Should XP be removed from AE?

That'd be kinda hard since Sleeper was in Velious and that expansion didn't come out until like late 2000 (and no one was in ST until March or April of '01....because it was launched broken). Furthermore, they weren't killing Kerafyrm. They were exploiting on the warders (Ventani is the one they got busted on, if I remember right). And that case has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion btw. In fact, there are people here who wish Paragon Studios would do to people here what SOE did to the people who exploited the warders, or exploited Ssra Temple (zone crash! Raid mob reset!) or exploited Grieg (pre-leashing) or PoJ trials or exploited pathing in PoTime and so on and so forth. Blue diamond dupe bug? BANS! Cheese "exploit" (due to some dev setting the resale price of a craftable item wrong)? BANS! We don't tend to see too much of that here.

Removing XP from AE would be a clear message from the devs that they've given up on ever keeping pace with the exploiters and that they've given up, for all intents and purposes, on the Architect feature. That would be unseemly considering how many copycats are being produced right now (I'm looking at you, STO's Foundry).

No, you have a legitimate claim for the structure of MA ticket rolls (which can net you capped and sought after mid level recipes) versus random drops from 'real' arcs.

In my mind, I was thinking it more from the XP side, where you earn less XP for the same mobs in AE, which when you are leveling a character to 50, is a concern. Granted, many specific missions can outperform 'standard' missions due to placement/etc for ideal farming, but it annoyed me when they dropped the XP rewards for the equivalent mob in AE versus standard. It felt like they were punishing gamers like me who play arcs for their content and dislike farming, but don't want to experience a longer road to 50 because they want to play AE content.

That was my feeling, at least. But alas, they did what they felt they had to.

That requires 1: knowing what to spend your tickets on; 2: knowing which recipes are desirable and which are vendor trash; and 3: knowing how to use the market properly. It also assumes people actually care about earning inf and aren't all about the UBER XPEEEZ so they can get to 50 as fast as possible and complain about the price of purples.