if you make the acquasition of qp much more expensive then it's going to slow the newbs down more so than before. 1m per qp is enough. it gives people something to work towards. whilst i'm not making a buckit load of money per day, i do think that 1m solars per qp is enough.
as for ap, well i don't mind that either. again it's something that can help the newbs and you can choose how you use that ap. 1 qp per day with just generating ap really isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things. especially if you want to have officers and vip status. on it's own you'd never be able to save up enough ap to acomplish all that.
Well the thing is, AP working the way they do actually is making it faster for noobs than ever before. I mean if they are picking up even the cheap refugee missions in the 1st or second ring they can easily spend a few of their free AP to cut the time to go around collecting them and then come back to Sol down pretty drastically without having to spend a bunch of money upgrading their engines and paying for a ton of fuel. On the other hand if they are in a corp as many new players do join a corp before long they can already get decent engines and maybe some fuel or even a corp ship to use to make a bunch of money. Those people can save up those AP and use it solely to convert into QP. As SirEmi said the full amount of free QP you could get just from AP alone is 36 over the course of one month (30 days). That is enough to not only buy VIP for 25 days but also an Officier for 15 days. Now if you consider the amount of QP you can get from voting every day (and I mean from the individual votes not the grand prize that most of us will never win) it isn't too hard to see people being able to afford VIP whenever they want it as well as one or even two officiers at least half of the time if not most of the time.
I mean hell when I joined TGE I got a corp ship that can get me enough solars from a single COM to buy VIP status at the current prices after just a week. Granted not all corps have the kind of assets that TGE does (not to mention I've know Jam for awhile so he knew I wouldn't do stupid things with it) but corps are getting stronger and bigger every single day so in the future I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case with all the majorly active corps.
If you want to have perma VIP status you can get that with just the AP you get every day if you save them up, you can even have an Officier half of the time. If you want perma VIP and all of the Officiers then yes you are going to have to pay a premium but honestly you don't really need most of them. I mean starting out the Science Officier is kinda pointless since it's a percentage boost that gets better the more base RP/Hour you have. The Manufacturing Officier is similar though not completely pointless since you are really just trying to make money in order to make something better and you aren't dealing with 100 hour + manufacturing timers. Again the Combat Officier gives you a percentage boost much like the Science Officier so at low powers it's really not all that worth it.
So if you are smart and realize that early on all you really want is VIP and the Nav and Engine Officiers this free AP goes a long way to having those at all times. As things stand noobs will still be progressing much faster than any of us did in the old days with AP essentially giving them more free QP's than we ever got.
Going from 1 mil to 1.5 or 2 mil isn't that drastic of a price increase as well. Once people get into the 3rd and 4th rings they can make that just by picking up 5-10 refugee missions and bringing them back to Earth, with two or three ships doing laps out there you can rake in enough money for any number of QP you want depending on how much support you get from a corp and how much time you have to play. Don't get me wrong it is significantly more over the course of buying those things for several months but I think that SirEmi is entitled to do what he wants with the game. This is just a compromise between what the players in general want and what SirEmi wanted to originally do.
Personally speaking I don't want it to be more expensive, I gotta pay for extra Officiers since I'm actually at a point where the Manufacturing Officier is pretty much vital and the Combat Officier is pretty darn helpful. However it's really not that much effort as it is considering I will basically be getting VIP and an Officier for free from those AP I get every day. It seems like it right now since we haven't had time to build up a stock of AP but I imagine that once we've had the AP mechanic in the game for a month or two quite a few people will feel the same way.
Anyways it was just a thought for SirEmi to think about, I'm sure we will see if it is or isn't a good idea in time.