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Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.21 09:50:00 - [1] Some proof As a first step - and this would just be a temporary band-aid - reduce all insurance premiums and payouts by 25-33% Longer term, we need a better system.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.22 09:17:00 - [2] It is evident that the prices of T1 ships - and therefore minerals are wholly determined by insurance values. In the past CCP have removed mineral price ceilings (reprocessing NPC items) and floors (NPC buy orders), but Insurance is the elephant in the room. Earlier in the game's evolutionary progress, I believe it was valuable and necesary. Now it is become a giant hinderance to the emergence of a true player economy, not to mention a vast ISK fountain, not to mention anti-immersive behaviour like suicide ganking (a legal absurdity made possible and necessary by the economic absurdity of negative-value battleships and the gameplay absurdity of omnipotent CONCORD police). The one real value of insurance is to protect new players. However simple schemes like simply reducing insurance payouts by x% per loss are susceptible to farming with alts. It is also worth noting that without further change, a reduction or removal of insurance would lead to a freefall plunge in T1 ship value, so the absolute loss suffered from ship loss would be considerably reduced in any case. The other issue of course is that at the moment, Insurance is essentially a huge demand subsidy to miners. The industrial economy is at the moment capable of producing many more ships than the war economy requires. An alternative or even a companion to insurance reform might be to consider methods of increasing demand. Which is to say: ship loss. At the very least, some dicussion as to why supply so outstrips demand is merited.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.23 10:59:00 - [3] Originally by: Leneerra They could just remove the top level purchased insurance and see the result. and while they are at it remove all payed insuance payout on suicide kills (only pay base fee) Removing insurance just on suicide kills would necessitate a CONCORD nerf. That's a whole different issue.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.23 11:10:00 - [4] Originally by: Hirana Yoshida No insurance company in the present day world pays a dime when you are careless/reckless with the insured property, duplicate that in Eve and issue is resolved. No payout on PvP kills (ie. player on mail) or self-destructs. If ship is insured and it is lost to another player you do however get a partial (50-75%) refund on the premium. There is no reason to penalise new players, who are more likely to lose boats starting out, by making the initial grind all the more difficult. Cannot be supported in current iteration. Um, how is proposing a change to the way insurance works not supporting a proposal that insurance needs to be changed? A straight reduction in insurance value would actually benefit new players.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.23 15:25:00 - [5] Edited by: Malcanis on 23/11/2009 15:28:33 Originally by: Vincent Gaines This is different than Concord- if Concord kills a ship then there should be no payout. Self destructing, keep as it is. Let them do it. more ships blown up = more need for minerals = more demand = higher mineral prices = relief for starving miners. more ships blown up = more demand = higher prices both being about a market equalibrium. In other words, Insurance is effectively an NPC buy order, as I said in my post above. Hardly what we would normally think of as a "market equilibrium"; the market has little to do with it. CCP have - rightly - been progressively removing NPC market buy/sell orders as they encroach on and distort the price levels the market sets: it's time for them to remove or amend this one too. This is not about suicide ganking. This is about a player driven market.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.23 19:48:00 - [6] Originally by: Vincent Gaines Edited by: Vincent Gaines on 23/11/2009 16:44:33 Originally by: Malcanis Edited by: Malcanis on 23/11/2009 15:28:33 Originally by: Vincent Gaines This is different than Concord- if Concord kills a ship then there should be no payout. Self destructing, keep as it is. Let them do it. more ships blown up = more need for minerals = more demand = higher mineral prices = relief for starving miners. more ships blown up = more demand = higher prices both being about a market equalibrium. In other words, Insurance is effectively an NPC buy order, as I said in my post above. Hardly what we would normally think of as a "market equilibrium"; the market has little to do with it. CCP have - rightly - been progressively removing NPC market buy/sell orders as they encroach on and distort the price levels the market sets: it's time for them to remove or amend this one too. This is not about suicide ganking. This is about a player driven market. Yes, insurance is a "floor" you do understand if you remove payouts that the price of ships would plummet before actually begin rising again? I don't need to explain why do I? Insurance is not a commodity, it's an incentive to place a ship in harm's way. don't get me wrong, mind you I rarely... if EVER, fly a T1 ship these days. Nature of the business. Who said anything about "removing"...?
