MA's financial records are public. If you look through the history, they were operating in the negative for a long time until finally having a positive year last year -- coincidentally right after the time that I've read a lot of people seem to have noticed a big change in the economy. Coincidentally right after electing a new CEO. Typically when my company replaces CEOs it's because the previous one was not profitable enough, but who knows. I'm an engineer, not a finance person, so maybe I'm misinterpreting.
It stands to reason that it's not in MA's benefit for us to succeed. I've only been playing a short time, so I don't know what it was like to have loot with MU, but as I read through the various threads I see a common fallacy. People seem to see MU as something that doesn't hurt MA, because it's money made off other players and not the system, so they feel it's justified for MA to introduce things that help increase MU. This is, of course, false. Even if it's off other players, if you can steadily profit then you don't need to deposit, and that hurts MA's revenue stream. From a business perspective, it would make sense for MA to do everything they can to make profitability extremely difficult.
So it's silly to think MA's going to get rid of, or even change, the EP BPs - killing the markup on everything is good business for them.
It also is fairly common in the industry to cater to your whale players. Even though I've put what I would consider a fair amount of money and time into the game, I'm just a casual player compared to the big boys. As long as MA has the Messi's wasting all their time and huge amounts of money playing this game 14 hrs a day, they are going to incentivize
their play style, not mine.
So the "real cash economy" seems to mimic the real world economy. The middle-class players, such as yourself, OP, seem to have it most difficult.
Ya'll might get a kick out of these notes from the 2012 annual statement:
Expected Development
Veteran Appreciation - MindArk will focus lots of development time on improving the Entropia
Universe experience for current participants and Entropia veterans. Many of the most common
requests and wish list items received from our participants via support cases and community
forums will be addressed in the first two version updates of the New Year. Issues that will be
prioritized includes:
Reducing cost to play / increasing average TT returns
Lowering the volatility of returns for many activities
Increasing UL item tiering speed / lowering UL item tiering cost
Removing the UL armor equipping fee
Lowering the minimum usable condition of many items
Introducing goals for users that in many ways has hit the progression ceiling
Fixing bugs