Chunky or extra chunky?

Back on topic:
I'd save your EC for any new situation that arises - like cake or other well-used memes the devs might throw at you!

It's a symptom of how bad things have gotten, in my opinion. As seasoned players have tons of cash and nothing to spend it on, they won't hesitate to drop thousands of ECs for anomalies, just to avoid an anomaly/exploration grind in one of the lonely boxes of clusters. Why not pay outrageous prices for common anomalies? There is nothing else to spend ECs on, unless you want to bet them away on 4000 spins at the Dabo table.

Really, what else can I do with my 2 million ECs? The fleet doesn't need them, and the stuff I get from drops is mostly better than anything a vendor sells for ECs.

The economy is borked. It always has been. It's not some temporary fluctuation.

Gaining 2 million EC before level cap is a fluctuation. At endgame, virtually all of us are swimming in this much. However, a new player doing this is something... new.

This was exactly my concern. I can do roughly the same thing in LOTRO by mining tin and silver and selling it in the auction hall. But it would be a very long time before I had enough to buy the biggest ticket items in the game. The fact that there is so much free money sloshing around speaks to the fact that there are more sources than sinks for cash. That's a problem for any game.

STO has multiple currencies. Energy Credits are one of the more common forms of currency and can be created by selling items to vendors. They're not, generally, very useful. My Rear Admiral from Head Start and the first 30 days of the game has somewhere around 1 million EC just from selling a few rare drops on the Exchange.

The character I began when I returned for Season 3 has ~200k EC. I get plenty of EC from vendoring/replicator recycling drops that don't sell well on the Exchange. I've got maybe 50 or 60 hours of play time on this new character, if /played can be believed.

The more useful currencies in STO are marks and medals of various kinds; these are obtained by doing Exploration or PvP missions. They can purchase uncommon, rare, and very rare gear and are generally a more worthwhile currency to accumulate.

STO doesn't have many EC sinks. As in other poorly designed MMO economies, this means that inflation is rampant. It's similar to what happened in SWG with Credit prices once decay was removed and housing maintenance was lowered. You have a way of creating an endless supply of EC and almost no way of permanently removing EC or even limiting the supply.

So I guess I'm the lone anomaly that I suck at making money. I suspect fleet starbases will be one of the major gold sinks. That or poker

That or Ferengi Royalty Banking Schemes...

No your not. I normally have about 800K on my characters. Because I can't be bothered with faffing about on the exchange. So I normally just chuck my loot into the nearest vendor.

And here comes the problem. On one hand you need enough Energy credits sloshing about so that people like us whom can't be bothered have enough. On the other hand you have a group of players who are channelling Ferengi, who will happily spend all their game time on the exchange (one of my colleagues does this).

Moving the slider towards either group means that you upset the balance of the other. Here lies the problem.

I got about 4-5 million on each of my Fed characters and about 150k on my Orion Eng(cant remember amount on Klingon Tac), originally I struggled for money but when I switched to Advanced the drops improved a lot and I sold as much as possible on the exchange or dumped it at a vendor.
Slowly built up the amount but I got most of my items from doing exploration missions and saving up the reward tokens then getting green/blue gear from the vendors.