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Topic: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

This is my idea on how to replace the insurance system without giving people NIC or a replacement bot, which could potentially crash the market in either case.

As giving a replacement bot seems to be the most thought of idea, it has merit, but giving you a free bot would inevitably crash the market as bots would no longer need to be built or sold, for the most part.

Instead of providing a replacement bot, I recommend an untradable 'Marker'.  For instance, if you lose a Kain, you get a 'Kain Marker', if you lose a Termis, you get a 'Termis Marker', etc.

The 'Marker' would then give a price reduction % on your next PURCHASE of that bot.
Take the following as an example:
Cheapest Kain currently on market = 3mil
'Kain Marker' = 90% discount
Buyer pays 'Kain Marker' + remaining 10% + taxes for the market Kain
Nian Syndicate (insurance company) pays the 90% to the seller

In turn, the seller still gets what they asked for on the market, and the buyer gets their replacement Kain at a discount.  There's nothing tangible given to the pilot that could be exploited, and the market is still able to flourish. 

This could be used in many ways, such as a way to puchase the mats to produce another bot at the same discount as the 'Marker'.  Like a lump purchase of the mats.  You, the buyer, go the market, and 'insert' the marker, you are then given 2 options, the bot or the mats.  If you select the bot, the above example happens.  If you select mats, you get all the mats needed to make the bot, provided there are enough mats currently on the market to fill the order. 

Keep in mind that the markers % could easily be changed to suit the devs idea of fair replacement value.

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

There are two big holes in that plan:

If you give a 90% discount on the buy price then Corps are going to manufacture bots, stick them on Beta at prices 100X the ave and have their corpmates buy them. Making billions of NIC for the sellers, which they will then use to make more bots.

If you peg the price to 90% of the cheapest bot on the market some chop will sell his bot for nothing at some unreachable Beta island and screw everybody out of insurance.

Either way the Devs will have to intervene leading to some more epic tears.

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

three things have to happen if they want to build upon the existing insurance system:

a, payout/fee has to be based on mineral AND commoditiy market prices

b, one obvious production issue has to be solved (you can build bots from less commodities then they contain at the end). This has an impact on point a

c, insurance limitations regarding how often you can use it - increasing fee for using it to often.

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

Alandrix wrote:

There are two big holes in that plan:

If you give a 90% discount on the buy price then Corps are going to manufacture bots, stick them on Beta at prices 100X the ave and have their corpmates buy them. Making billions of NIC for the sellers, which they will then use to make more bots.

If you peg the price to 90% of the cheapest bot on the market some chop will sell his bot for nothing at some unreachable Beta island and screw everybody out of insurance.

First of all, the % is merely an example, as I stated at the end of the post.

Secondly, your first point shows that there is a failure in the market in general, having location specific markets allows individuals or corps to alter market values based on location instead of the actual value of the item.  Thus, a global market is needed, or the 'marker' could be used on a global scale instead of a local scale and the 'Nian Syndicate' could transport said bot to you.

Thirdly, your second point is, imo, moot.  As selling a bot for nothing would affect no one except the fool who just gave his bot away for nothing, or near to nothing.

Common sense is the least common of all the senses.

5 Reply by Black Flag (edited by Black Flag 2011-02-17 18:43:35)

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

All-in-all, the only way to trully deal with this insurance fubar is to remove it completely, but that won't happen, because of all the people that wouldn't be able to replace their vehicle when they lost it.  My idea is merely a concept, that has a few holes that could easily be fixed.  Also, the ease at which people can find holes in this concept shows how easily people will find holes in ANY form of insurance.  People will use them once they find them.  Sadly, it's unavoidable.

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

Annihilator wrote:

c, insurance limitations regarding how often you can use it - increasing fee for using it to often.

I like this idea... just as your car insurance premiums would go up if you continually got into accidents... The game's insurance company is in the game to make money... in the past system they would bankrupt.

We need to maybe consider working the system from the eyes of the insurance company and what it would take for them to remain profitable?

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

Black Flag wrote:
Alandrix wrote:

There are two big holes in that plan:

If you give a 90% discount on the buy price then Corps are going to manufacture bots, stick them on Beta at prices 100X the ave and have their corpmates buy them. Making billions of NIC for the sellers, which they will then use to make more bots.

