There has been enough rage about loyalty since 7.9 and nothing has truely changed. It was sped it by about 75% yes, but it is still about 500%-700% slower than before contract changes.
You have an overly rosy memory of the old model. I used to get something around 1000 for loss and 2000 for win back then if I remember correctly. Nowadays if I come to play a handful of games a day, I will get several times more than what I would have gotten with the old model (three contracts per game, awarding 600 to 3500 each).
If only slows you down significant if you grind hardcore, and even then the only way to go to numbers you quote is to chain lose every game. Getting victory contract alone gives you about 1/4 of the old gain.
Considering that you can cycle factions when grinding, you will rarely if ever really run into a situation where you don’t have three contracts picked for completion. As a result, your gain is usually close to what it used to be back when loyalty was tied to reputation even when grinding if you do it right, and actually higher than it used to be if you’re just coming in for a few games.
The current model with loyalty appears to be fairly well made. It punishes the ultra grind (and even more so PvE grind) but rewards smart playing, winning and people who play just a few games a day. The only major problem I see with it is the insane increase in loyalty needed for R13>R15.
And on topic of reputation, I suspect that for grinding just one type of ship/racial implant they actually reduced the grind significantly. Look at the utterly insane numbers needed from the loyalty screen and imagine how many games you would have needed with the old system to hit R15 with any of the factions. Also consider that they also reduced the reputation gained from tiers lower than your current maximum tier around 0.8.x.
I suspect that the actual numbers would have been pretty crazy for reputation grind under the old system, far worse than even current synergy grind provided you just want one type of a ship/racial implant and not all of them.
Rounded up math: with average 50% win ratio and when playing maximum rank ship available to you, you’d be earning around 1500 rep per game under old system. It takes 1.390.000 rep to go R12>R15 for a single faction. That rounds up to approximately 926(!) games.
I’ve played much less than that since new patch, and I have 2 ship lines up to R15, one of them had to be leveled from R10 no less.
On a side note, this math is pretty depressing. I shudder when I think that some people actually had multiple R15 levelled up before the patch. That requires thousands upon thousands of games.