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.23 20:17:00 - [7] Originally by: Ankhesentapemkah Edited by: Ankhesentapemkah on 23/11/2009 17:30:26 I agree with Malcanis, the current insurance system is an artificial price floor which has no place in a player-run economy. For the solution I'd like to see insurance payout based on actual market value, the base prices made sense 6 years ago but they are out of date. Root mean square price aggregated by volume of sum mineral requirement would seem to be the simplest method.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.23 21:07:00 - [8] Originally by: Kiljaedenas Originally by: Ankhesentapemkah Edited by: Ankhesentapemkah on 23/11/2009 17:30:26 I agree with Malcanis, the current insurance system is an artificial price floor which has no place in a player-run economy. For the solution I'd like to see insurance payout based on actual market value, the base prices made sense 6 years ago but they are out of date. Be careful how this gets implemented. From the way you described this I believe you're thinking about some sort of built in auto-calculation of the insurance rates based on the market average. People could take advantage of this by posting sell orders for T1 ships at ridiculous prices (hundreds of billions of ISK each) in order to jack up the "average" market value, and this way they could potentially get auto-calculated insurance payouts worth far, far more than they should be. I support the idea of tweaking the insurance system, but do NOT use an auto-calculation method based on the average market price. Otherwise, we'll have an even bigger insurance fraud mess than we already have. That's why I suggested a root mean square style calculation, that will even out the effect of outlying values. also: motherofgod.jpg at Ankhthingy supporting one of my proposals
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.24 09:52:00 - [9] Originally by: Kiljaedenas Originally by: Malcanis Edited by: Malcanis on 23/11/2009 21:08:13 That's why I suggested a root mean square style calculation based on mineral prices; that will even out the effect of outlying values. also: motherofgod.jpg at Ankhthingy supporting one of my proposals Still doesn't solve the problem. They'll just make the bogus sell orders on the ore instead once they realize that's how the system works. You can't use any kind of auto-calculation system based on market values of anything, regardless of what formula you use, as people will find a way to pad the market values to their benefit. Exploiters are smart these days Hmmm... I think you're dismissing the concept too easily. What about basing it on actual mineral sales? That would ignore phoney high sell/low buy orders altogether. True, you could have alts selling back and forth to each other, but you'd be spending a titanic amount on broker fees to move the RMS mineral sale price even a little. Remember that RMS calculations level out the effect of outlying values, both high and low. I really think the eve mineral economy is simply too vast to be affected significantly in this way. And un-naturally high buy orders are very susceptible to interference once people see what's happening (and they certainly will). It only takes one smart trader to ninja in a sell order at the right time and your putative insurance market manipulator is left holding vast amounts of someone else's trit at 16 ISK per unit or whatever.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.24 18:24:00 - [10] Originally by: soren tores No claims bonus, is all is needed to sort out this insurance mess. the more ships you lose the more it costs you to insure. could also tie in the new sov mechanics to insurance for 0.0 pvp Kind of harsh to penalise legitimate PvP in this way. 0.0 is economically disadvantaged enough as it is.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.25 12:51:00 - [11] Dynamically linking insurance to mineral prices to make sure that the insurance value is always around 5-10% less than the market value (barring extremely sudden, extremely large shifts, which are very unlikely IMO) is the way forward, I think. Of course this will almost certainly lead to an initial sharp fall in mineral prices. This inevitably means that miners will see a reduction in income. However, the current situation is that there is an oversupply of minerals. In short: we have too many miners.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.25 22:21:00 - [12] Originally by: Kiljaedenas Originally by: Malcanis Edited by: Malcanis on 25/11/2009 13:02:38 Dynamically linking insurance to mineral prices to make sure that the insurance value is always around 5-10% less than the market value (barring extremely sudden, extremely large shifts, which are very unlikely IMO) is the way forward, I think. Of course this will almost certainly lead to an initial sharp fall in mineral prices. This inevitably means that miners will see a reduction in income. However, the current situation is that there is an oversupply of minerals. In short: we have too many miners. Let the market decide how many we need and how much they should earn. However, there is certainly a very strong case for eliminating non-mining sources of minerals. Specifically: rat loot. Some reform of drone alloys might also be considered. Replacing a percentage of the minerals from drone alloys with moon minerals, or even first-stage reactions might be a possibility. Be careful with this idea too. In the missions against enemies that don't have bounties (i.e. drones or empire faction ships) the can loot makes up a significant portion of the income, especially with drones. Missions of equal level and difficulty should have roughly equal overall value in terms of ISK earned through all the various means (loot, salvage, bounties, mission reward, LP). Dropping the amounts on the drone alloys should be buffered by an increase to the mission reward itself, or perhaps a tweak to what items they drop for salvage. Replacing named item drops with named item BPCs (or some sleeperesque equivalent that could maybe also be used for invention) would not only eliminate the mineral supply but it would also increase mineral demand. Additional bonus: looting missions wouldn't require so much cargo space. Changing drone drops is a tougher issue, but tbh this should be debated in its own thread. This one is about insurance reform.