EVE General Discussion

Thats a certain group of ppl for you.

However:
It is always some kind of exchange.
More ppl would risk more, if there would be more fun in fights.
My own ship blown up?
Not so much fun, except the fight was exciting and i really had the chance to win.


From that point of view, being in nullsec is much more fun.
You are prepared to watch your back. You got more ppl with the same intentions, witch explicilty includes miners, indus and traders( haulers).
And nobody tries to tell you, you should do something, what themself are not prepared to do.

time for "remove local"

Also "uncatchable fits"

FTFY

I believe they're planning for the long game. Hoping they can survive in their cocoon until they blossom into beautiful PvP butterflies of death.

It's sad really, how much possibility they let slip by them all because they're scared. Scared of video games.

Well, the concept has been improved with input of a constructive commenter.

Player-sold insurance contracts.

F

I'd be a bit too risk adverse to pay people money for doing dumb things

Now if they were in our blob and lost a well-fitted thing in a not-dumb situation, well that's SRP so~

it's SRP, so yeah

the point is join a big blob coalition.


probably us, or perhaps join moa??!!

Why would a player want to offer insurance to another player in the game? The idea is just stupid. That is why we have not seen the formation of a player driven insurance market.

How are your going to address the issues of moral hazard and adverse selection? In an economy with a legal system and well defined property rights it is feasible, but not easy. Insurance works in such economies because contracts are enforceable--i.e. the government will use it's monopoly on physical and overwhelming force to ensure people comply with the terms of a contract. We don't have that in this game. Sure, you could try to enforce the contract yourself, but you have to put your own assets on the line then, it is a case of good money after bad and the effects are temporary--you can't put another player in the Eve equivalent of jail. You cannot confiscate his assets. You could try to ruin his reputation, but many players seem to revel in that.

As for the idea of having CCP decrease its insurance premiums, no. Just no. Not by itself. There is already enough ISK sloshing around in the game already. Same with having CCP increase the payouts.

Insurance has nothing to do with it.

Its more to do with the current meta. People will not undock unless they have a chance of winning irrespective of the cost taken in losses and SRP or insurance (which won't cover 10% of your PvP faction battleships).

What Mister Vee said tonight on the meta show alludes to this. The current fleet meta is very cookie cutter - Fozzie and Rise have balanced the game for micro gangs and in doing so screwed up larger fleets. There's 4 or 5 optimal doctrines with hard counters. If you don't have a viable fleet on hand that you know can counter your opponent, at best you run away, at worst you don't even undock. That's been EVE for well over a year and a half now.

SRP is not insurance.

No player will offer insurance in the game. Here is the thing, insurance increases risk taking, Feyd has that right. Problem is that the person issuing the insurance does not want that. That is a sure fire way to go broke. This is the moral hazard problem. This is why insurance has a deductible and insurance coverage is not complete.

Also, you have to remember that insurance is based on probabilities and more than 1 person. You cannot have a functioning insurance market with 1 person. When there is a large number of people in the market then you can appeal to things like the law of large numbers. That is if the bad state occurs with probability p, with enough people you'll have the bad event pretty much p*N where N is the number of people and N is suitably large.

In a complete and competitive insurance market where information is perfect (two giant mother freaking assumptions by the way that not only don't hold in real life, they do not hold in the game either) then the premium for an insurance contract is going to be p*L where L is the loss that is incurred.

To put some hard numbers on this, if the probability of ship loss is 10% and the loss is 100 million ISK, the premium for ship insurance would be 10,000,000 ISK. If we had 10,000 people then the premiums collected would be 100,000,000,000 ISK. And the payouts for ship losses would be...100,000,000,000 ISK. The insurance company will make a profit off of the fact that not everyone will lose their ships immediately all at the same time...i.e., they'll have time to invest it and earn positive rate of return.

Problem is that now those guys who have bought insurance they have less incentive to "fly safe". After all, if they lose their ship they'll collect the insurance and go buy another one and they are out only 10,000,000 ISK. Great right? Not if you are trying to run an insurance company in game. If this leads to ships being lost 20% then you'll end up having to shell out 200,000,000,000 ISK. You are ****ed. Or you can not pay out the claims and pocket the 100 billion ISK. And there is nothing anybody can do about it.

And if you wanted to account for these problems you'd need some actuaries, and also some adjusters. You'd need to look over kill mails, look at the fits, etc. and deny or approve claims. And the actuaries will have to grind through the data to come up with the premiums and so forth. And you'd have to simply deny insurance to the PvPers. They will lose their ships with a very high probability and insurance does not work when the probabilities of large losses gets too high. This is why people who have pre-exiting medical conditions have such a hard time getting health insurance. In this case the probability of getting sick is trivial, 1. In this case the premium should be set equal to the medical costs. Any premium lower than that means the insurance is basically a subsidy/wealth transfer. PvP pilots basically have a pre-existing condition, they love to go into situations where ships, sometimes theirs, go boom.

Bottom line is that anyone would be an idiot to pay a premium to an in-game insurance scheme. Anyone would be an idiot to start one (unless they are planning on absconding with all the money). There is, literally, zero ability to enforce these kinds of contracts in game. The only entity in game that can do this is CCP because...surprise they can print money instantly and effortlessly. It is very much like all of the Eve banks that in the end turned out to be scams where somebody walks off with a large pile of ISK collected from suckers. And even if one were to give it a go, it wouldn't do what everyone seems to think it would do...it would only be offered to mission runners and people doing stuff where the probability of ship loss is minimal.