Is VP Farming Actually Dead?

Based on my calculations, it doesn't have to be.

While there is a hard cap on VP farming itself with packs ceasing after the 2 Million VP mark, there is still quite a bit of incentive to VP farm in Vanguard Zero.  Namely, you still get the cosmetics and gems from leveling up clans, you can still get some VP when you sack a first turn trigger, and if enough people continue to VP farm, you will still be able to gain rank (and VP at vastly improved rates).  The only thing dampening the effectiveness of VP farming at this point is how many people are willing to do it.  Technically, if everyone ran 5k base powered Vanguards and opted into VP farming, everyone would cap out VP and hit ranks of over 30, which sounds like all we're missing from previous seasons would be about 60 packs.  Given how comically lucrative VP farming was in past seasons, I think this only makes sense that the reward would be lessened.

So, how much VP would you actually earn if you decided to VP farm right now and nobody else was VP Farming?  Assuming they call an intercept on turn 2 every game (unlikely) I've calculated the average number of damage you deal per game to be about .561, meaning that you'll be averaging around 282 VP per game assuming the worst case scenario and you can only attack the vanguard once each game.  This is, of course, less than 15% of previous profits.  But it's also not a meaningful estimate because the opponent won't always have that interceptor, which means that on games where they don't, you average double the VP.  Additionally, if you fight a VP farmer, your average VP increases by nearly 10x (2.6k).

As you can see, from that number, if we have 20% of the community VP farming, how does this change the numbers?  Even assuming the interceptor is always present turn 2, you end up with an average of 746 VP per game.  That's roughly triple the output, just because people opted in to keep VP farming.  It's also roughly 37% of previous profits, which is far, far better than the other number.  I doubt we'll see VP farming at the levels we saw previously, but it's still viable in this context.

Finally, for VP Farming to work meaningfully, everyone needs to be doing the same thing.  The more people "take advantage" of VP farming to run things like ride chains or 6ks, the worse off the entire prospect will be.  It reduces the VP of all parties involved, because ride chains sometimes miss and can't hit 6ks and ride chains sometimes succeed earlier than they should and 6ks can't hit them.  Everyone running 5ks fixes every possible issue and the less people try to capitalize, the better for the VP farming community as a whole.

Given that over half of the VP farmers last season were Galahad/Tsuk farmers, my confidence that these individuals will play nice if they find out VP farming is still viable is pretty minimal.  But I digress, the more people VP farm, the better VP farming is.  The more people screw up VP farming, the worse it is.  The viability of the practice going forward is entirely based on the community.  We have a true Prisoner's Dilemma on our hands with VP Farming.