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.26 07:49:00 - [13] Originally by: De'Veldrin Insurance reform yes. One thing I'm seeing a lot of, though, is people tossing around words like average and mean. Let's be very very clear on which one we're discussing, because they aren't the same thing. Mean, modal, median, yeah yeah. If you dont want to use the mean mineral sale price, then explain why you think the modal or median would be better.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.26 18:44:00 - [14] Originally by: Beau Heem SANDBOX ffs. This is all far-fetched... Yes, it really is! Now dont get me wrong, there was pretty much nothing in your post I didn't like, but what you're talking about would suck up huge development resources and ad a vast amount of complexity. In essense what you're describing would require a true secondary market, sophisticated financial tools, etc. Essentially a wholesale reform and upgrade of the economic basis of the game. I was thinking of something rather less ambitious (although still very economically significant): an end to the outright equation between insurance value and mineral/ship prices.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.28 10:56:00 - [15] Originally by: Gnulpie I am against lowering the insurance payout in general. The insurance payout acts as a lower bounder for the minerals. If minerals become to cheap, people can (and will) make profit by selfdestruction ships and thus they increase the demand of minerals and therefore increase the prices. Removing insurance will only result in a sharp drop of mineral prices, making mining even less profitable. It is already not that profitable compared to other activities, for example level 4 mission-running. Just lowering the insurance payout by 25-33% will lead us nowhere anyway because then mineral prices will simply drop by 25 - 33% and we will be where we were just before. A different insurance model in the long run is some other topic (with premium fees for people who get their ships blown up often and discounts for people who rarely use the insurance payout for example). I love the way the last sentence of your post completely contradicts your first If you want to improve mineral throughput (and therefore prices), you should advocate better insurance rates for people who lose lots of ships.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.29 08:58:00 - [16] Originally by: Sellmewarez Bad idea. Not supportin dis since it doesn't address the issue and only makes pvp more of a barrier which strings out the following equation; less pvp = less lost ships = less bought ships = less money going to industrailists = market collaspe The solution? More money in the hands of players so they can buy more ships. Maybe dominion will change this, we will see. When ship prices are so low that people can make good ISK by self-destructing them, then arguably there is not a shortfall in ship supply. T1 ships are effectively free. In fact you get paid to buy them! How much cheaper do you want them? This raises the prices of minerals which then in turn raises the prices of other things that are built from minerals - such as eg: modules. Which aren't free and you're not paid to buy. So let's imagine that insurance values reduce by 25%, and ship values consequently by 20%. Minerals prices will also fall by 20%. This means that building modules will be nearly 20% cheaper. Module prices will then also fall. So we will have a situation where T1 ships are still virtually free, but it's considerably cheaper to fit them. Please explain why you are against this.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.11.29 17:44:00 - [17] Originally by: Tradeslave1 Malcanis: There IS another problem though With mineral prices dropping, everything that con be bought gets cheaper, but that means everything that needs to sell stuff to the market (especially miners) will make far less ISK, if the mineral prices drop by 20% thats 20% less money for everyone that sells mins. So either they go to missioning/ratting etc. and make ISK from something else -> more money in the system, less minerals avaiable, stuff gets more expensive, Inflation...perhaps even supply shortage on Minerals till they get more expensive again. OR we have the same problem again in 6 Months, whith another cry for lower insurance...I aggree, that the situation isn't acceptable, and that insurance might need a change. But your solution will not solve the whole problem, only cure a symptom for a while What you're saying is that we have a mineral production surplus. I agree, we do... kind of. This is because mineral demand is distorted by the huge insurance subsidy. If you look back to page 1 I hint that instead of just looking at a supply side solution, we should also consider the demand side. In short, find a way to replace the artificial demand from fixed insurance rats with greater player demand. And what better way to do that than to reduce the non-insurable component of ship loss, ie: module cost? In short, because of the insurance subsidy, minerals are being diverted into insurance-fraud ships when they should be used for building modules. Resulting in excessively high ship and module prices for consumers. Let the player market decide how much minerals are worth. When insurance values shadow mineral prices, they will. Why should I have to pay excessive prices because miners want subsidising?
