Insurance and “rare” Components

[Richard Bong]

Note, I'm not saying that insurance should cover things you can't either show valid receipts for, or can show was "legitimate salvage." I'm not even saying insurance should cover you while you're committing a crime (real world insurance doesn't in the US).

I'm saying this is the wrong time for this without the rest of the system in place.

 

[FZD]

Hauling profits will necessarily be raised. Like it or not, CIG has been clear that they intend all haulers operating outside "safe" space, to hire escorts and gunners.

(Them numbers are just to illustrate how the economy could work:)

Let's say you invest 1 million on the cargo. Let's say 100% of the time the dangerous route will have NPC pirates, and if you have any half decent escort you will win while without escorts you'll lose 100% of the time. Let's also say that 10% of the universe is players, so every 10th trip you run into player pirates who will win regardless if you got escorts or not.
Say the escort costs 100k per hour, and let's say cargo unloading and loading now also takes up time, so you can do just that one trade run per hour.
With an escort, your costs will be 100k for the escort + 100k for losing to the pirates 10% of the time.
Without an escort you'll lose the 1 million every run you attempt as well as an hour to setup everything again.

Now, the profits from that run would need to be pretty high. You'd need to have 30% ROI at least, and then that's assuming 100k UEC is comparable to other professions.

What if you had an insurance?
Well, you still need to hire an escort, because that dangerous route just isn't possible without one. But your ROI only needs to be 20%, as you're now not taking a hit from player pirates. This makes it easier to balance the economy, as Trading can be further away from being "double or nothing."
Also without an insurance, vetting the escorts would be more important, since if they actually aren't a half decent escort, you'll lose to the NPC pirates as well, costing you a million for the attempt.
With an insurance, you're also more likely to give that type of gameplay a try, as you're not standing to lose anything but time. Meaning there'll be more haulers hiring escorts and turret gunners.

So there's absolutely ways to make you hire escorts even with cargo insurances. And in some cases cargo insurances might even increase the amount of escorts being hired (as more people will be trying those routes).

 

[Shadow Reaper]

Absolutely yes, and you can see immediately how complex this all is and why CIG will certainly need to leverage AI to get a workable solution.

 

[Ltmifune]

Not entirely certain I am on topic but I wrote it.

All I really want is to be able to return to the shard I was playing on so the "persistent universe" actually works. If that was the case people really wouldn't have to worry so much about lost cargo and ships. I've had 10 Vulture runs end in a full cargo stored ship vanish and lose everything. Same thing with the reclaimer. Lost connection and return to the same shard and not be able to access my own ship.

I get its an Alpha game and at times it's super annoying, but I don't new ships and new desert holes in the ground with a bug in it. I want ships like the vulture and reclaimer to be finished.

I want insurance in the game to actually matter, I don't like the idea of increased reclaim times because ppl are abusing the salvage loop. I want a level of insurance on cargo, so I can fly a large ship to one or multiple places, buy every component I want to upgrade my ships with and take them home, instead of fly to, claim multiple ships, install components, fly back home or where ever claim ships etc.

I want trash loop in the game to make money cleaning up stations, outpost, and planets. I wanna get paid to clean up Clorpses that litter the world because ppl (me) are to lazy to fly back to homepoint.

I would also like ships that have wheels as part of their landing gear be able to roll around.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

Note, I'm not saying that insurance should cover things you can't either show valid receipts for, or can show was "legitimate salvage." I'm not even saying insurance should cover you while you're committing a crime (real world insurance doesn't in the US).

I'm saying this is the wrong time for this without the rest of the system in place.

I can't honestly say whether it will create more troubles than we can manage or not, but certainly it will cause huge problems. The one thing I can say is that we have to see these things come into game sometime, and without CIG's sense of what will be implemented when, its really hard to say. If we want to see rare items in game in the next year, they have to do this sometime soon. What it will look like at first. . .probably pretty fubar. Certainly it will suck if players lose rare items from 30Ks. That will totally suck if it happens. I'm sure they know this, but they're focused on building a game, not satisfying game testers.

Rare items are in some ways tied to our first jump point to Pyro and the development of a distinction between safe and dangerous space, so they may feel they have to do this soon. It doesn't make much sense to find rare items on missions in safe space.

IIRC, I think you're a coder? So maybe it helps to remember that iterative development requires one make mistakes. The earlier you implement, the more mistakes you make but the better you can adapt to new iterations in the future. Hence why Alpha play generally sucks, and needs to. Fixing stuff like NPCs, and bed logging, and getting trapped in elevators are only important now as they relate to satisfying playtesters enough to keep us involved, but when forced to choose between fixing a bug and forming the next iteration, CIG prioritizes the next iteration because that is the only way to press forward toward the goal of Beta. Yeah, falling through your bed into space sucks, but those kinds of bugs get worked out as they focus on the big picture. If we all didn't want to play so badly, we'd have CIG's perspective which is to keep an eye on the goal, and slave every action to that end. They're obviously doing okay with making the unfinished product playable, because people are always begging to play, but they also know that if they don't focus some attention on making it playable, their testers will all wander off. So there's a balance to be had.

CIG knows that when Starfield releases (September), they're going to lose millions of players temporarily. My money is on SC suddenly becoming much more playable when that happens.

 

[Lorddarthvik]

Remember when CIG tried to increase the insurance timers to what they thought were reasonable values? Yeah that change lasted about half a day because the game crashes/disconnects every five minutes for the very very large vast huge majority of the players, and having to wait half a fucking day so you can fly your one and only ship is kinda dumb in an alpha, especially one that Keeps on Crashing!

