Smyrk
SRE Brotherhood
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Posted - 2010.03.30 18:30:00 -
[1]
My objections to the idea of per-class pricing for insurance are many but here are a few:
Not all ships of the same class are the same risk to fly, or even close. Eagle vs. Vagabond comes to mind.
Not all ships of the same exact type are the same risk to fly. Railgun w/ sentry Ishtar vs. blaster w/ heavy drone Ishtar for example.
It doesn't make in-fiction sense for the insurance company to insure riskier ships better. I know most people don't mind this, but I think it indicates something is wrong.
Furthermore the market will tend to counter any artificially high insurance for high risk ships. Manufacturers can supply low and high risk ships equally, but demand is higher for high risk ships that get blown up a lot but are fun to fly, so the market cost for high risk ships can be higher relative to the material cost. There are a lot of variables in that equation, though, and I am not sure it really works out that way every time, but again compare the Eagle and Vaga (about same mat cost, but Vaga costs 25M more right now).
It seems to go against CCP's player-sandbox goals to have the game system determine which ships are risky or not. Even given the same ship with the same fit, a player may fly it in a risky way or a safe way. The game system should not make artificial guesses at this.
I understand not wanting to reimburse as much of t2 ship cost compared to t1 (because t2 ships are "advanced" and intended for experienced players who know they are putting ISK at risk), but that already won't quite happen because a chunk of the t2 ship's market cost is the cost of the invention, which doesn't apply to t1. If that alone isn't enough of a penalty to t2 insurance, maybe some kind of adjustment could be made to how the mat costs are calculated for t2 mats (or as a last resort all t2 ships could be less insurable), but it should affect all t2 ships, not per-class.
EVE already has enough poorly documented dark corners. Maybe the different insurance rates will be clearly communicated but I sort of doubt it. It would be great if all ships could end up insurable at 100% of mat cost and still reach the goals of "under-insuring" advanced ships, but at least all t2's should insure at the same penalized rate, etc. Per-class risk assessment just gets crazy.
I should note that anything I say about mat costs and ship costs here has to be taken with a humongous grain of salt. When they remove insurance's function as a floor for mineral costs, almost anything could happen to the entire economy including spectacular breakage. This change is subtly but hugely risky for the EVE economy. I'm excited about it.
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