Ship Insurance mechanic.

[J.D.]

Hey, so after watching that awesome new dev video, I noticed the dev team seem to be currently debating on details about the insurance system, I took that as a welcoming for the community to share thoughts..

I’m not sure how most feel about it, but as far as the cost, I do think it would be nice to have credits play a part. I don’t think it would be a good idea to use JUST ore in everything, while making credits less and less valuable. As far as how much the cost goes up, and the time it takes to rebuild, im not real sure I’ve developed an opinion on those yet. All I know, is that I personally want to see a system that isn’t abused as some sort of cheap meta.

Am I still understanding correctly that we will still have means to repair ships in repair hall? That the insurance system may be more of a thing like we are stranded in space with a ship that’s so damaged it cannot be flown? Or otherwise players who can’t be bothered to recover their ship even if it does take a little work to get it running? Making the cost high enough to make the options debatable in the players mind is good. That way after tapping into an asteroid, they won’t just be like “screw it, abandon ship” type thing.. what you guys think?

 

[0123]

I don't think it is a good idea to have a uniform 1 hour to respawn regardless of the size of the ship.

I understand that if the time required is too short, it can be abused.
Still, if all ships have the same respawn time, it would make no sense to use "light fighters" and only "heavy fighters" or "warships" would come into play.

 

[Colonkin]

Hey, so after watching that awesome new dev video, I noticed the dev team seem to be currently debating on details about the insurance system, I took that as a welcoming for the community to share thoughts..

I’m not sure how most feel about it, but as far as the cost, I do think it would be nice to have credits play a part. I don’t think it would be a good idea to use JUST ore in everything, while making credits less and less valuable. As far as how much the cost goes up, and the time it takes to rebuild, im not real sure I’ve developed an opinion on those yet. All I know, is that I personally want to see a system that isn’t abused as some sort of cheap meta.

Am I still understanding correctly that we will still have means to repair ships in repair hall? That the insurance system may be more of a thing like we are stranded in space with a ship that’s so damaged it cannot be flown? Or otherwise players who can’t be bothered to recover their ship even if it does take a little work to get it running? Making the cost high enough to make the options debatable in the players mind is good. That way after tapping into an asteroid, they won’t just be like “screw it, abandon ship” type thing.. what you guys think?

Insurance. Its essence is that the old damaged ship is located in the same place where you abandoned it. Like a derelict. They actually provide you with a new one for your money. What does this give?
The ship's cargo, its settings, scripts, etc. remain where they left it. Prize for whoever finds it. Good game mechanics too. I would also add that in the event of an insurance payment for the ship, its connection to the owner was lost. And the derelict transponder turned on (and it would be nice to designate them as a separate group and with a visibility of, say, 30 kilometers maximum.). Some players would hunt for them. There can be a lot of interesting things in some ships.
In addition, the respawn time of a new ship under insurance should actually be equal to the time it takes to produce it from ore (so that there is no abuse of the instant respawn of one ship). Those. many modules - wait a long time. Small light ship - get it quickly.

 

[XenoCow]

I don't think it is a good idea to have a uniform 1 hour to respawn regardless of the size of the ship.

Personally, I would like something like a "good piloting discount" The longer you have a ship and do not use insurance, the shorter or cheaper the claim takes. So, this way players that are attempting to abuse the system will have higher costs/wait times than those that are just solo miners who crash once in a while.

 

[Brian Peppers]

Insurance should only pay out credits. Getting a brand new ship from insurance lowers demand for ore and lowers potential for player interactions.

-The ore market will lose a lot of demand if people are simply receiving free ships instead of needing to use/buy ore to re-print them.

-The ship market (if added) will lose out, as people won't need to buy more copies of ships, they will simply get free replacements.

Claims should have a weekly payout limit. This limit should decrease for every claim, down to basically 0 if you max out your claim consecutive weeks in a row. It should increase if you DON'T file claims, to encourage ship recovery rather than insurance every time, and discourage fraud.

In the case of custom ships that you have modified and saved the BP in-game (outside of the ssc), there should be a way to save a printable chip of that, which you must remember to do in case you lose it and need to re-print it. With stolen or salvaged ships this shouldn't be possible to avoid getting a free lifetime subscription to someone else's design.

 

[Colonkin]

Insurance should only pay out credits. Getting a brand new ship from insurance lowers demand for ore and lowers potential for player interactions.

-The ore market will lose a lot of demand if people are simply receiving free ships instead of needing to use/buy ore to re-print them.

