I agree it looks awesome.

Just a slightly modified suggestion in case people end up preffering this :

Seth :
-Change shield bonus to 5% resists/level
-Increase base speed slightly (your value of 39.4 seems fine, definately not more)
-Reduce AP usage for all medium lasers by 20%

Gropho :
-Change shield bonus to 5% AP recharge if most Gropho pilots prefer this, if not leave the shield bonus.
-Increase medium ballistic and compact missile damage by about 5%.
-Increase COMPACT missile range slightly.

Mesmer :
-Change 5% falloff bonus to 10% falloff bonus. Afterall, falloff is definately not as useful as a same amount of optimal so 10% would be fair. Should carry over to all Nuimqol.
-Increase falloff on all magnetic weapons by about 50%
-Decrease AP use on medium magnetic weapons by 10%
-Increase base speed to 44.8 as you suggested.

All turrets :
-Increase firing height.

All firearms :
-Increase AP usage SIGNIFICANTLY! Leaving them as they are currently makes it hard to balance any turret bot in regard to their accumulator and their repair-tank, due to the huge contrast in AP usage between firearms and the other 2 turret types. Their AP usage should be close to that of magnetic weapons (only slightly lower).

Note that the changes to medium magnetics might make the already-powerful Kain slightly too powerful. Perhaps reducing its speed VERY slightly would compensate.

Also with my suggested changes I think the Gropho would not need a nerf (heavy mechs in general really don't need any nerfs in my opinion) so its shield bonus should only be changed if the current Gropho pilots think it would be preferable.

Keep in mind I am just brainstorming, modifications and criticism is welcome.

I think he's reffering to me letting a GM know he was not disappearing despite being offline for over 2 hours, between Davisbay and Eria teleports.

I think it was GM Oley that sorted it out.

You're welcome.

Jita has a good (obvious and old) point :

Is it also an exploit to have PvP tournaments between friends, or duels, involving insured bots?

Is it only an exploit if the bot that gets destroyed has no modules fitted, and if so, is it also an exploit if all he has is a syntec sensor amp? If syntec gear counts as having nothing due to their near-zero cost, what if he has a single tier 1 laser, is it still an exploit?

Is it an exploit if a noob genuinely has cheap gear to the point where he unknowingly makes a small profit from the insurance payout? Will this evildoer be banned?

If I insure a single bot then walk it into mobs, is it an exploit? If not, what if I do it with 9 bots? Still not an exploit, but 10 is considered industrial scale, what's the magic number? Does it start being an exploit when the economy is affected? How do you determine if it has been?

Also, will innocent people be compensated for all the trouble you've caused in examples like in the following quote (from this very thread)?

So I'd like to ask the dev team a few more questions.

The smart thing to do would've been not to name anyone, but since it's too late for that, perhaps naming every individual would help. You don't seem to care that half the corps in Infestation are ENTIRELY innocent and of the ones that aren't entirely so, most members are innocent aswell. Although Norhoop Alliance is not affected nearly as much by the bad press, the same could be said for them. Did you really think Herp Derp in the above quote would read your blog and then tell themselves that less than 5% of 2 corps in Infestation are "guilty"?

Also, do you deny the fact that someone could've mistaken this for an unintended yet allowed mechanic? How do you explain the fact that there were no clear rules on the matter even though it would take you all of a few minutes to let everyone know (ahead of time) that it was an exploit?

Do you realize that of all the other games I know that have an insurance mechanic similar to this (there's only one, Eve Online), ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of them consider this a legit means of converting a bot into currency?

Can you confirm that despite knowing this (let's not kid anyone, you know about Eve Online as do a huge portion of your players) you believe it fair not to specify that in this game insurance fraud is an exploit?

Didn't you think someone would eventually come from Eve Online and unknowingly use a mechanic that is very familiar to them, sincerely believing to be innocent? Which is exactly what seems to have happened.

If you can't answer these questions in a satisfactory manner, don't you think the people you punished are innocent? If so, shouldn't you do right by them and at the VERY LEAST clean their name? Are you not worried that uninvolved people (like me) and uninvolved corps (like mine) will be extremely worried about the future of this game if you cannot treat your customers fairly despite the fact that the fault is entirely yours?

EDIT : please do the same thing to my post and quote the questions one by one, then adress them. Good luck I guess.

This is part of the problem. Really? Are you reffering to Heckle? He didn't exploit at all. Apparently we're dealing with conspiracy theorists who think that there are no individuals in an alliance, and that it's one big collective to be guilty by association.

