EVE General Discussion

Hey i think this is a great idea, do somthing criminal no insurance payout. To all the suicide gankers who are up in arms at the suggestion, well by your own Mantra man the **** up and stop moaning like a carebear. Lets face it this is just a disscussion and we are getting tears.....

Eve is a game driven by consequences for actions. It would be very easy to encourage ship destruction - just provide complete refunds for all losses. But if you minimise the consequences for losing ships you minimise the uniquely challenging features of this game.

Btw - I note that the 'ship loss is good' brigade never suggest that haulers should be encouraged to be more reckless with their ships by receiving full insurance for their cargos. Odd that. It's almost as if they are not really committed to the argument and just want to use it to make a cheap 'point'.

Off topic posts removed.

Please stay on topic, thank you.

And you would know that because you designed the game??

When the last major nerf to insurance was implemented CCP stated that insurance was designed to help players get back on their feet. It was not designed to make players money.

And guess what? That's part of where I want to arrive with all this.

People keep saying “oh, but I might lose my 200M ISK ship — huuuuge risk”, but they keep forgetting the other parts of the equation: the reward and the probability. How often does that loss happen? How much have they accumulated before they lose that ship? How large is the final net loss when (or even if) they're eventually targeted?

Same thing with the gankers (or the image of them at least): yes, it's entirely possible to discover some motherload of drops — someone carrying BPOs and a large pile of meta-bajillion items… but how much waiting around happens between that? How many opportunities are missed? How many targets are lost because you can't be there because of the last gank? How many are lost because you picked the wrong gate to scout? How many turn out to be a net loss due to the RNG hating your guts? I'm not even talking about opportunity cost as in “doing something else/something more profitable” — I'm talking about doing the exact same thing and inherently losing out on opportunities to either earn large volumes of small (net) rewards or on opportunities to score it big.
That depends if we're talking about opportunity to do something else, or opportunity to collect from what we're already doing. In the former case, then yes, but the same goes for ganking — same, same. If it's the latter, then not so much for miners, but most certainly for gankers.
Fair enough: it's not a quantity of risk — it's a risk factor. It's (confusingly enough for something called opportunity cost) the “probability” part of the Cost × Probability equation.

You risk losing out on “ze big van” when cooling your heels or when being too slow. Perhaps a better measure, in terms that most highsec dwellers understand, is ISK/h after expenses. Is it any better or worse than what hose miners/traders/haulers collect? Basically, so what if their risks are low? Anything you do in highsec can be done with next to zero risk if you do it right. The real question is: how does it stack up against other activities? Is it unfairly profitable compared to mining, hauling, mission-running, explorations, incursions, trading, S&I, whathaveyou?

…and before anyone chimes in with “so do that instead” — that's not the point. Or, rather, if you use that as your point, then the miners/haulers can also go do something else, and having nothing to complain about anyway. The point is that the gankers want to gank just like the miners want to mine. Neither of them want to grind incursions, even though the pay is several times higher and the risks are nil — they want to do what they want to do, and the question is whether that activity is unbalanced or unfair compared to other methods of making money in highsec.
I know this because I play the game. Look at what causes insurance to pay out. Trust me, “accidental” is not a factor unless you consider putting your ship in the line of fire of lasers an accident…
…and guess what, it doesn't. Well, not as much, unless you have very friendly a helpful miner/manufacturers who have no clue about the value of their work. The old insurance fraud is largely gone.

It was a Tier 3 BC we were talking about and I asked you to list the skills you think are needed.

Quoting Adunh Slavy:
It should be removed because it distorts behaviors outside what humans would other wise conclude as a reasonable action. It distorts Eve's sandbox as a crucible of human nature into the realms of the frivolous.

I take great affront at this comment.
I’m no mere human. I’m a Demigod. So are you.
Watch the intro son.

DireNecessity

I agree. I like the idea of realistic insurance in return for realistic police. I think that if people want suicide gankers to not get insurance (as in the RL) then we should have realistic police that you can successfully run away from. in addition to that, I feel that if you're elite enough you should not only be able to run away from them, but successfully tank them and blow them up. I also feel that those CONCORD rats should drop awesome loot (like RL police when they have the right stuff.... and some of their pistols are very expensive and very nice depending on the country).

wait.... CONCORD was like that once.... a very long time ago.... and then they changed to the lolwtfcan'thurtmeyourdead force that they are now. hm... people still suicide gank, it's a part of the game mechanics to be able to do so.... if insurance was removed from suicide gankers and then CONCORD was equally adjusted to also be more RL (which is what the people against suicide gankers getting the insurance want, right? more RL likeness?) wouldn't there just be more suicide gankers after getting those things updated to be more 'RL'? I think this entire thread is only in here because some hulk pilots are tired of losing their ships. There was a paladin (I think it was a paladin) kill a while back where the paladin pilot had been running level 4's in the most expensive non-titan ship ever recorded due to the officer modules he had equipped. it took like 30 or 50 people or so to actually pull off the successful gank. the paladin pilot didn't complain about his losses, nor did he state he thought the suicide gankers shouldn't be paid their insurance. He complimented the gankers on being innovative, fitted another ship exactally the same and continued running level 4 missions in high sec. he has not been suicide ganked again as far as I know. I bring this up because the potential reward of even 1/4th of his modules being dropped is more than enough to pay for another 30 to 50 ships to gank him, yet no one has ganked him since (to my knowledge).

suicide ganks are rare. even if insurance is taken out of the game for criminal acts, people will still do it. the only place where suicide ganking doesn't actually have a potential benefit for blowing up the ship is with blowing up mining barges and exhumers, which can be done with 2 to 3 destroyers working together. oh wait, drop the ore.... drop some t2 modules from the tank, drop 1 or 2 strip miners.... oh, hunh, that covers the cost of the destroyers as well as some of the modules to equip those destroyers with...

removing insurance from suicide gankers won't solve your problem of losing your hulks. people will just wise up and use destroyers to do it. I suggest a blaster catalyst or ac thrasher.

The Point: removing the insurance payout won't stop suicide gankers, it will only fuel them to find cheaper more effective ways to do it so they still get their payout. I mean, hell, not everyone does things for a reason. some people just like to watch the world burn.

like I said above, if insurance is removed, people will result to more effective and cheaper means i.e. 2 to 3 destroyers... and I know you're talking about suicide ganking hulks. my question is why can't people just come out and say that it's not about suicide ganking people, it's about suicide ganking hulks. Ninja salvagers don't suicide gank, and they can potentially ruin mission runners... you don't have to suicide gank in war decs where everyone just ends up docking unless they're combat pilots... and I don't really hear the elite omglolwtf officer and deadspace fitted BS pilots crying... so yeah, I can assume it's safe to say it's the hulk pilots.

what's the saying? applied physicist are from Venus, theoretical physicists wonder why it spins backwards? ... no, that's not it... oh I remember.... DON'T FLY WHAT YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO LOSE!

EDIT: that paladin loss.... here's a news clip about it
http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/10/10/questionable-eve-attack-deals-30-billion-isk-in-damage/

also, I checked, and his second omglolwtf priced ship was also ganked, as well as a third that was only t2 fitted. still, the first paladin was like 30 bil isk due to the officer modules and he never cried about it.

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this argument indicate that insurance for suicide ganking is not needed? You say in the last paragraph that removing insurance will just lead people to to find cheaper and more effective methods. Isn't that a desirable consequence? Why should player development be handicapped by unnecessary subsidies?