-The ship market (if added) will lose out, as people won't need to buy more copies of ships, they will simply get free replacements.

Claims should have a weekly payout limit. This limit should decrease for every claim, down to basically 0 if you max out your claim consecutive weeks in a row. It should increase if you DON'T file claims, to encourage ship recovery rather than insurance every time, and discourage fraud.

In the case of custom ships that you have modified and saved the BP in-game (outside of the ssc), there should be a way to save a printable chip of that, which you must remember to do in case you lose it and need to re-print it. With stolen or salvaged ships this shouldn't be possible to avoid getting a free lifetime subscription to someone else's design.

I agree. I'm ashamed that I didn't think about it myself.

 

[dusty]

I did a little insurance model a while back when Lauri was talking about initially. It's definitely got its issues, but I thought it was fun to play around with anyway. It was pretty much harebrained 3AM scheming, so try not to judge me too harshly.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Tz_PkSJ5SbLN73PmAuPVB-KEUvkN72yz60lWa000z6c/
Make a copy if you want to mess around with it. I didn't really put much thought into the values of the weights themselves, so don't be too surprised if you get weird results.


This would be a function hosted exclusively at developer stations, as it is their markets which would underwrite the value calculations. These stations should be distributed throughout the universe to enable relatively easy access for all players. It is tempting to allow insurance to be taken out at any point, but bringing players back to common points has its own benefits (and also, prevents players from taking insurance only as soon as they start getting shot at).

My thought was that insurance should come in tiers (including 0% and 100%) so that players are allowed to choose the risk they're comfortable with. The insurance cost (premium) is paid upfront and keeps the ship insured for a long but finite period of time, and at the time of claim, will payout in credits according to the level of insurance the player bought. The idea behind it is that a 100% insurance policy will payout the amount of credits required to buy the materials from the auction house in order to rebuild the ship (plus the assembly cost, etc.).

The insurance premium is generated according to the prices of materials in the auction house. In order to keep from unduly affecting new players or from rewarding insurance scams (too much, anyway), each material has a unique modifier associated with it, which is multiplied against its auction house value. For example, a basic material like bastium is weighted lightly so that newbies can always buy and insure a basic ship at a reasonable cost, whereas rare and exotic materials are weighted more heavily so that bad actors aren't routinely defrauding insurance for billions of credits.

In order to calculate the premium cost, the player has a personal risk coefficient, which naturally decays with time. It includes a base modifier, and is added to a personal variable which is affected by both the number of claims in the past X months/span of time as well as the sum total credits paid out. This personal risk coefficient is then applied to the sum value of the materials' weighted values.

As an example, a player could fully insure a Trident T1 (build cost 166,000, made predominantly of charodium, bastium, nhurgite, and vokarium) for the tiny sum of 12,203 credits. They could then crash that ship and repeat the process 20 times, receiving 3.32M from the insurance system (which is then put back into the economy after each payout as they buy materials to rebuild the ship). By the end, because the ship is super basic the premium cost has only risen to 35,825 credits.

On the other hand, it's a much different scenario repeating that scenario with a larger, kitted-out combat ship such as the OSA Xothian Mk2 (purchase cost 1,132,288). Losing that ship 20 times and receiving 22.6M credits in payout jumps that ship's premium up to a whopping 4.87M, which is mildly prohibitive. Meanwhile, insuring a Trident T1 is still pretty cheap, and you're never fully in the weeds.

To prevent market manipulation affecting the insurance cost, the price that the insurance uses to calculate premium would be a rolling average of the past several months of marketplace sales (not just listings), trimmed to exclude the top and bottom 5-10% to weed out outliers. It wouldn't (or shouldn't) be possible to affect insurance cost by pushing a million single-credit listings, nor could you raise the price without also suffering the 10% auction house tax.

There was also some thought about having the insurance company then issue salvage/repossession contracts for other players to go and retrieve the (now insurance-owned) ships, but that's gravy.

 

[pavvvel]

Personally, I would like something like a "good piloting discount" The longer you have a ship and do not use insurance, the shorter or cheaper the claim takes. So, this way players that are attempting to abuse the system will have higher costs/wait times than those that are just solo miners who crash once in a while.

