It's not ubers or noobs that are stealing the loot, it's non-depositors.
MA only has a finite amount of cash coming in, and has chosen to pay for server overhead and bandwidth for every person using the system, whether they deposit or not.
Here's a hypothecital situation.
MA won't release numbers, so I have no idea if these statistics are in the ballpark but the math principal beneath it works:
If there are 5 non-depositors for each depositor, then the Value of *possible* average loot is:
(Deposit - all overhead)/6
Lets plug some numbers in there just to see what that looks like...
Lets use... I dunno, 5000 active participants as an example
1000 of them deposit 500 PEDs. That's a total of 500,000 PEDS (Sorry
EU folks, I'm an American, and we use commas to seperate thousands!)
Out of that, overhead for
MA in the form of decay. What's an average return on hunting? I've heard lows of 20, highs of 80 as an average. Let's go between them and say 60%.
500,000*.6 = 30000 (loot pool? I don't believe in the pool, but here's the amount of money that *could* be paid out and
MA stay profitable)
30,000 PEDS divided by the 5000 hypothetical users?
6 PEDs average for loot.
As I said, the actual numbers and ratios may be off, but the effect of non-depositors on available loot for players should be obvious to anyone that adds 2 and 2 and doesn't come up with 22.
Who's stealing your loot?
AG