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I feel like there was a lot of asspulling and anecdotes with the numbers regarding the "economics" of a raid, 'cause I've seen some wildly different prices in entity trading and doesn't take into account explosives and other raiding tools pulled basically for free from either crafting or processing or quests or bought at a discount, etc. So I'm not gonna touch too much on that for now. But.... As it stands now, I disagree with this. There is more knowledge and resources tied to raiding than skill. The difference between a good raider and a bad raider depends more on which one knew to take the "Launcher" gang talent and which one has more explosives at their disposal than anything we can really quantify as "skill", I think. Well yeah. This is largely because tossing a smoke grenade and punting in a cooked C4 is not terribly difficult. Take this with a grain of salt, I've never seen you raid before and I'm in no way trying to imply that you're unskilled, but from what I've observed in my basing/raiding experiences is that there's not a whole lot that can be done against a raider with enough C4 on hand unless you have a group you can call for backup. On top of that, a majority of the buildings on the map are so small that even measuring and planning for C4 radii, it will only take two or three at max to wreck all of the props, and that -really- puts non-VIPs and new players at a disadvantage because they can't use dupes. And that's not to disparage raiders, by any means. With the current building rules, they basically have no choice but to fling in explosives, as trying to crouchwalk and blowtorch/lockpick/crack your way into any of these serpentine one-way'd deathtraps is suicide. Again, I can't speak much to the economics of the matter, but if the basing/raiding meta were healthy and fun we'd see -far- more basing and raiding going on. One of the data points I was working on collecting was counting the number of active bases at any given hour I was on and those numbers were low. Like... Really low compared to the server's population. If I had to guess I'd say most players were more content with selling their entities directly than trying to base around them. I'll post the metrics I have once I have a full week's worth of data, but so far it hasn't been looking like anything healthy.

There are a lot of factors at work when it comes to basing and raiding-- I've actually been trying to gather actual data and videos to punctuate points over the past week, but it's been really slow-going. Since you're breaching the topic tho, I'll share my thoughts on the matter so far. In short, in the current state of things both basing and raiding are OP in their own way and require eachother to be OP to maintain anything anything even attempting to pass itself off as balanced. On the raiding side, you've got C4 that can be cooked down to a fraction of a second before getting punted into a base. Raiders can use smokes or even slap down deployable barricades at the entrance to ensure that the C4 cannot be shot out and away. The cost of C4 isn't even really so much of a factor anymore as you can easily wind up with a pretty healthy stock of explosives after a night or three of sitting on procs. On the basing side, you've got one-ways, thin shooting slits, and typically long winding designs. Bonus points if you've got a legendary sniper rifle. Technically these can be raided with just a lockpick and/or keypad cracker as the rules demand, but practically they require the use of explosives to get through unless the defenders are afk. Any decent base design will be built so that a raider can be shot, but has no real hope for meaningful retaliation, so they pretty much have no choice but to use C4/makeshifts. This dynamic also puts something of a limit on which buildings can and cannot support a decent base due to the building's size vs the explosive radius, which further discourages people from basing. The advantage is generally goes to the raider, but if you can snag a really long base (like that one in the sewers) the advantage flips to the defender in a big way. If you nerf explosives, basing gets even more OP. If you change basing rules, explosives get even more OP. If there is to be any meaningful change to the meta, there needs to be a change on both fronts. Until then, the meta's gonna remain a contest of who can lean harder on their crutch.