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.02 13:01:00 - [18] Originally by: Jonathan Dawnchaser That exploit is preventable by ignoring extreme outliers. But if someone wants to invest the taxes to increase the price, I say "let them." When you put it like that, I agree.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.03 15:18:00 - [19] Originally by: Krystal Flores If there is any change it could be fixed so t2 ships didnt pay out less than their t1 ver. Your wish is granted; all T2 ships pay out considerably more than the T1 version, generally about 50-100% more IIRC. Note: you will have to actually insure them to get the full payout.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.05 10:45:00 - [20] It would be awesome if you could bring this up with the CSM.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.08 17:42:00 - [21] Update: in the last few weeks, trillions of ISK have been injected in to the economy by these players who are building ships for no other reason than to destruct them for insurance. This is over and above any losses from normal game play. This situation is URGENT now.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.21 11:02:00 - [22] Originally by: Trazis Edited by: Trazis on 21/12/2009 06:20:09 Unsupported. 4 reasons. People in null are already skittish about fights, you really only get a fight if your out numbered cause people are afraid of loosing their ships. Take away their fall back and you wont ever get fights. People who want to take away insurance money are people who get suicide ganked in their freighters and ya suicide ganking insurance needs to be fixed. People who want insurance taken away are people that have so much isk they could wipe their a$$ with it and still have some to use blow their load on. No insurance means less isk for people who fight and pvp and loose ships which means more grind and less pvp, which means less fun which means worse eve. Nobody wants grind.... unless you came here from WoW... in which case go back and stop tainting eve. Solution to your filthy proposal based on filthy proof, remove insurance from self destructing you filthy noob don't freakin remove it from the freakin game. Thats like saying o the abbadon has too much armor, lets take away 1/3 of its armor and low slots. My personal guess is that you produce ships namely rokhs and abbadons and are mad cause you have to loose 2m profit now cause people are blowing up ur ships. You sir are filthy, rash, and extreme. Use common sense, not carebear emo wrath. Wow... just wow.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.21 20:19:00 - [23] Originally by: yani dumyat Originally by: Trazis You sir are filthy, rash, and extreme. Use common sense, not carebear emo wrath. Yet more irony ^^ I wouldn't mind, but being called a "carebear" by a guy with his KB stats... well anyway, he didn't read the thread and now he looks pretty silly. Hopefully others will avoid doing the same.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.23 22:05:00 - [24] Originally by: Dr Cron not supported Thanks. Any reason why?
