The only two times that raiding provides a net benefit to the economy are:
Raiding Inactive bases -
They are not using their loot, therefore, this is essentially being re-added to the economy. However, it has been suspected by many that Supercell has reduced the number of inactive bases available to be raided. This, I'm not too sure on. I see hundreds of completely inactive bases every day - it's just that most of these inactive bases have super low level collectors, and therefore, I cannot profitably raid them anyways.
War Win / League Bonuses -
Other than collectors, these are genuinely the only other repeatable sources of income. They are much more potent since the buffs ♥♥ gave to them, and now, can be considered as a major source of income.
Here are some facts about why making active/storage base raiding the only way of obtaining resources are flawed:
- Army costs to 2 or 3 star a well upgraded TH9 or TH10 are crazy high
- Spell Costs to 2 or 3 star a well upgraded TH9/10 are crazy high
- Training time for a large army is extremely long
- Creation time for spells is extremely long
On top of that, think of the following:
If I have one of those exceptionally expensive armies, and use 5 expensive spells, and I raid a full storage base, all I am effectively doing is shifting resources from one active player to another, minus the cost of nexting, minus the time it took to create the army, minus the cost in elixer and DE to create the army. In the long run, this does not speed up either of our abilities to upgrade our base.
In addition, I also incur trap re-arm, xbow re-arm, and inferno tower re-arm costs upon my victim. All those resources are straight up *lost*, never to be seen again.
In order for you to make raiding active players effective, here are the changes that would need to happen:
Nexting costs would need to be effectively eliminated. You can do this by either completely eliminating them, or by putting filters on search so that non-profitable bases are eliminated from the queue.
Army training times would need to be driven way, way down. Who wants to play a game once every 45 to 60 minutes? For a maximum of 3 minutes? Nobody, that's who.
Army costs would need to be driven way down. This would have many, many consequences and would be a balancing nightmare, imo~.
Spell training times would need to be quartered, or reduced even more drastically. If I need at least 2-3 spells to 2-3 star a TH9/10, and that's the only way to profitably raid, well, don't you want me playing your game more? Spell training times and army training times should BOTH be balanced to be in line with one another.
If you think removing sniping will "fix" the loot problems, I think you just haven't really thought through the long term consequences of what that will actually mean.
The solution will come in the form of increasing passive production (new collector levels for TH9, TH10), and increasing the found loot (league bonuses).
War is where you should be using big armies trying for 2 to 3 stars. Unless we completely overhaul army cost and training time, it will never make sense to farm using bigger armies.