving at your optimal level of hunting "later" rather than early in the piece: that the main drops for the high end items you feel are the ones you are playing for (and effectively trying to buy perhaps with your hunting ammo) are simply not statistically available for the moment due to insufficient players.
MA have part-solved this problem by adding cool armour rewards for events like Merry Mayhem - but it's important to realise that if they are giving items out directly as rewards then the "1 in X players" algorithm gets skewed and some armour pieces may become ever harder to loot naturally until the rate at which players join starts to exceed the 1-per-year Mayhem events.
So, where I'm going with all this, is that perhaps you are approaching your game-time expenses from the wrong angle: you are going out actively hoping perhaps to loot a rare item, and burning PED in an effort to secure one. While this helps the game turnover to no end, and provides valuable input to the loot pools and the decay model for MA (all much appreciated) when the loot machine grinds over to a big loot award for someone, it doesn't matter who you are or how much PED you've cycled, if the creature you are hunting has most of it's rare item loot tapped out due to the size of the player base then you will get what we see a lot of: 4000 PED HOFs made up mostly of oils and so on.
I'm drifting a little, but what I wanted to say here was: maybe adjust your expectations down, and hunt with less expectation of reward in the form you seem to be desiring... And then anything that's an actual item becomes a cool surprise "out of the ordinary". I see a lot of threads mentioning that many people seem to only hunt for / during events now and if they have the same outlook as you on this scene it would be likely that this is because they are competing for the items as reward instead of expecting or hoping to find them in normal loot.
In short, I believe that the major driving force for EU in the long term will be the size of the player base - which is a good reason for MA to work with Planet Partners to get more people on board... But it is also a very good reason for each and every one of us to try and be as welcoming, helpful, and positive as we can about Entropia with all our friends and so on.
I'm always very careful to be as clear and open as I can with new folks about their prospects to actually make money for example, and I am happy to give them numbers so that they can get a sense of the scale of what other folks have done in the past in this game... But it is possible to do that in a positive light rather than being negative about it.
The system is what it is, and I don't feel I have a silver bullet to "game" it in any way, but I enjoy the play time I get out of EU, I like the opportunities it offers, and I just wish I was some wildly popular individual who could mystically attract thousands of my devotees to join up and have everyone enjoy themselves with me.
But I'm not, so instead I try to simply make sure that _my_ word of mouth doesn't add any fear, uncertainty or doubt that isn't fully required just because I am not creaming 10K US a month to my own pockets. I do this by having modest goals, probably pretty low expectations, and treating anything I put into the game as an investment: by which I specifically mean "POSSIBLY 100% LOST". Obviously, no-one wants that outcome, but I do that with any investment I make which mentions _any_ kind of risk so that even if the utter worst comes to the utter worst, I only lose what I am prepared to lose.
And I find that makes me remarkably calm about the future of EU.
Good Lord, I've written a lot now. And probably lost the core impact of what I was trying to say somewhere.
But in general, my point was that I am going to wait and see how the marketing goes, and how the planet partners perform at signing people up as well. Because I have a feeling the more people who play Entropia, the more gear gets unlocked - so in order to make folks like you happier we need a larger player base, and a happier one to help with things like word of mouth, etc.
Look, you have 61 CLDs.
That's actually a lot of weekly income. Have you considered trying to invite just one friend of yours to create a character and join you in the game? Tell them you'll help them in the game, and then see if you can actually do just that: start small, hunt with Opalo's and Shogun armour or something, pick small mobs etc.
Give your friend the armour, weapon and ammo, and then simply share the experience of maybe doing some TP runs together (and I'd suggest on foot rather than flying) the old-fashioned way with weapons and so on. Get killed, explore etc.
Fly them through space to other planets, explore those.
But find other things to do with your time and money for a bit than shoot it all into mobs in space.
I dislike seeing people becoming over-frustrated with the game and the way it's (not) working for them, but usually I don't speak out too much. Today though, I'd like to invite you to reconsider your position, and instead of your current approach of throwing your hands up in disgust, consider what you can do to turn your current investment into something that brings you happiness and relaxation rather than anger and frustration for a while.
If your CLDs are still up for sale though, then I'll see if I can scrape some more cash together and buy some from you
Good luck out there though - hope things slow down a little for you and start to go your way again sooner rather than later.
