Lets be a little more transparent and address the elephant in the room. I love this game immensely so it bothers me when stuff like this happens to the community.
Yup. I like to know what sort of risk/reward structure I am facing. Whenever I get the strong feeling that the conditions have been changed, I throttle back massively to avoid haemorrhaging peds. One problem of a personal testbed is indeed the statistical significance of gathering data alone. Sure, I can kill 800 mobs an hour one way, over 1500 mobs an hour a different way, but some tests simply are not fast and I'm at only 60 mobs an hour.
So, instead of my turning over several hundred peds an hour routinely - and expecting a certain loss that I can minimise quite a lot with mu - I'm down to dabbling and experimenting at a much lower scale fighting this 90%-or-less (way less) monster.
I'm still in the room, but I'm not focussed on what I want to do and happy to do. Maybe MA is making more rake from other higher rollers oblivious to the changes, or maybe it's MY returns that have hit a bad patch and they would recover if I went out again at a higher speed. The problem is that I don't know, which is why we are seeking others' opinions.
So, I got a 350x multi the other day.... off 1 in several thousand 10 pec kills... whoopie! Give me that on a 5 ped kill and I can forgive whatever is normal for a while again! At least I'd be back on turnover pumping it back to MA for a while and then maybe reevaluating. But off a 10 pec kill I can't even maintain 20x5 ped mobs for more than 1 try if the return is 70% again. I give it another go: result=crap again.
I'm not really learning much on low mobs either, except that MA seem to be hardening up on shrap thresholds. It used to be 3x normal cost to kill and you'd still be getting non-shrap. It would appear to be well under 2x now and loot
quality is still "poor" - i.e. almost all shrap.
I really don't expect other players who have found out to announce what sort of dpp triggers not just normal loot but 'quality' loot these days, but it would be nice to know if we are really talking all the cost-cutting that can be done for even a chance of something nice, so maybe great normal dpp + loads of enhancers, rings and pills just as the 'buy-in'... Or is it being uber on shared loot mobs that gets the high chances of high mu stuff?
Without knowing, and no apparent way to find out if MA stay silent except maybe to 'buddies', I am unlikely to 'up my game'. I'm more likely to 'down my tools' - and that would be sad!