It was already bad enough that those who DID blow up bots for the insurance payout were not breaking any rules at all.

You can't expect people to guess that something they've seen as normal and legitimate for years is considered an exploit here. That's like making an MMO where you can kill people but it's against the rules, then expecting people from every other MMO to be aware of it even though it's not written anywhere. You're supposed to tell people what the rules are.

Insurance fraud is illegal in real life but so is shooting at someone to take their loot, so real life is not a valid reference. Eve Online is the obvious one, with both games being extremely similar including their insurance systems. No surprise that someone coming from a game where the EXACT same mechanic is NOT considered an exploit would assume as much here unless the rules were actually written. Pretending that it was obvious is pathetic.

You can keep repeating the same lines but that would just show that you did not read my original post (or ignored it) because it contains information that makes your conclusion invalid.

Before I go into explaining the extreme yet overlooked difference between what I call insurance FRAUD and what I call the insurance EXPLOIT, I will list a few facts that are relevant to me and my thread :

Fact 1.
I play Drahkar and Brawn, I never participated in neither the fraud nor the exploit, and neither did my corporation. I'm looking at the problem as a third party who knows some people who were involved.

Fact 2.
A significant number of people who play this game also play or have played the very similar game Eve Online. Eve Online has a nearly identical insurance system which is why this is relevant.

Fact 3.
In the previously mentionned Eve Online, insuring a ship (equivalent of a bot in Perpetuum) and then blowing it up to receive the insurance payout is where the term Insurance FRAUD originated. It is NOT against the rules in Eve Online as it is a self balancing system. It is self balancing because the payout is usually slightly lower than the mineral cost of the ship but when the mineral cost goes down, people commit insurance FRAUD for a while until the mineral prices go up again and insurance FRAUD becomes unprofitable again. The profit made from this activity in Eve Online can be considered insignificant compared to the game's entire economy.

Fact 4.
People coming from Eve Online (and many of those who don't) cannot GUESS that insurance FRAUD is against the rules here. They are in fact very likely to assume that it is NOT. Just like they would be likely to assume that offering to triple someone's NIC and then breaking their promise is ALLOWED unless the opposite is mentionned in the rules somewhere.

Now that everyone is aware of these facts, let's look at the immense yet overlooked difference between Perpetuum's insurance FRAUD and Perpetuum's insurance EXPLOIT.

The Insurance FRAUD

Insurance FRAUD as mentionned above in the facts section has been going on for a while in Perpetuum. It involves either building or buying a bot, both of which cost significant time and/or NIC, insuring it for between 20 and 30% of the insurance's payout value, and then intentionally blowing it up to receive the insurance payout. This practice was and is still genuinely thought of by many honest (probably ex-Eve) players as a legitimate means of getting NIC in exchange for a bot. This means is chosen by some because of its self reliance (you don't need to find a buyer for the bot), for the extra profit (depending on the economy, it can sometimes be more profitable than selling the bot) and surely many other logical reasons (perhaps because blowing up a bot removes it from the market, while selling it could put it in the hands of an opponent).

The Insurance EXPLOIT (which may never have happened)

My knowledge of Perpetuum's insurance mechanics is very limited because I only used it to reduce my losses when dying in PvP, never making an actual profit from it since all my bots were obviously fitted with modules. What I have heard of after the punitive actions is that A SMALL PORTION of the insurance FRAUDers were also using an EXPLOIT to increase their insurance payout. By selling a bot (for example a Kain) back and forth to eachother for a ridiculously high price (for example 100 millions NIC), they would influence the game's insurance system into thinking that the average price that the bot was being sold for was much higher than it really is. This EXPLOIT increased the insurance payout and allowed people to make an much larger UNINTENDED profit from the otherwise legit insurance FRAUD. Note that I'm not sure if the EXPLOIT ever even happened, although it was most likely attempted, but this is the only type of activity that I see here that I think would deserve punitive action.

Hopefully many people will read this or already understand the difference between the two. The Devs have done a very poor job explaining these things and also a very poor job at punishing some innocent people (even some who were involved in NEITHER the fraud nor the exploit).

Sadly, I'm certain that some people with hidden agendas will continue spreading lies about how their opponents in a game are all dishonest cheaters, as if the developpers here haven't made a mistake about the way they handled this, and as if Infestation (I mention it because I see Infestation being targetted by the mob, despite the majority of us being entirely innocent) is one big borg collective where if one is guilty, everyone else is aswell.