Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26348265-20150602193759/@comment-62.232.111.100-20150602195108

It's very odd. It is no longer remotely viable to by the help of an agent - you lose more than you gain. The theory appears to be approx 6K fame = 1 gold - so to get back the invested 5 gold you need to be earning back over 30K. Which you wouldn't get even before the change.

The only thing I can think of (and this is with conspiracy theory hat on) is that it's actually an attempt to cook the books by putting a real life $ value on the "free crew" bonus.

So every time they "give" us a free crew member they can claim they are "giving away" approx £0.50 in real money.

The more sensible analysis is that they've analysed usage and the people who are most likely to buy gold packs (with their own real money) tend to use that gold to buy crew. So they're trying to get them to spend even more to get that crew member result they want (and who knows, maybe their favourite is the engineer, not the agent).