Whats the ticket cap and whats the average rate if anyone knows

There is no need to tune foes to your strengths -- most builds can find at least one type of standard foe that they can handle easily.

People have been farming standard content since the game was released. The most common abuse of this was the "Family Farm," a mission given by one of the 45-50 contacts and used by Fire/Kins to great advantage. Players would start the mission and instead of completing the goals they would exit and restart it after slaughtering all the mobs (the mission was populated by the team leader after haranguing other players to pad the team so they could spawn it for a full 8 -- the need for padding was eliminated when the new difficulty system was instituted). This was so abused for PLing that the experience rewards for Family in that level range were drastically cut.

Other missions were similarly abused, but instead of changing the experience values time limits were placed on some of those missions so that could not be saved and farmed. This was done to some warwolf and freak missions.

There are many standard content missions that certain builds can breeze through: the Infernal mission with all the demons is trivial for Fire tanks. The Hequat mission with all the Mu sorcerers is easy for /Electric brutes. The Battle Maiden missions are often farmed.

And, of course, any Council radio or paper mission is trivial for most scrappers, tanks and brutes in the 40-50 range. Since you can abandon any radio mission at will and get a new set of three to choose from you have a ready-made source of trivial farming missions in PI and Grandville for any character with good S/L defense or damage resistance.

Thus, the devs cannot frown upon someone who builds a mission that is identical to one of their own. They do, however, disapprove of AE missions that take advantage of exploits that give full experience for things like pets and monkeys.

As long as an AE mission is structured like a regular mission and gives the same kind of experience as a regular mission, it is by definition not an exploit. But if takes advantage of some quirk of the system and delivers XP at a much higher rate, then it's an exploit.

In general, however, a solo character running a mission optimized for their particular build is still going to get XP at a lower rate than a well-balanced team with lots of debuffs and damage dealers. A well-played team of a tanker, scrapper, blaster, and two or more dark/sonic/rad/storm/trick arrow defenders/controllers/corruptors will run roughshod over almost any kind of enemy, including Nemesis, Malta and Carnies.

That's really the yardstick you should be measuring against. If a solo character is earning XP at a lower rate than a good team, there's no reason to put a stop to it.

It may not be an exploit, but it could be a farm. The devs have stated that AE is not for creating farms. So if you filled a map with standard Council, with "kill stuff" as the mission intro and "box" as the objective, they would be fully justified in taking it down as a farm. On the other hand, if you actually wrote out a detailed mission briefing, added some clues and NPC dialogue, and gave the player a reason to beat up all those Council, that exact same mission would be fine.

As for average ticket earning rates...impossible to gauge. Non-farm missions contain such a variety of enemies, and so many other variables, even if they're all using Standard dev-created foes, that there is no way to determine an "average." It can take me over an hour to run a five-mission player-created arc. I run on +1/x6 or higher. I can't cap my tickets in that hour. I'm also pausing to read everything.

And another thing: since higher-conning enemies award more tickets, +0/x8 is not necessarily the most efficient setting for all characters. It's certainly not the most efficient for non-farm arcs, which can't be instantly completed once you hit the cap, and high settings usually put you over the ticket cap on the smaller maps a lot of story-focused arcs use.

Actually, they can, and to some extent, they do. AE missions quite simply are not held to the same standards as developer-made ones, even if the developers may also create farmable content. We may not like that, or agree with it, but they have the power to make it so. Positron said rather explicitly that the AE is not meant for farming. That said, the truth is that the devs themselves police it for that very weakly. Anything that's not truly a full-blown exploit is not likely to be found unless another player reports it. However, if a player reports a mission that looks like a farm, it can be locked, and has been before.

The process for determination about what is and is not a farm (by both players and the CS staff who respond to reported content) is definitely subjective, and this has lead to no small amount of drama and argument around the AE. That sadly means if you're making a mission, you should consider whether it might seem like a farm. Likewise, if you do make a farm, it's worth taking the effort to make it at least not look like a blatant one.

I never said that this was needed. I said that if you do it, you can increase your rate of gain over more generic foes.

750 tickets before or after the progressive mission bonus?

Suddenly finding Atta's cave as the last mission of an arc actually makes a mad amount of sense now...

Before.

You know you're on to something when the first four missions required you to click a zero-countdown glowie in a tiny one-room map.

(Honestly though, tricks like that stopped making much sense once they lowered the ticket cap from 9999. If you've got a sufficiently tough character, it's so easy to cap tickets even on large map that arc tricks like that really aren't worth the time any more.)