EVE New Citizens Q&A

Maybe I am missing something, but it seems ship insurance - more than just the default 40% - doesn't seem to net any value, especially on T1 Frigates and even some T1 cruisers. Maybe needs to be lowered quite a bit?

I read that the payouts are based on the material costs of building a ship. If this is true then materials must plummeting in price...

For example: to cover 100% ins on a Tristan, it costs roughly 135000 isk upfront, but the payout is only going to be 140000 more than the base 40% I will get with no ins. So I am going to end up with a whopping 5k isk. Wohoo! A few frigates have a net loss...

What am I missing here? Or did I get some part wrong?


H. Lee

You have to look at insurance a little differently than it being tied to the value of the ship. No, it won't ever provide replacement value. I think the worst insurance in game is on a Gnosis. Platinum insurance on a Gnosis costs about 1.50 ISK and pays out 4.00 ISK on a ship that costs between 50 and 80 mil ISK to purchase. No, that's not a typo.

I tend to look at insurance more as a separate, guaranteed investment that will mature if and when my ship blows up. For example, my VNI costs in the neighborhood of 3 mil ISK to insure platinum, and pays out a little over 10 mil ISK when it gets destroyed. When looked at exclusive of ship loss, that's a whopping 233% return on the original 3 mil ISK investment. The ship loss is really not an issue as I generally make a lot of ISK with one before I lose it, so there's already money put aside for replacement.

So if you look at insurance as just an investment tool, it's a lot easier to rationalize the expense.

Respectfully Submitted.

As Chainsaw Plankton said, CCP implemented "insurance" just to give you some money back when you lose your ship, as a way to lessen the "death penalty."

It's a completely artificial mechanism, and they're caught between making death less painful for you, in order to encourage PVP, while at the same time making sure that the player base as a whole (100,000 people) don't get so much from insurance that they get rich from it.

Since players manufacture the ships, the price that you pay for the ship on the market is NOT equal to the cost of the components required to make the ship. In fact, there's quite a bit of markup, and sometimes the sellers have outrageous prices.

On the other hand, the insurance payouts are calculated automatically based on the average costs of minerals and other components, which, as you've seen, can go up and down INDEPENDENTLY of ship prices.

There have been periods in the past where insurance paid equal or MORE than the cost of the ship, and immediately thousands of players started buying ships and undocking with them and hitting the self-destruct button in order to commit insurance fraud. Cheesy, but valid gameplay.

So, anyway, these are the factors that have contributed in the past to CCP's decisions on the formula for insurance payout. So, don't think of it as insurance, as in, "you'll get your ship back", think of it as "it'll be slightly less painful when you lose it." If you do heavy PVP, definitely insure; if you do PVE, where you're free to warp away or can read the spoilers of the encounter ahead of time, it's probably easier to not bother with it.