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.24 08:36:00 - [25] Originally by: Dr Cron Edited by: Dr Cron on 23/12/2009 23:54:12 Originally by: Malcanis Originally by: Dr Cron not supported Thanks. Any reason why? I may be wrong but I still dont understand how the market cant sort this out or what the advantages would be in drastically reducing insurance payouts. Apparently the only way to game the system for huge profits requires a MASSIVE production capability. You're talking a 2mil deficit on a tier 3 BS right? Wouldn't the solution require a 2 mil adjustment rather than 30% as you propose? Eliminating some insurance payouts under certain criteria I could possibly support, but an overall reduction in payout hits me in the wallet due to my chars' PVP losses and thus personally I dont like the idea. And my guess is that the average little guy feels the same. My question would be, how would a reduction in insurance payouts actually benefit ME? You could read through the thread to find out. If you buy anything made from minerals, then the current insurance system is costing you ISK, because insurance artificially inflates the cost of minerals. It is basically an NPC buy order. That's why the market cant "sort this out" - players can't compete with NPCs with infinite funds who dont care about value. As for the MASSIVE production capability, plenty of people have that capability. Read the thread linked to in the OP. The biggest time sink was actually destructing the ships. The problem that this causes is that it's a vast ISK fountain, with no comparable ISK sink, it's scalable, and that it keeps ship and module prices artificially high. It also means that suicide ganking is OP, because you can buy and T1-fit a ship for free. Whilst I do believe that suicide ganking is absolutely necessary at the moment, it should cost something to lose even a T1 ship. Pegging insurance at around 85-95% of ship mineral value means that it will always cost at least a few mil to lose even an unfitted ship. However the bonus side of that is that T1 ships will almost certainly become quite a bit cheaper.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.27 18:55:00 - [26] Originally by: Hamano Walker Originally by: Allen Ramses I don't see ship prices dropping that low in the foreseeable future. My only problem with the idea of modifying the base payout in any way is that right now T1 ships and by extension their components are pegged to insurance plus or minus 1%. The more you believe that overproduction for suicide is propping prices up, the more true this is. If 10% of the ships constructed are sold as suicides no insurance change in any direction will change much else. If 90% of battleship production is for suicide then changing insurance rates will directly change the prices those builders are willing to pay for minerals so they can still make suicide ships. Raise payouts, mineral prices go up, directing more filthy lucre from the mega-rich mass suicide builders to the newb miners. Lower payout and you won't change the big boys' balance sheet much, but you will change the new guys'. An alternate theory is that there is a magic number below which the big boys will stop. In that case they'll probably stop building ships entirely, raising the price on a BS even as the mineral prices plummet. The "magic number" you speak of is obtained by pegging the net insurance value of the the ship to slightly below the mineral value at the time the ship is insured. Thus at any given time, it will always pay someone better to sell or reprocess a ship than it will to insure it just to suicide it. It will never be worth building of ships just to suicide them, because the net payout will be less than the cost of the minerals you used to build it. If you peg the net payout at, say, 90% of the mineral cost, the effect on player who use the ship 'normally' will be fairly minimal. Without the artificial price floor, the market will be able to set a true value to minerals, and prices will probably fall. I reckon by at least 30%. This means that a tier 1 BS will probably sell for around 40M ISK. Given that it costs about 20-40M to T2 fit a BS, increasing the post-insurance cost to 24-44M isn't really going to make a big difference to most people's willingness to use them. Even if prices stay the same, we're looking at 25.5 - 45.5M instead of 20-40M.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.28 23:05:00 - [27] Originally by: Gah'Matar Originally by: Malcanis If you peg the net payout at, say, 90% of the mineral cost, the effect on player who use the ship 'normally' will be fairly minimal. Without the artificial price floor, the market will be able to set a true value to minerals, and prices will probably fall. I reckon by at least 30%. This means that a tier 1 BS will probably sell for around 40M ISK. Given that it costs about 20-40M to T2 fit a BS, increasing the post-insurance cost to 24-44M isn't really going to make a big difference to most people's willingness to use them. Even if prices stay the same, we're looking at 25.5 - 45.5M instead of 20-40M. This works if something provides stability to the mineral price from manipulations. Probably something along the lines