There are much easier ways to generate NICs than a beacon farming tbh.

sry jas but where do you get your numbers from?

infaltion would mean that prizes would go up. but i see only the oposit. look in the market at the raw materials. the prices have been droping for over 1,5 years.

i have sold epriton for 14nic over a year ago. we are at 4.20 atm. and were at over 5nic not long ago.
noralgis is sold for 9nic (sry would not go out doing that f****** work for that ammout of money...)
just alpha resources havent moved that much.

resource prices overall got down so much and you talk about inflation? when prices go down it might be deflation but surly not the other way around.

fact is that we have more input on the market then ppl buying up. thats the reason prices are going down instead of up.

and you still forget the basics (again).

you first have to get the beacons. speeding up the process in killing it is one thing, but its not that you can create beacons out of thin air in a rapid way. only way to create them out of thin air is artefacting, and that is realy a long way to go. artefact for 10h and count your beacons. it will not be too many.

second way is beacons from tokens. well here you can ask, either you can farm tokens too fast, or the prices for the beacons are too low. so now you have to count your farming time for tokens against the avarage worth of the beacons loot.

some math for you:

a T2 racial mech beacon costs 40tokens.
it will yield a avarage:
NIC (Plasma sold at 325): 6,7mil
Kernels T4: ~24-30
Some loot and higher tier items. which are hart to tell whats it worth. dependend what you do with it. but any way the plasma is the main part.

if you buy your tokens on th emarket: price before the anoucement was ~120.000nic (now lower)
thats 4,8mil vs 6,7mil plasma. = 1,9mil nic gain per beacon at a investment of nearly 5mil.
well it it would be much lower it would hardy be worth the job. as soon as the patch comes out i guess prices will drop even further because time of killing beacons will rise by quite a bit.

so: one token to beacon to plasma to nic =  (6,7m plasma / 40 tokens) 167.500nic then the question arises how much time do i need to get the token + how much time do i need to get the nic out of the token (beacon).
THIS IS THE QUESTION THAT IS IMPORTANT, NOT JUST HOW FAST YOU CAN KILL THE BEACONS!!!

(ps.: nic ratio of T3 mech beacons per tokens are worse. yes i have numbers...)

but back to your topic:
terraforming is part of the game. using it against npcs is also.

and i still think the poping beacons is not that big of a problem. would be otherwise if beacons were for free. if there is a problem then in the way how to get the beacons.

EDIT:
my mesmer with suport can create (solo with support bot) on alpha2 in the right spawns plasma worth up to 26mil nic per hour.

now compare beacons that are mostly done in groups and compare alpha farming with this.
do your math and tell me again if its that big of a issue. when getting the beacons is takeing into consideration. and split the group of members doing the beacons on multible spawns on alpha... ...

the gain of kernels is differtent from beacon types, besides the market is dead for it for ages. so what numbers do you want to use for it?

as written above loot is hard to handle.
you can take a avarage price for the higher tier items and substract the repair costs.

t1 loot is even more difficult. do you repair and recycle, recycle only, and what numbers do you use to calculate it. and what facilities and skills do you have at hand... (and if you have t3 facilities then you would have to calculate that investments as well)

fragments are not realy worth anything.

the numbers up there are plasma/nic only. of cource loot is there. i only have vague numbers for that, because it heavy depends and is fifferent for most beacon types.
for example of the t2 mech beacon had: 0,06 T4 items and 0,85 T3 items + around 80u of T1 loot all of cource damaged.

with all these factor around the loot its hard to call a number but i would say ~2mil nic at max. but that is materials and way harder to turn ito nic. so you can substract a effort there as well. because its not the nic you get in a click.

edit:
the problem i have in this whole beacon discussion is that everybody sees that big nic per hour from poping beacons. just a mob with no facts discussing a problem without realizing what the numbers are behind it and without putting the whole picture into consideration. (yes i might have made me even more popular with that post)

just like i hate 90% of the ppl that are against nuclear power plants. dont get me wrong i am against that too. but when i am against something then i have to know what the problem is with it. if i ask 100 anti nuclear ppl then only 10 ppl can tell me how a nuclear reactor works and why the radio active stuff in there is so dangerous.
this example might be taken from a bit far away. but i hope some ppl get the point. dont just complain. first you have to understand the problem and then, and only then you should complain. if you know nothing just shut *** **** **.

sry for that...

of cource it has to have a benefit over alpha farming, why do it if it has not???

well i just pointed out the thing where i see reason to act. i did not say you have to nerv the missions or you have to make that cheeper or this more expensive.

but i realy think that is the part where the ballancing should happen. you have to get the thing at the root and not just try to get rid of the symptoms. because if you go for the symptoms it might work for the time beeing, but othe rproblems will arise sooner or later.

time to get 40 tokens? not very long.

You spark port to ICS beta, take Geoscan mission (23 tokens + ~900k NIC), spark to heydelhorn, take Geoscan mission (8 tokens + 300k NIC), undock light ewar with t4 geoscanner + t4 speed nexus + T4 lwf and run ~1km.

cycle two times a geoscan charge, run back to outpost, repeat.

thats like 5min, 1.2M NIC and 31 Tokens. Since your doing two missions, no limit of runs,
1km running back an forth is no risk.
Do it with like 4 accounts and you get 120 Tokens every 5 minutes + 4.8 Million NIC.

Thats only an example i have access to - pretty sure there are more effective ones.

all this will be History once the random mission generator is out. Until then, have fun generating NIC and Tokens with zero risk involved.

+1

Came to be entertained...left disappointed.

i stopped reading after he said fragments are not worth anything. +1 for balancing the rewards rather than nerfing beacons.

That's what she said! 

I don't want to even begin to tell you the amount of time and energy and Money that is invested in getting a gamma island "safe"  Hell even when you think it's "safe" theres always those two guys(or one using a proxy to connect to perpetuum) who never seem to have a life, who sit in perpetuum all day neglecting their family, responsibilty, and general have no life who just poke holes into what you thought is a "safe" investment.  Which leads to trial and error, during times where you risk EVERYTHING.  What stops a well organized fleet coming in, getting through the initial defenses and laying seige to a base taking it and surrounding it by turrets?  12 terminal cap rule, thats it. 

2 Months. 5 guys, and billions of nic later, to be "relatively" safe and even then it's never 100% safe.  You really need to experience the content and enjoy it before you appreciate things.  I never thought in my entire game development I would enjoy building/terraforming as much as I do now.  Honestly, I was hardcore against this expansion because I thought it would be the lamest thing ever.  But now, seeing some of the empires and their designs and base structures and even creating my own, it is an awesome and spectcular thing.  I am so proud of the the guys in pretty hate machine for building what we have now.  It is a feeling of great accomplishment when you undock, look around and go, "We built this gentlemen."