If you peg the price to 90% of the cheapest bot on the market some chop will sell his bot for nothing at some unreachable Beta island and screw everybody out of insurance.

First of all, the % is merely an example, as I stated at the end of the post.

Secondly, your first point shows that there is a failure in the market in general, having location specific markets allows individuals or corps to alter market values based on location instead of the actual value of the item.  Thus, a global market is needed, or the 'marker' could be used on a global scale instead of a local scale and the 'Nian Syndicate' could transport said bot to you.

Thirdly, your second point is, imo, moot.  As selling a bot for nothing would affect no one except the fool who just gave his bot away for nothing, or near to nothing.

Let me help you out here. The 90% is just an example, yours in fact. You can make it 80%, 70%, 60% or whatever you want, as long as it doesn't go 50% or below. The fact remains that this will be very easy to exploit, something that I'd have thought you M2S people would appreciate by now.

As for the second point. This is easily done if one alliance controls a station on Beta and is able to keep others from entering it. Norhoop atm? Imagine this scenario if the game had player owned stations like they do in EvE.

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

Alandrix wrote:

This is easily done if one alliance controls a station on Beta and is able to keep others from entering it. Norhoop atm? Imagine this scenario if the game had player owned stations like they do in EvE.

Norhoop is a poor example.

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

My apologies.

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

Why not make the base number insurance is calculated on the average cost of manufacturing the bot type across the whole server. Now the percentage of this might need to be close to 100 but as long as it stayed under 100% of the average construction cost the margin for exploit will be low.  I would recommend using the going rate of minerals as if someone with level 5 refining made the refining for the cost and make the calculation at the time the bots go into the line plus a percentage of the cost of the bot(by materials again) that the CT came from and the cost of a CT at the same percentage with someone with level 5 skills to help there.

  If you think about it the best miner might have a slight edge over the average price.  Someone with 10 refining and any other skill will have a slight advantage on the cost refining and the best person at making a prototype or the bot will get a slight profit at this step and then the maxed production person will make a little.  But if you look at the average number of times a bot CT is used to set that percentage then even at 100% of the calculated cost there is such a slim margin to be made that other ways are faster and easier to make nic.

The only way to exploit this besides manipulating the entire mineral market globally would be to somehow get people with low skills turning out enough of the same bot to compared to an uber super set of skills to raise the average price to widen the margin the uber setup gets.  Which means loosing the profit or insurance as these bots to raise the rate cost more to make than the insurance will pay.

The only real drawback I see in using this as the base concept of the bots construction cost and not the retail price is that it might limit the amount over cost that people are willing to pay for replacements.  The example would be the player just lost a Kain and got his insurance payout.  Now he knows roughly the price to make the average Kain will he be willing to go on the open market and pay multiples of that amount, so it could limit bot profits.  The other drawback is that the insurance would never fully cover the loss as the producer is going to mark up from the cost, the upside is corporation produced and provided bots at cost no longer make nic in the system.  Maybe the solution to this is to lower the cost of insurance but in the end the lost bot will take more than just the equipment cost to replace.

I guess there is no easy answer if you want to replace most of the bots cost of replacing the bot for the player who lost it to keep them in PVP.


As an after thought to my already long post for a second option here:

Similar to the chip option but a little different.  Have the cost of the insurance be for a complete replacement based on whatever math the devs feel balances it.  Then have the insurance company buy the cheapest identical bot from the market and deliver it to the players home base.  In the case that none are for sale or there are so few. The amount of raw materials to make the bot from either an average or other level industrialist(tweak point) are purchased from the market.  If there is a mineral shortage then the average cost of the missing items could be calculated and that amount of a random item not from the syndicate could be bought. The to few number determined by devs to avoid price fixing if its issue but seems a waste to blow up a Kain to sell to yourself at the inflated price so you then can try to sell it for a profit later.

To me this has the added bonus of removing replacements from internal corp purchasing and forces it to the open market either as materials of bots.


Sorry to ramble but there is no easy answer if people want to cheat but thought both of these had merit.

11 Reply by Arga (edited by Arga 2011-02-18 21:27:24)

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

ForestWanderer wrote:

tl:dr

The issue isn't with insurance, the problem was that it was the BEST way to make NIC in the game; best means fastest and least effort.