This is the exact same situation. Even if you can get your ship back in a reasonable amount of time, the hours you have to spend going from shop to shop to outfit your ship Again every time the game or server decides to crash, is stupid. Note, we are talkin current alpha here, not 5 years from now when persistence actually fully works..
I'm totally okay with this being a huge risk factor later when we can at least log back into the game and pick up where we left off, or have the chance to go back to our wreck and pick out the remains. Then it will be okay to implement this. Or just give us the component level insurance too...

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Forgive me for not having read your post, but I need to ask, you do realize the reason CIG has given that you can't insure cargo is that no players would then hire escorts and turret gunners, which is the play they want to support. If there's no threat of losing cargo then there's no excitement in shipping. Haulers need to curse the pirates and hate them, and then plan for them.

That's weird I was certain they were going to have different in-game insurance tiers to cover for component/cargo loss and that in the Edge Systems brokers would refuse to insure you as the risk was too high (also on a different point, think about what's happened IRL with the Oil prices since the insurers refused to cover loads over a certain value)...

I can't find any sources for this though, can you provide sources for CIGs intention not to allow any insurance at all?

Also, as for hiring escorts, right now I can't afford that. My best ever in game trade route gave me 80k aUEC for 2 hours trip. That's 40k an hour, split evenly between me and two escorts that's 13k each per hour per escort... for a 2 hour babysitting trip which isn't going to guarantee action... and those fighters could make 60k an hour playing Clear The Satellites missions... There is going to be a hell of a lot of balancing needed before Hiring Escorts becomes viable.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

The only variability I recall about insurance was whether places like Grimhex would supply insurance for pirated ships at hugely inflated prices. I don’t even know how many years ago we switched to include insuring non-stock items. That was not however the original activity. IIRC, it was only invoked because of 30Ks taking so many ships, and once they find a way to protect loss from puter mishap, that should not be an issue. I think they were waiting for persistence and we’re kinda there now.

Try to put this all in proper context. CIG still plans severe consequences for dying in game. Losing your top shelf reactors is going to be a minor issue compared to starting a new character every ten deaths. To do that they likewise need to stop computer crashes from seeming like ship crashes, and we were told persistence was key to this.

 

[Richard Bong]

I can't honestly say whether it will create more troubles than we can manage or not, but certainly it will cause huge problems. The one thing I can say is that we have to see these things come into game sometime, and without CIG's sense of what will be implemented when, its really hard to say. If we want to see rare items in game in the next year, they have to do this sometime soon. What it will look like at first. . .probably pretty fubar. Certainly it will suck if players lose rare items from 30Ks. That will totally suck if it happens. I'm sure they know this, but they're focused on building a game, not satisfying game testers.

Rare items are in some ways tied to our first jump point to Pyro and the development of a distinction between safe and dangerous space, so they may feel they have to do this soon. It doesn't make much sense to find rare items on missions in safe space.

IIRC, I think you're a coder? So maybe it helps to remember that iterative development requires one make mistakes. The earlier you implement, the more mistakes you make but the better you can adapt to new iterations in the future. Hence why Alpha play generally sucks, and needs to. Fixing stuff like NPCs, and bed logging, and getting trapped in elevators are only important now as they relate to satisfying playtesters enough to keep us involved, but when forced to choose between fixing a bug and forming the next iteration, CIG prioritizes the next iteration because that is the only way to press forward toward the goal of Beta. Yeah, falling through your bed into space sucks, but those kinds of bugs get worked out as they focus on the big picture. If we all didn't want to play so badly, we'd have CIG's perspective which is to keep an eye on the goal, and slave every action to that end. They're obviously doing okay with making the unfinished product playable, because people are always begging to play, but they also know that if they don't focus some attention on making it playable, their testers will all wander off. So there's a balance to be had.

CIG knows that when Starfield releases (September), they're going to lose millions of players temporarily. My money is on SC suddenly becoming much more playable when that happens.

While I did some coding in college, that's never been my profession. I ran QA for a software company for 9 years. Good memory though. :)

There is a time and place to bring things into a project. This appears to introduce more problems that it solves, for something that has no actual need at this time. What is the goal here? Is it the user base is realizing how little there is actually to do in game so they are introducing something shiny that serves as a time sync? Don't they have to get more differentiation between the components before rare stuff actually makes a difference? There isn't anything to do with excess cooling capacity or excess power. The distances travelled means that quantum speed differences doesn't mean much. A couple of percentage points difference in shields might mean something in a close fight, but from a practical standpoint, not usually. So is introducing "rare" components about bragging rights?

My personal frustration, from the outside, looking in, one thing CIG doesn't appear to have is a will to finish anything. Even the little stuff,the idea is put in and then there is no apparent iteration. The most obvious is flight model. They put a new flight model in, promise iteration, let it sit for a year or two, tear it out and start over. I know what iteration is supposed to look like, this isn't it.

There may be some method to what they're doing but it defininitely appears to be more the "oooh shiny" or "squirrel" method of development.

As for doing "OK?" They're bringing in revenue, and appear to be paying their bills, so from that viewpoint, sure. From a build a game standpoint, though, not so much. The appearance is like my Golden Retriever running laps in the back yard, or a person running on a treadmill, lots of energy being expended but not going anywhere.