It's unfair. The conditions should always be the same for everyone. Following your logic, the more a player decorates and enlivens the game world with his active actions and interaction with other players (including in dangerous places), the more he risks, the worse the insurance conditions for him? This is extremely strange. On the contrary, it is necessary to support those who move away from single-player gameplay and help develop the game (interacting with other players and creating content). Simply put, you are already being given a huge indulgence in the form of insurance, and you want more and more. Players who take risks can pay more than singles, simply because they break the ship more often, and not because they will receive a debuff to pay for each subsequent insurance

 

[XenoCow]

It's unfair. The conditions should always be the same for everyone. Following your logic, the more a player decorates and enlivens the game world with his active actions and interaction with other players (including in dangerous places), the more he risks, the worse the insurance conditions for him? This is extremely strange. On the contrary, it is necessary to support those who move away from single-player gameplay and help develop the game (interacting with other players and creating content). Simply put, you are already being given a huge indulgence in the form of insurance, and you want more and more. Players who take risks can pay more than singles, simply because they break the ship more often, and not because they will receive a debuff to pay for each subsequent insurance

There is truth to what you are saying, but you are forgetting that the players who risk more will be rewarded for their risks. If you decide to engage in combat or the like, then you will be given access to more resources if you win. I suppose the issue is what insurance is for. Is it a way of making ships cheap or for softening the blow of losing one? If everyone is given equal access to insurance with no downsides, then it will be as though nobody has it. There must be some kinds of tradeoffs available to make the system interesting.

I suppose if the idea is to incentivize high risk behavior, then you could have insurance work in the opposite way it realistically would. If you claim insurance on a ship that is new, then it would pay for most or all of it, but as the ship aged, the amount payed out decreased... There would need to be some kinds of limits to this or else it would be too easy to abuse.

 

[pavvvel]

There is truth to what you are saying, but you are forgetting that the players who risk more will be rewarded for their risks. If you decide to engage in combat or the like, then you will be given access to more resources if you win. I suppose the issue is what insurance is for. Is it a way of making ships cheap or for softening the blow of losing one? If everyone is given equal access to insurance with no downsides, then it will be as though nobody has it. There must be some kinds of tradeoffs available to make the system interesting.

I suppose if the idea is to incentivize high risk behavior, then you could have insurance work in the opposite way it realistically would. If you claim insurance on a ship that is new, then it would pay for most or all of it, but as the ship aged, the amount payed out decreased... There would need to be some kinds of limits to this or else it would be too easy to abuse.

Unequal conditions for players create a bad precedent: insurance conditions worsen for you today, and tomorrow something else will worsen for you... In addition, the idea u proposed stimulates the kind of gameplay where the player avoids dangers and other players. This does not benefit the game as a project. Which video content on YouTube will be more useful for starbase: lone mining asteroid number 23456, then asteroid number 23457.... Or a massive Star Wars-style battle..? This is a rhetorical question

We must not forget that the less a player loses when his ship explodes, the less tension and intrigue there is. And the phenomenon of Elite Dengeros proves that cheap insurance does not make the game better: there, in one evening, you can earn enough money to blow up your ship for a whole year and buy it with insurance, but players still use the dirtiest ways to avoid blowing up the ship and avoid PVP.

P.S. I can feel with all my soul how the online translator is uglifying my message


It is a known fact that on a tin bucket, consisting of beams and crates, you can make huge money, and in automatic mode. this fact alone deprives many players of the need to think about safety. if you add insurance - only those players who for their moral reasons do not want their ship to be blown up will think about safety. and if you add bonuses to the insurance, which are deprived of those who take risks, the situation will become even worse.

And the main question arises: why can those who don't take risks get so much reward?

It is necessary to put players in such conditions that people are always on the lookout for safety, cooperate, arm themselves, add armor to their flying tin cans.

 

[XenoCow]

Unequal conditions for players create a bad precedent: insurance conditions worsen for you today, and tomorrow something else will worsen for you... In addition, the idea u proposed stimulates the kind of gameplay where the player avoids dangers and other players. This does not benefit the game as a project. Which video content on YouTube will be more useful for starbase: lone mining asteroid number 23456, then asteroid number 23457.... Or a massive Star Wars-style battle..? This is a rhetorical question

We must not forget that the less a player loses when his ship explodes, the less tension and intrigue there is. And the phenomenon of Elite Dengeros proves that cheap insurance does not make the game better: there, in one evening, you can earn enough money to blow up your ship for a whole year and buy it with insurance, but players still use the dirtiest ways to avoid blowing up the ship and avoid PVP.

