Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It seems a bit silly that the contracts to allow one immortality, are cheaper than the cost of a license to fly a ship...

First I was going to propose some inverse power law for clone cost vs SP... I read another post where you'd essentially have unlimited clons for a fixed ISK/ month fee, at first I didn't like that idea

I thought... DUSTies don't have to pay for clones at all...

So, then I thought, why not go with the idea of a fixed fee/month for clones, and why not rename plex to "clone contracts"

In its simplest iteration, it would simply be: clone consts go away, PLEX is renamed.
(Perhaps the acronym is kept: Pilot Life EXtension, or something like that)

A more complex iteration would involve a F2P scheme.

Plex would be a "clone maintenence and revival contract", or something like that.
One could play without paying, but if you don't pay, you've got no cloning contract, and you accumulate no further SP.
Death would be perma death

It has a number of problems, which I'm not sure could be worked out or not:
#1) proliferation of market alts-> they never undock, they've got no need of clones (future DUST link, allow assasinations in station? arbitrarily force people to undock X number of times within Y time units? an Aurum fee for station quarters? This fee + 2 others would be included in the PLEX for one toon)
Then we could still have toons perma cloaked in space playing the market... but then you could extend it to hangar rentel, as they'd still have assets in hangars

#2) Penalties too harsh for death of older players ->
You are a 10 year player, your subscription ran out an hour ago... you get podded, your toon is now perma-dead -> ouch!
If you allow one to revive their toon via plex, then everyone would not use any plex until they get podded for the first time in a 1 month interval. Of course if PLEX was also needed to run a skill queue, then this might not be a problem, and reviving dead toons with plex would work