of the median price paid over the last 7 days throughout all of new eden (can be computed during downtime / offline). Payout and premium would become static as off when the policy was subscribed. So if BS prices went up 30% then net payout would become something like ~66%. If price went down significantly, you could strip the ship, blow it up and buy a replacement for a small one-time profit. Another thing is that with insurance "guaranteed" to pay less then replacement cost, daily or weekly premiums would make sense improving the affordability of insurance to new chars (while being mostly irrelevant for old chars). Have you any idea how much ISK it would take to move the whole mineral market by more than 10%? Trillions wouldn't be enough. And you'd need to move it rather more than 10% to actually make a profit, and do it quite fast as well. That kind of manipulation would not only require vast capital, it would also be fantastically susceptible to outside interference. If the dynamic insurance price is based on market sales, that means you can only change the mineral basket price by actually buying or selling minerals. Unfilled buy/sell orders wont affect the insurance price. Even if you're just selling them back and forth to an alt, the quantities involved would rack up inconceivable broker fees, and people would start to notice long before you'd moved the basket price 2%, let alone 20%.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2009.12.31 20:43:00 - [28] Originally by: Hamano Walker Two operators with a few billion between them can drive the value of completed orders of Tritanium up pretty quickly, though. Depending on the calculations, you might be able to throw them off by having one sell many units to the other at slightly higher than market value or by selling a very few units at an insanely high value. I seriously doubt that they would be able to do this. Those broker fees will add up fast, for one thing. And basing the basket price off of market sales means that this toing and froing with minerals is susceptible to other players ninjaing in their own orders. One tiny slip by the would-be market manipulators would leave them with billions of units of someone else's 25 isk trit. Have a look at the weekly mineral sales volume over the whole of EvE, and work out how much you'd have to spend to raise the aggregate mineral price by, say, 20% using the methods you outline. The sums involved are almost inconceivable. And there's no way you can do it stealthily, and there's no way you can prevent other people profiting by at least as much as you but without spending all that ISK.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.11 05:02:00 - [29] Edited by: Malcanis on 11/01/2010 05:04:18 Originally by: Hamano Walker I seriously doubt that they would be able to do this. Those broker fees will add up fast, for one thing. And basing the basket price off of market sales means that this toing and froing with minerals is susceptible to other players ninjaing in their own orders. One tiny slip by the would-be market manipulators would leave them with billions of units of someone else's 25 isk trit. Absolutely agreed that raising the overall average completed order price by any appreciable amount is nigh impossible. Lowering it, on the other hand, requires nothing more than a freighter full of Trit (or whatever), two characters that could even be on the same account and one station anywhere that either has no trit up for sale or can be bought out efficiently. 0.0 offers any number of these. The higher base cost the mineral, the easier it is to tank this arbitrary average figure. The cost in fees (with no trade skills at all) would be roughly 3ISK/10,000 units to set up a local sell order for .01/unit with the left hand and to buy it with the right. I leave it to you to figure out what effect this bizarre indirect manipulation of insurance and mineral prices would do. Of course all of this is entirely beside the point since the mineral prices do not justify the logic that insurance inflates them. I invite you to compare which minerals are the most overpriced and the most underpriced. If insurance were bouying mineral prices, you would expect the high end minerals (low supply) to be the ones reaping the most benefits. Yet Tritanium is the only mineral that can not be readily acquired for less than its base value and the highest few can easily be had for 1/2-1/3 their base value. Those aren't artificially high prices based on insurance fraud. It's trivially obvious that ship insurance does provide a price floor (minus a small percentage for production costs, etc) for the aggregate value of minerals, since there's no real limit to the amount of minerals you can use this way. If insurance was not bouying the price of minerals then the aggregate price would have to be higher than the insurance value, since insurance is effectively an unlimited NPC buy order. As the price of one mineral rises, the others fall to compensate. High-end minerals have been depressed far below their base value for 2 years now for the simple reason that vast quantities of them are easily available from the rats in drone space. (The huge amounts of high-ends available in W-space didn't help prices either) When I started playing back in 2006, Zydrine and Megacyte were a lot closer to their base values, and ships typically sold for 10-20% above net insurance value. After the drone regions opened, high end prices went in to free fall, and T1 ship prices sank to insurance value, never to rise more than 2-3% above it again. The facts are there for anyone to see.