Tokens would be worth nothing then and may as well be removed from game. If beacons are so profitable and abused why don't you do them?

Don't be an idiot Cindy, wait, too late.

Even when I ran 1000's of beacons simultaneously on Gamma I never whined for beacons to only be Beta or Gamma and screw the Alpha peeps.  Beacons are very profitable. I know this better than you, lol. Beta only is the dumbest troll from you in awhile, normally you disguise them with a touch of intelligence, but hey, even CIR evacs gamma bases once in awhile.

Different time, different mechanics.

Gamma was safer then Alpha at the time. Explosion damage worked without destroying loot.

Today, Alpha is perfectly safe and the amount of beacons you can process per hour is greater then what you can process per hour on Beta.

Risk vs reward - it is completely broken, there is no incentive whatsoever to go to Beta except for Epriton.

Alpha requires you to pay no attention and is inherently open to a whole host of 3rd party utilities.

There is no risk, only reward.

The reward is considerably better then Beta since its:
a) Faster
b) No risk
c) A macro doesn't get tired
d) Repair bots can't die to explosion

Supply cannot be throttled because while Im running 1 beacon on Alpha I've already earned 2 more in tokens.

It's a broken NIC faucet with zero risk.

Mining fields and spawns are fixed values which don't scale in the slightest with more accounts.

Beacons however, drastically scale with more accounts.

Mobs not generating hate towards an account using remote-repair/remote transfer/remote amplify only increases the macroability of this.

Zero risk, maximum reward.
vs
Maximum risk, most of the reward gets destroyed by explosion damage.

Balanced? Nope.

It didn't used to be that way but CIR and 77 abused the agro mechanic to grief people on alpha and the devs had to dumb it down until it could be fixed. They are planning on changing it back afaik but its just a matter of when.

That's like saying beating someone to death with a wrench is OK because the person who made the wrench should have planned in advance for that despite it being clear what the wrench is actually for. In fact its irresponsible of the wrench designer and totally not the fault of the person holding the wrench as they were just using a tool that's badly designed.

Take some responsibility ***.

I dont think it was a major problem. The rats were very low level and only really a problem to afk / macro people and lwf scarabs.

It did however make people quit the game. I witnessed an alliance member rage quit over STC doing it. I dont think you have to have griefing in a sandbox really but im not totally against it provided its reasonably balanced against people quitting.

Why? Because it's too easy or because Beta earns even more?

I think a +50% increase in plasma coupled with the removal of explosion damage for rat on rat would make both ratting and bacons viable on beta. Maybe even make it +100% until we start to see ratting out there again.

I'd like to see easier to kill T5 spawns so they can increase the Nic per hour on Beta.  If I could make 150 million Nic an hour, in just plasma it would be worth it.

*Editted:

Ratting in an Arbalest MK2 for a spawn of T5s could be profitable!

Heavy Orange spawns -750 to 1000M away from terminals and light/assault 500-750M off of alpha gates.

I would make the word 'farm' nonsensical in relation to NPCs and instead make the word 'hunt' more appropriate.