P.S. I can feel with all my soul how the online translator is uglifying my message


It is a known fact that on a tin bucket, consisting of beams and crates, you can make huge money, and in automatic mode. this fact alone deprives many players of the need to think about safety. if you add insurance - only those players who for their moral reasons do not want their ship to be blown up will think about safety. and if you add bonuses to the insurance, which are deprived of those who take risks, the situation will become even worse.

And the main question arises: why can those who don't take risks get so much reward?

It is necessary to put players in such conditions that people are always on the lookout for safety, cooperate, arm themselves, add armor to their flying tin cans.

I agree that risk versus reward is at the core of this issue. That's why I think if there is to be insurance, that there need to be some kinds of trade-offs associated with it. I also understand that risky gameplay should be incentivized to increase the exciting parts of the game. But you yourself said that ships with high value being destroyed is more interesting than if a cheap ship is. So, where does that leave us?

It seems to me that insurance lowers risk for everyone, but also lowers the value of risky behaviors. If destroying an enemy does not cause him to have lost anything of value, then you have not done much harm in a conflict. If you steal a ship from someone, then it will not be worth very much since ships will be so cheap that the risk of stealing it is not worth the reward.

I wonder if these insurance mechanics are not intended to balance the gameplay of individual players, but instead only work on company scales. It could be that individuals having very low risk is the goal so that the only time players will experience risk is if their company is at war with another and stations are at risk...

 

[pavvvel]

I agree that risk versus reward is at the core of this issue. That's why I think if there is to be insurance, that there need to be some kinds of trade-offs associated with it. I also understand that risky gameplay should be incentivized to increase the exciting parts of the game. But you yourself said that ships with high value being destroyed is more interesting than if a cheap ship is. So, where does that leave us?

It seems to me that insurance lowers risk for everyone, but also lowers the value of risky behaviors. If destroying an enemy does not cause him to have lost anything of value, then you have not done much harm in a conflict. If you steal a ship from someone, then it will not be worth very much since ships will be so cheap that the risk of stealing it is not worth the reward.

I wonder if these insurance mechanics are not intended to balance the gameplay of individual players, but instead only work on company scales. It could be that individuals having very low risk is the goal so that the only time players will experience risk is if their company is at war with another and stations are at risk...

Insurance may be necessary only if it will be difficult to earn money in the game. but as we see, players can walk with a dog on the street or drink beer in the park while their ship in automatic mode mines ore in the safe zone of the planetary station (I hope the developers will fix it somehow).
Players have dozens of ships at the stations, consisting of cargo crates, fully loaded with ore, which is enough for years of play.
what is the point of insuring a ship in such free conditions? ))

 

[Aha]

My concern with the insurance mechanic is the possibility to duplicate ships without owning the blueprint. For those like me who sell ships only (no blueprints) further more numbered and limited ships, this is a game breaking feature. The fact that you could just insurance a ship you own, get a new one and then go to the decommissioned one and claim is the same (with some hassle) as you would own the blueprint as for being able to print however many copies of the ship you like.
This must be addressed before implementing it to the live server.

 

[Askannon]

My concern with the insurance mechanic is the possibility to duplicate ships without owning the blueprint. For those like me who sell ships only (no blueprints) further more numbered and limited ships, this is a game breaking feature. The fact that you could just insurance a ship you own, get a new one and then go to the decommissioned one and claim is the same (with some hassle) as you would own the blueprint as for being able to print however many copies of the ship you like.
This must be addressed before implementing it to the live server.

Haven't done much on STU, but if there'd be a difference between the repair hall insurance claim and the right click in ships list claim there could be a balance so that ships need to be able to be fly back to a station or be towed back. Or be forced to use the more "expensive" claim.

 

[Colonkin]

My concern with the insurance mechanic is the possibility to duplicate ships without owning the blueprint. For those like me who sell ships only (no blueprints) further more numbered and limited ships, this is a game breaking feature. The fact that you could just insurance a ship you own, get a new one and then go to the decommissioned one and claim is the same (with some hassle) as you would own the blueprint as for being able to print however many copies of the ship you like.
This must be addressed before implementing it to the live server.

Your concerns as a designer are very understandable. And they are solved very simply. As a result of insurance, it is not the ship that is returned, but the money.
This eliminates all possible fears and problems.
Money can't quickly put together a new ship. And if people are serious about PVP, then they should have a supply of ores, modules and ships.

And if someone doesn’t have them, then boy, you didn’t prepare well and didn’t do your homework.
And this means that it’s too early for you to do serious pew pew. ))) (this is a joke. Appeal to a non-existent pvp player).