Hi everyone!

We're going back to older questions today with Angel Azrael's question - "How will you keep insurance from RUINING the economy?"

Property insurance in Earthrise does everything but ruin the game economy. In fact, it is a very powerful instrument in both yours, the player's, and our designer hands to balance the game economy and provide many interesting choices to the players. Insurance for the players is a tool that allows them to keep all the items they have insured when they die. The emphasis in the case is on the word "keep" - items are not duplicated thus creating inflation, instead the victim gets to keep his insured inventory and the killer gets only those items that were not insured (such as collected loot that has not yet been insured or safely stored). While this sounds unfair to the killer, here's a catch - the killer is then awarded with a percentage of the money the victim invested in his insurance. This monetary reward isn't inflation either – it is subtracted by what the victim paid to insure his inventory, thus it's still a money sink, however interconnected with automatic transaction of a dynamically defined ante. Suddenly, even people who always insure all their property become juicy targets for their enemies, because the more powerful items players have, the more they are motivated to keep them by insuring them, the higher the insurance prices and the more money the killer will receive if he scores a successful attack. Also, there's major difference between getting money for your kill and looting the player - while items won can be lost a moment later when the killer gets himself killed, money aren't lost along with inventory. Some killers will go for the great items they can get out of unsuspecting targets who have missed or cannot afford to insure themselves, while others will go for the much smaller, but guaranteed monetary reward. Some players will load themselves with the most powerful items and will become a walking piggy bank, while others will wear the cheapest equipment to make sure they don't reward their killers.

Things become more interesting in the grand warfare intended for the contested territories. In a siege battle, it's possible for members of warring guilds to die dozens of times within couple of hours - this is a huge loss of either items or money for insurance. If there was no monetary reward, war would bleed both guilds to the point where the rich guild wins out because they can afford the losses, while after the battle both guilds are so poor, they cannot support their defense against a third party guild. Monetary reward allows players to "win" money they need for their own next insurance out of their kills before they are themselves killed. There may be many interesting tactics - players who enter the battlefield in powerful arms, scoring kill after kill, while other players equipped in cheap stock equipment that costs next to nothing to lose on the battlefield, will gang up on those powerful, well-insured targets and the money won from that one grand kill would be enough to ensure some income for them. At the end, it's possible for every individual in a territory warfare to walk out with a hefty profit from the battlefield, thanks to the fact he was killed less than the number of people he has killed, even if not a single item was dropped on the ground. That individual's next destination would be the global market of his faction to make sure he gets all the cool stuff he has earned the dough for.

So there you go! What do you think?
~ m.

Wow...! I'm speechless... This is seriously the first time I get to find something that is interresting enough to support insurance.
I always though insurance was for the weak and kids.... And was getting in the way of PVP.

Well bravo for the idea Dev team, if this is the kind of creativity you guys are gonna put to all question we have, I just can wait....

Bravo

This is really neat.  It really evens stuff out. 

So basically even if a guild loses the battle they might still get to come out of the battle with some sort of gain. Tho on the winning side they might have defended/won the territory but they still lost a great deal of money.  Am I understanding this correctly?

Everything in your inventory will be allowed to be insured?

Yeah, I'd prefer not to have my leftovers disappear instantly. T_T

*crafters would most likely disassemble the items that were left and create new ones, well the scavenging crafters that is*

 

I assume that uninsured loot will simply drop to the ground.

Some interesting implications in this post that weren't directly stated:

I wonder if this means each piece of equipment will be a progressively higher price or simply that it's "dynamic" in the sense that each item is appraised independently for salvage.

This implies a couple seperate things:
A) Equipment is intended to be cheap enough, or easy enough to come by that either you can stockpile it, you can reinsure immediately, or basic (and thus readily available) equipment will be of sufficient fighting value to allow you to re-equip on the fly.
B) Re-spawning is going to be readily available during siege battles, or siege battles will be exceedingly long.

Overall that seems to be a MUCH better system than what I was imagining, it sounds like if balanced out properly it will be a great system.

As usual, Great information devs!!!

A few questions

- How will the kill be allocated when many players are involved in killing a single player? A shared kill for cash value is easy but I am assuming that only one player can actually loot the victim. The concept of the killing blow was badly abused in EQ1. If the player that does the most damage gets the loot then that leads to players gear and skills that are only centered on burst damage. It also penalizes anyone from developing healing skills. If its range related then snipers will never get any loot.

- Will there be partial insurance? Can you insure the 3 great pieces of gear that you are wearing without having to also insure all the crappy stuff?

- Why would a guild siege another guild during busy server times? There would be more defenders than during off-peak hours. They would be smart to attack when the defense is weak. Personally I hated the 4am alarm clock settings for relic raids in DAoC. How will you encourage sieges to occur during reasonable hours?

- Small guild A starts to seige small guild B. Large guild C waits until A and B are weak and then charges in killing both sides. Is that your intention? When it sucks to be in small guild A or B then everyone joins guild C the big guild. How will you prevent a few large guilds from controlling the game through sheer numbers? Personally I would prefer a game where individual player skill is more important than numbers.

- How will you prevent gangs of players simply rampaging across the map for the loot and insurance reward? I forsee entire loot guilds that do nothing but wreak havoc on other players in the game. Is that your intention? If so then you have just lost me and thousands of players like me as subscribers. Believe it or not most players like some kind of order in the game. I play games for fun not to be part of a gang of looting rioters. One way to prevent this is to allow players defending their own guild territory to not be looted and not have to buy insurance. The defenders big advantage is that they can wear their best gear without fear on guild territory. They will actually make money by killing players that attack their guild. The attackers will lose money while attacking and can only make money by taking over the territory and utilizing the resources in the territory.

If you find that a lot of posters on this thread actually like the concept of "loot guilds" then you know that you have a problem. In real life the good citizens in a city move away when the gangs control the city. In a game the good players will just play a different game if they cant have fun in this game. Once all the good players leave the game then the economic side of the game will collapse. You will be left with gangs of roving looters. That gets boring in about two weeks.

I think the group leader should be able to select the loot distribution method (random, FFA, sequential).

Let players sort it out themselves.  If a group leader is being shady it's not like you can't just blast her into bits.

Hey, not bad, game design that encourages me to keep my inventory clean(which is the bane of my existance in most MMO's)