I wasn't around for the economy before September '09. But from what I've experienced in the economical downfall in Sirius since then, I'd say we need a redo here.
When I came here, it was wonderful. A quick trade run around Liberty would give you six or seven million credits in a 2k transport. Mining scrap in one with a few friends and dropping it off at Pittsburgh made good money. The game was fun because you didn't have to spend hours to make enough for a SNAC.
Well, when Boss and I discovered the profitable Niobium Ore from Tau-37 to New Berlin route, we hit the jackpot. We were at about 70 million a run in a 4.3k, where one run of mining and transporting took about 45 minutes. That's a little over two hours for enough money to get a light cruiser and outfit it with guns and a UAU8. We were making metric fraktons of money. It was awesome.
But when the mining mod came out, a lot changed. It became harder to keep up that 100-mil-an-hour run, and it slowly degraded to 50 mil an hour. That's not right. We lost half our expected profit in two days. The admins, in effect, ripped us off. How pleasant. The admins had taken not only our money, but one of our favourite group activities, and utterly destroyed half of it.
Now, as an aside, this wasn't 50 mill an hour for each of us. This was in total, with about 4 or 5 guys mining and transporting. So we were down to each receiving about 10 million credits for an hour of long, hard work. Not very profitable, but more fun than powertrading.
So we lived (slowly) off it. We made a living in Disco off of this at the beginning of the Niobium Ore runs, so we kept on doing it. It was no more than a week before the mining mod was the biggest ****up that, to this day, I have EVER seen in my time on Disco. I mean it; in the past six months, this has been the biggest economy disaster on disco I've seen. I'm pretty sure there have been more economical deaths before this, but this one was pretty freakin' bad.
We were down to 25 mill/hour in total and it kept going down. Eventually it was a combination of people going to pirating and trading because it simply wasn't profitable to mine anymore. It sucked big-time.
Now, you can't get 25 mill/hour in a group of three mining Niobium Ore. Here's why:
The original Niobium Ore drops were 15-30 a shot for about three out of five shots. Pretty decent. Now, we get about 1-10 with proper ID/IFF/ship/guns every three or four shots. Comparison of drop rates: 6:10 original, to a max of 3:10 now.
Original Niobium ore prices at New Berlin were over 16k per unit of ore. I think it was closer to 17k. Now, the price is just over 10k. That's a 7k profit loss per unit over a month of economy "retuning".
I don't feel like crunching the numbers, but it's probably going to be freakin' similar to the (over 75 mill/hour) profit loss we experienced over less than one month. We never exploited any bugs or anything. We just played the way the economy worked.
