Have you ever wonder which playstyle, between short and long missions, was the most effective? Then wonder no more! I have the solution! The answer is: it depends.
But let's start first with real interesting subject here: me.
I just reached level 55, huzzah!
All right, you might not been passionate about me (your bad, then). The important point in reaching level 55 is that I've been working on this modelization for some time but I waited to have the complete and correct data for Zone 2. That also means: no data for zone 3.
So let's jump in.
I already talked about it in percedent posts, but a reminder won't hurt. Moreover I expanded the concept to take into account different playstyle.
I call "ego-compensated earning" the earning of a mission, decreased by the amount of energy or time needed by music lessons to compensate the increase of ego.
It can be expressed in "starbits per energy" in case you are limited by available energy (not enough pizza slices?). Let's say you earn 100 starbits for a mission that cost you 40% energy and increase your ego by 10, while you average gain of skill with a music lesson is 20, then you actually spent 40+20= 60% energy to earn these 100 starbits.
Or it can be expressed in "starbits per minute" in case you are limited by time (a day is only 24 hours indeed). On the same example, let's say you earn 100 starbits for a mission that cost you 60 minutes and increase your ego by 10, while you average gain of skill with a music lesson is 20, then you actually spent 60+30= 90 minutes to earn these 100 starbits.
So looking at my account: 2000 fans - music lessons 10-20: average 15
With average raw earnings and ego-compensated ones, for each subsequent increase as missions are repeated:
So the more efficient way for me would be: 1 Radio Studio Session, then 1 Radio Interview, then 1 Local Mini Tour, then another Radio Studio Session and so on.
Yeah right, that's just a photo and no one cares about my account. Let's play with numbers and see the influence of different factors.
So, we consider a fixed amount of fan and variable skill increase by music lessons. And let's take a look at the earnings per minute (earning per energy basically doesn't change much)
So here we see that as the skill gained increases, the short missions become slightly more profitable. It doesn't change much although regarding the profitability between Zone 1 and Zone 2.
Let's do the contrary: fixed skill gain and variable number of fans, see where we go.
Now the impact is much bigger and short mission are definitely more profitable as the number of fans increase.
Let's simulate the growth of an account, in both skill and fans.
It shows clearly that small accounts should focus more of long missions, and as they grow, they have to switch to short missions that are more profitable. Passed a certain thresold, a going back to Zone 1 is even the best choice!
At 2000 fans, I still play long missions mainly and I'm able to earn 6000-6100 starbits a day. If I switch to short missions, and play perfectly all day long, I can earn 6400-6500 starbits a day. Would it worth it?
Shout out here to my friend 
The most profitable way is: Radio Interview, Illegal Busking, Open Mic Night, Radio Studio Session, Midweek Support, Busking with a licence, Midweek headline.
If you play perfectly, 5 of each, it takes you 15 hours (yeah, full time job) and you have time to do 1-2 lesson a day to compensate the 82 ego gained. And that's for on average 13800 starbits a day.
While if you play long missions, you can make around 7000 starbits a day.
(there is a more optimal way, I just took 5 mission of each of the sake of rapidity and simplicity - and yeah, no Zone 3, you have to add these)
That bugs me a bit, there's no choice but to change the playstyle as the account grow. If I compare
I'm trying to mix it up a bit, but there's no way I can be on my phine all day to do short missions. So... I feel I don't have much incentives to grow my account.
It's probably not the intended way either for the progression of the game as a rock star, to rise, to form a band and to keep busking in the street...
