u/ConversationLegal973

So yesterday me and 4 friends did bounty missions for a few hours. I want to share our setup and the numbers because I think it shows a real problem with group content scaling in this game.
Our setup:
• Perseus (me as captain, 2 gunners) – full crew
• Ares (1 player)
• F7 Hornet (1 player)

We did 4 or 5 missions total, all of them the highest available bounty tier. Each mission had 3 waves and a Polaris as the final boss. Those missions took us easy 20 to 30 minutes each, sometimes a bit more depending on how the waves spawned and how long it took our deadbolt f7 and ballistic ares to restock.

The numbers:
Each mission payed out around 450,000 aUEC. Sounds okay at first, but divided by 5 players thats 90k per person per mission.
Now here is the thing: I took the operating costs of the Perseus on myself. Repairs, ammunition, fuel. After everything was said and done I personally ended the session at maybe +100k total. For multiple hours of gameplay.

The gunners on my ship did better, around +300k each, because they had zero costs.

The problem:
We fought a Polaris. A ship that costs tens of millions in game. With 5 players, coordinated, in ships that are not exactly cheap to run. And the economic outcome is honestly kind of a joke. A solo player grinding easier missions in a small ship probably makes more per hour with way less risk.
Group content should scale better. The payout doesnt reflect the coordination needed, the ship costs, the time, or the difficulty.

A Polaris boss fight should feel rewarding, not like you did it just for fun and thats the only reason it was worth it.
To be fair: we are all friends and we had a great time. But if someone tried to grind this seriously to make money, they would quit after one session.
CIG please look at group payout scaling. It needs work.

I keep scrolling through this sub and seeing people discuss the wipe, complain about the wipe, or get excited about DefenseCon and new ships and almost nobody seems to be sitting with what the crafting expansion actually means long-term. Maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But hear me out, and please push back if I’m off base.

The single most important design decision in any player-driven MMO economy is deceptively simple: where does the best gear come from? In World of Warcraft, it comes from raid bosses. Full stop. You can craft some decent stuff, but the ceiling is always a dungeon or a raid tier, always gated by Blizzard and never truly owned by the player economy. In EVE Online, player crafting is genuinely powerful and the market is one of the most sophisticated simulations in gaming history.

But even EVE has limits. The absolute top-tier items, certain faction modules, officer gear, still drop from NPCs. Players supply the bulk, but the apex is always in the hands of the house.

What CIG is doing with 4.8 is something different. Ship components, power plants, shields, coolers, weapons, are now player-craftable, with stat outcomes that depend on material quality and blueprint tier. The top-tier output comes from players. Not from a vendor. Not from a boss drop. From someone who mined the right materials, researched the right blueprint, and built the thing.

Think about what that single design decision pulls behind it. Someone has to mine those materials and they become a target. Someone has to haul them and they become a target. The crafter needs protection while they work. The finished component needs to reach a buyer, and that transit is vulnerable.

Every single one of those steps is an emergent gameplay loop that doesn’t need a mission system to justify it. The pirates aren’t griefing, they’re participating in an economy. The escort pilot isn’t doing a side quest, they’re providing a real service for real stakes. Revenge for a stolen cargo run becomes personal in a way that scripted content never achieves.

I genuinely think this is the architecture that makes the “persistent universe” label earn its name rather than just describe a server that doesn’t log off.
Now, am I overselling this? Probably a little. 4.8 is still Alpha. The buff/debuff system at the top blueprint tiers is described as something the team is still figuring out how to surface earlier in progression. Player trading, which is what makes all of this an actual economy rather than a crafting minigame, is not fully in yet. And there’s a real question of whether the average player even wants this depth or just wants to fly cool ships and shoot things.

The wipe makes more sense to me now. You can’t properly test whether player-crafted components are actually the economic ceiling if the economy is already flooded with duped credits and legacy items from 18 months of accumulated weirdness. You need a clean ledger to see if the loop works. That’s not CIG punishing anyone, it’s them finally having something worth testing cleanly.

What I genuinely don’t understand is why this isn’t dominating the conversation here. Is it because people have heard “game-changing system” too many times and tuned it out? Is the player-driven economy angle just not exciting to the majority of the playerbase? Or am I misreading the scope of what’s actually launching in 4.8 and it’s more limited than I think?

Serious question, what am I missing?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​