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.12 23:32:00 - [30] Originally by: Juwi Kotch Edited by: Juwi Kotch on 12/01/2010 23:27:37 Supported. Insurance should be generally and totally removed, but at least no insurance payout anymore for ships being destroyed by Concord. If insurance would be removed, we would need a new ISK sink replacing its effects, though. Uh... Insurance is a huge ISK fountain, not a sink. This thread is not advocating the total removal of insurance, since that would have huge and horrible effects - not least the obsoletion of sub-BS T1 ships. When T1 ships cost more to build than you can insure them for, then suicide ganking will become balanced again.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.14 18:26:00 - [31] Edited by: Malcanis on 14/01/2010 18:30:13 Originally by: Ere Colliseru Damn too many topics for the same thing. I wrote here my view: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1222490&page=1#29 Quote: It is widely talked about that Eve is like real life and therefore not safe. In real life if someone is caught by police he not only get a punishment (in our case its the loss of the ship), but also he is not insured anymore (would need to be introduced) AND if he has got the money he as to pay the damage he caused (i.e. not only the truck but also the freight i.e. other cars). This would mirror life more realistic. Thats no whining, just pure facts. So if someone ganks a Iteron 5 with 6 Catalyst in a Myrm he should loose insurance for the myrm, pay the Iteron (probably with or without rigs) and the cargo. At least in 0.5-1. In low sec there should be only the loss of insurance as its more like wild west (but still you loose insurance cause of "improper use". That's outside of the scope of this thread, and in any case I strongly oppose it. Losing a ship should be sufficient "punishment"; it's not up to CCP to add extra penalties to stop people who play in ways you don't like. Your proposal would make suicide ganking completely pointless. Please remember that EVE is founded on the principle of non-consensual PvP. If you want to effectively remove suicide ganking, you need to match that proposal with some other method and make your own proposal. This one is about how insurance is calculated, not under what conditions it is paid, nor is it about nerfing suicide ganking. In any case, no "realistic" insurance company would ever insure a pod pilot's ship. There can never be anything remotely "realistic" about ship insurance in EVE, as *real* insurance companies take more in premiums than they pay out in compensations. This is why it is also foolish to expect any kind of player-run insurance to be widely applicable. "Realism" is a poor reason to do something compared to "game balance". At the moment, the insurance system is both unrealistic and unbalanced. My proposal is that it should be unrealistic and balanced
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.17 01:31:00 - [32] Originally by: Malcanis Edited by: Malcanis on 25/11/2009 13:02:38 Dynamically linking insurance to mineral prices to make sure that the insurance value is always around 5-10% less than the market value (barring extremely sudden, extremely large shifts, which are very unlikely IMO) is the way forward, I think. Of course this will almost certainly lead to an initial sharp fall in mineral prices. This inevitably means that miners will see a reduction in income. However, the current situation is that there is an oversupply of minerals. In short: we have too many miners. Let the market decide how many we need and how much they should earn. However, there is certainly a very strong case for eliminating non-mining sources of minerals. Specifically: rat loot. Some reform of drone alloys might also be considered. Replacing a percentage of the minerals from drone alloys with moon minerals, or even first-stage reactions might be a possibility.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.17 10:31:00 - [33] Originally by: yani dumyat Originally by: Malcanis In short: we have too many miners. Let the market decide how many we need and how much they should earn. So you think CCP should abandon miners to the free market even if that means loosing subscriptions? Haha good luck with that. Every other profession gets "abandoned to the free market". Why do miners deserve special protection and subsidy? Are you saying that people who mine are all incapable of adapting and respecialising? Originally by: yani dumyat If you understand the root of the problem then why are you advocating a drop in the mineral price floor that would potentially drive people away from the game rather than fixing the mechanic that is driving down mineral prices? Because miners deserve the advantages of the free market, as well as its rigors. That's called "balance".
