No money for insurance -> basically delete your game

[Chris M Fortune]

Two things,

I regularly fly without insurance. I do so knowing that if I screw up I loose it all. That is how the game works and I knew that from day one without reading the manual.

I have recently did a clear save from having a python, upgraded to value of over 120 million and about nother 30 million in credit. I am loving starting again about 15 days in and flying an ASP.

It is much easier the second time round as you don't loose you understanding, skill or knowledge. As an aside this time round I am only exploring and have still gotten to an ASP in 15 days, not fully upgraded for sure but I am not that far off.

 

[Kernyx]

I'd like to put this into another light:

Isn't it a bad design decision to allow a player to lose months of hard work if they fail to pay the insurance?
Sure it is their own fault at some point, there is no doubt they can avoid that, BUT:

If it happens, no matter who's to blame, there is a giantific risk that the player quits the game entirely simple due to the fact that he doesn't want to go through all that grinding again.
The feeling to have lost so much time and effort would ruin the game for the majority of the players it happens to.
Therefore I highly recommend to evaluate alternatives, such as a punishment mission.
Here is an example:


The player is not able to buy back their ship, so they have to work for the military to pay off the debt (or better said to buy off the ship from the insurance).
They would have to participate in battles until they have saved up enough money to buy back their ship.

Another alternative, that would be far easier, would be to first put the player into the basic Sidewinder and store the ship in the shipyard.
If they want to get back into their old ship, they have to pay the insurance fee.
It would be a hard punishment since they would have to grind the required money with a Sidewinder if they don't have a second ship.
If they have a second ship, they still have to grind the money back before they can get back into their main ship and therefore for example won't be able to participate in a battle until then.

 

[-SOVEREIGN-]

[...]

Another alternative, that would be far easier, would be to first put the player into the basic Sidewinder and store the ship in the shipyard.
If they want to get back into their old ship, they have to pay the insurance fee.
It would be a hard punishment since they would have to grind the required money with a Sidewinder if they don't have a second ship.
If they have a second ship, they still have to grind the money back before they can get back into their main ship and therefore for example won't be able to participate in a battle until then.

This is actually the best solution I've read so far. (If FD would want to change it)

 

[Flappers]

Hi,

Isn't there any better solution for this?

The one and only solution... don't go all out on a ship and hope you won't get blown up.
If you don't have enough money for a ship, and it's insurance... don't buy it. Simple.

Keep your old ship, go make some more credits and go buy the new one once you have enough to cover insurance.

Man, we really need a subforum for these threads

 

[Shadowed]

If your ship's insurance is out of your reach, store it and fly an affordable one until you feel like you can fly it risk free.

 

[clinton]

Fix insurance to stop whinging please Devs it's not hard

I'm really sick of seeing the "I've lost everything threads". I know it's easy to keep enough for insurance, but why turn a 5% loss into a 100% loss just because you didn't know the mechanics of the game and the bizarre insurance system.

Think about real insurance, and you crashed your car, here's how it works. These are your options.

(1) Pay the excess, get back your car.
(2) Get the value of the car minus the excess.

You've already paid for insurance so they owe you a car, or the cash for the car.

So this is how it should work in ED:

(1) Pay excess OR
(2) Sell insured ship, pay excess and get rest in cash.

In case 1 you pay 5%.
In case 2 you effectively pay 15%, as you lose 10% on ship sale, and 5% excess. You also need to rebuy a ship and modules.

So death without insurance is at least 3 times worse under this system. That's punishment enough.

For those of you who want to make ED more "Dangerous" well just raise insurance to 10%. Or 20%. But just annoying new players isn't make Elite Dangerous more dangerous, it's just making it more annoying.

 

[Cmdr Eran Mintor]

I think a warning/notice before you undock that you don't have the necessary funds to cover insurance would suffice. People who want to take a risk they can't afford deserve the reward/consequence they receive.

 

[Aeropilot]

I guess if you want realistic insurance we would have to pay a monthly premium as well.

This would be cheap for the "undesirable" ships, especially those not designed for combat like the Adder. But then again, the premium would be very high for combat ships that are more likely to be destroyed. So insuring a combat Anaconda would cost a vast amount each month, but you would get the ships value back when you lose it.

Of course, this premium would also be affected by your age and gender. Cheaper insurance for older women, and very expensive insurance for young men.



Edit: Oh, and I forgot. When you lose your ship you would fill in a form explaining what happened, and after 4-6 weeks of processing they tell you that the loss was your own fault and insurance payout will be thoroughly reduced as a result.

 

[Valethar]

How do you guys keep track of the hours played?

Some games have a /played command. I'm not sure if ED has one or not, I've never actually looked.

If not, you can use some third party programs, such as Raptr, Xfire, Steam, etc.. to track time played. For example, Raptr is telling me I have 34 Days 19 Hours 44 Minutes (835 hours) played thus far, and that I need another 2,102 hours to catch up to the person with the most hours played at present.

Some of that time, for folks with a high number of hours played, came from Alpha and Beta in addition to release, though I've no doubt quite a few folks racked up impressive totals during the Race to Elite competition.

 

[jan]

Yes a warning be Nice, if you stil fly whitout Insurance, you cant blame anyone exept yourself. shud be easy to add to the program.

 

[Valethar]

They can't fix what they didn't break. It's not the mechanic that's broken, it's the interface between the keyboard and chair that needs to be adjusted.

 

[IceFire122]

I kind of like the OP's idea. Players would still lose their ship and significant progress, but not all of it.
If you for example have a Python and loose it due to lack of insurance with the proposed system, you might end up with a T7. This would force you to work up the way to the Python again without the frustration of starting from scratch.

Stating form scratch will lose FD players over time, as the hit is too much for some of them. I lost my progress once during beta, but could cope with it, since it was early and a reset was planned anyway.

 

[-SOVEREIGN-]

so why exactly didnt you just post this into the ongoing thread?

 

[xkjacob]

I think you'll find there is no solution to whining. Once you fix one thing they whine about another.
Let's just enjoy their tears while we can.

 

[clinton]

They can't fix what they didn't break. It's not the mechanic that's broken, it's the interface between the keyboard and chair that needs to be adjusted.

The mechanic is broken. No real life insurance works like this. In real life insurance the excess is simply taken from the insured price.

The insurance person doesn't turn up at the car crash and say "oh, so you don't have $5,000 in your bank account right now? WELL TOO BAD NO INSURANCE FOR YOU!"

 

[Munted]

• A bigger cash insurance safety net from the Pilots Federation for higher-ranked pilots so you can fly more expensive ships with reduced risk. We want pilots to be daring.

^^^^^

You crashed to early this was in news letter #72

So this might mean less people whine about how they get punished for their own dumb mistakes.

I sill think you fly without insurance you have it coming.

 

[SteveLaw]

The mechanic is broken. No real life insurance works like this. In real life insurance the excess is simply taken from the insured price.

Again you're missing the part where real life insurance requires us to pay a regular premium.

 

[Insomnia]

I don't understand these insurance haters...

 

[SteveLaw]

I don't understand these insurance haters...

They mess up, look to blame something else.

 

[Ydiss]

Again you're missing the part where real life insurance requires us to pay a regular premium.

That and it's not actually the insurance that we are paying. The cost of insurance is built in to the cost of the ship and the pilot's federation front the cost. We pay the "excess" as a fee.

Hence it's called "rebuy cost".

But it's simpler to call it insurance. But it's simply a death penalty. A lot of games have it.