Even used as intended, insurance will always convert resource into NIC, because that is the type of NIC source it is.

The cost of ore on the market is not really relevant to the issue, as those ores are available 'free' from the world. The only true cost is the NIC paid to the factory and in the CT.

In games, the only real thing that counts is player time when looked at from an exploitation of game mechanics.

If I can make X NIC/hour doing THIS , and X+1 NIC/hour doing THAT; I (Player, corp, alliance) will do THAT.

Now, if THAT carries a risk of banning, it will need to be X+Y, where Y is my NIC vs reward tolarance to getting banned before I will switch from THIS to THAT.

I doubt an entire corporation/alliance will doing anything again like the previous scale, because it is now know to be bannable; at least not until the economy and player base is much much larger and they have a chance of going unnoticed. But even than, the profitability of the has been reduced with the removal of the cost reduction skill, as well as (assumed) better market tracking.

TL;DR

Insurance is a NIC source, it is balanced when the time required to generate NIC is equal to or greater than the time required for other NIC sources.

12 Reply by Nik Bossman (edited by Nik Bossman 2011-02-25 15:38:09)

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

It's a tough nut to crack and some of the ideas here are very good. 

I would personally like to see a mechanism closer to RL insurance where the brokers get rich and the insurers need to find a better deal each time it is due for renewal taking into account no-claims bonuses, risks and general liability.  It would take some clever coding but what if players/corps could set up their own insurance brokers:D  - bring some competition to the insurance market

13 Reply by Annihilator (edited by Annihilator 2011-02-25 17:20:07)

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

Nik Bossman wrote:

It's a tough nut to crack and some of the ideas here are very good. 

I would personally like to see a mechanism closer to RL insurance where the brokers get rich and the insurers need to find a better deal each time it is due for renewal taking into account no-claims bonuses, risks and general liability.  It would take some clever coding but what if players/corps could set up their own insurance brokers:D  - bring some competition to the insurance market

while i would like to see lowere efficency for insurance if you use it more often, im aware of the reason why an insurance game mechanic is in the game at all:

to prevent player bankruptcy due to participating in combat (voluntary or unvoluntary)

With the recent change and removal of the exploited NIC, you see the main issue rise again: -low base income without excessive grinding
-no real NIC-sinks for those who broke the 100M barrier.
-no the no-risk-no-reward mechanics the PvP nerds are talking about do not apply to themself...

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

Hmm how about you recive a stack of Ressources in your home base instead of NIC ? Mecs you can buy infinitly from NPC Corps are excluded ofc. You trade Mats for Mats now and get less than spend. I guess thats really uncomfortable for a fast replacement but NIC will not overflow the market.

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

Acutally the basic idea of insurance is keep players in a bot for pvp.

I can live with loosing some NIC on each loss (most time its PVE though), but since you hardly make NIC pvping if it is too much of a loss, you have to farm for NIC way to long for a PVP game.

So keep insurance high enough to pay for a replacement bot. That way you loose your insurance NIC plus your equipment. Prices should be calculated on market value of minerals/components. If you actually can find a deal that saves you some NIC, even better as you can partly buy your lost gear as well.

I give a *** if you win a few NIC in total, cause if you use insurance as it is ment to be used, you won't blow up bots by purpose and as such don't make billions of NIC without doing anything usefull.

I want to have fun playing this game. Fun ain't farming for NIC just to participate in any action. It is already hard enough to get online and have some action if you can not be on 24/7.

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

i want to insure my equipment too...

bot cost vs. equipment on it is like 1 : 4

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Re: Insurance without exploits or market crashing

Andrew Redburn wrote:

Prices should be calculated on market value of minerals/components.

There are no component costs for vertically integrated corporations; like beta corps.

Also, with access to level 3 factilities, beta corps get better refining, so more metal per ore, they get access to higher level decoders, so better CT's that need less material, and better factories.

All told, a beta corp can make a bot much cheaper than an alpha corp, and for much less than the market price of the material; and for much less than the market price of a completed bot.

They also have no incentive to make extra bots to put on the market to drive the price of bots down, as they are just working to arm the enemy.

In short, the insurance payout will always be a small % of the current market price of the Bot because it has to take into account that bots are very cheap to make for the beta alliances.