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.20 21:32:00 - [34] Edited by: Malcanis on 20/01/2010 21:36:44 Originally by: yani dumyat With Malcanis's proposal the burger flipper is still being undercut by rat loot so the basket price will never double You do know I have consistently supported proposals to reduce or eliminate the mineral content of rat loot over the last 2 years? I even mention it in this thread specifically for that reason. But yes, anyway thanks for making it obvious that miners are quite aware that Insurance is effectively an NPC mineral buy order at levels far above what players are currently prepared to pay. Go make yet another proposal to reform the mineral content of rat loot and I will support you... even though I make my ISK ratting and missioning. I like the idea of replacing rat loot with meta BPCs that can either be used to build meta items or used directly by inventors to increase their invention chances (such that even meta-1 pieces have value) I think it would also be a great idea to increase by 10-20% the amount of Zydrine and Megacyte required to build ships. Just to make this explicit - I do NOT want to see miners nerfed. I have long thought that the profession needed some DevLoveÖ. But as part of that love, I want to see mining changed from an NPC-supported profession to a player supported profession. Which is also consistent with the other arguments I have made over the years. " Care to elaborate on these "options available to substitute insurance in order to maintain this mineral price floor"? It would be nice to hear some fresh ideas on this subject." EG: Change POS and/or POS modules in to player-created items. That will soak up a fantastic amount of minerals.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.21 19:32:00 - [35] Originally by: Sefredius Mengsk -1 If ppl are selling ships below value and I can make money by selfdestructing I do it. Yes, that's exactly the problem. Please try and see past your own immediate narrow self-interest.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.21 21:21:00 - [36] Originally by: Liang Nuren Originally by: Malcanis Yes, that's exactly the problem. Please try and see past your own immediate narrow self-interest. I suspect that if we removed insurance payouts on concord kills and self destructs, that we'd see insurance becoming a straight out isk sink. -Liang Speaking for myself, active in 0.0 as I am, it's been a decent net positive lately. About +130-140 mill this year so far.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.22 12:27:00 - [37] Originally by: Liang Nuren Edited by: Liang Nuren on 21/01/2010 23:52:00 Originally by: Malcanis Speaking for myself, active in 0.0 as I am, it's been a decent net positive lately. About +130-140 mill this year so far. Speaking for myself, Insurance has cost me a few bil over the course of my time in Eve. -Liang Ed: Hell, suicide ganking with a T1 fit Thorax costs about 3M - even fully insured. Factoring in named/T2 modules, and I doubt you've "made" isk off of dying. Oh of course I haven't made ISK off dying - a T2-fit BS with Trimarks has about 50-60 mill of unrecoverable loss on it. But I've made money from insurance; paying 19M to get 60M back.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.22 17:45:00 - [38] Originally by: Brengholl s 2. the insurance is calculated from the price of minerals needed to build a ship, but those prices are fixed to a value ccp set many years ago -so how about ccp update those mineral values to actual average mineral values... maybe quarterly. This is essentially the tl;dr of the thread, except that we were thinking of something more like a 7-day rolling average sale price. No need to remove CONCORD payouts, just set the insurance at 85-90% of insurance value and the problem pretty much takes care of itself.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.23 10:36:00 - [39] Originally by: Maxsim Goratiev also make extending isurance contract cost half as much as initiating one. that will stop people blowing up their ships as soon az insutance runs out. That's a good idea, I like that one.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.25 20:41:00 - [40] Originally by: Dred Smith Whatever happened to CCP Fear, and his statement in Dev Blog of 2008.08.06 that 'removal of insurance in CONCORD events will be implemented in the near future'. If CCP were planning to make this change, why did they change their minds - is there a link to comments from anyone in CCP? I couldn't find any. It was explained at length and in detail to Fear why that would be a very bad idea, and the proposal was put in a bag and drowned, as it deserved to be. Insurance is irrelevant to small ships being used for ganking. Losing ~10% of the price of a battleship will make casual BS ganks uneconomic. But you if you remove insurance altogether, then you have undesirable effects like making NPC corp freighters, orcas, etc, effectively invulnerable. You have to remember that suicide ganking isn't wrong. It's not cheating or undesirable or unintended or exploiting or griefing, and while it arguably needs rebalancing, it doesn't need eliminating.
Malcanis Vanishing Point. The Initiative.	Posted - 2010.01.25 21:01:00 - [41] Originally by: Pasus Nauran I agree with the idea that insurance premiums should fluctuate with average mineral prices on a regular adjustment schedule (every 7 days or month) is really the way it should go. Fixed prices just doesn't make sense when everything else in the economy fluctuates with supply and demand. I do also think that payouts from being Concorded or self-destructing should be reduced (to half) or completely eliminated. It makes absolutely no sense that either situation would grant full insurance payout. Once insurance payouts are lower than mineral value, self-destructing will pretty much stop, since it will always be better to reprocess the ship for minerals. As for "making sense", coherency takes a back seat to game balance. If you're going to eliminate insurance for CONCORDed ships in the name of "good sense", then fair enough. But we will have to abandon the idea of CONCORD of being omnipotent, invincible and omniscient and working for free, since that doesn't make any sense either. If CONCORD beome falliable, unreliable and escapable, then I have no problem with removing insurance for CONCORD kills. In any case, I dont want this thread to become about suicide ganking. There have been more than enough discussions about that. This one is about reforming the way insurance is calculated.

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