I guess when we get our items back via insurance they have the same durability as when we died and not when we insured them?

Or will there be a death penalty hit by knocking off a lump amount of durability when we died?

This will cause a interesting situation... consider that high quality items will be worth more, and low quality worth less... if you always use low quality items you do less damage, but you save more money.

So does a guild choose low quality in order to save for other things???

This also brings up the tactic where large sales of high quality items would most likely be an indicator of an upcoming push by a guild to take a territory... Interesting to see how this will act in terms of a forward warning system for defending guilds.

That's achievable high tech too. ;3 A well-equipped skilled player could easily experience low losses, and perhaps with a lower downtime (from being dead) than somebody sporting weaker armour (who theoretically dies more often due to having less efficient protection/offense) gets more kills, and thus more phat lewtz.

And I'm sure they'd be equally trigger happy, perhaps even more-so, as they probably wouldn't want to give anyone even a chance to get an advantage over them, lest they lose their investment.

So low losses, big gains isn't just something that a low tech person would be able to achieve.

All excellet point and I totally agree!

Sounds cool, I really like the idea of degrading equipment and such.  I have 2 concerns, though.  The first is technical and I'm going to assume you've figured it out so I won't worry about it too much.

The second has to do with vehicles and mechs.  I'm afraid that reducing something like speed over time will cause some playability issues for medium to large groups.  I've already ran into the problem where groups don't want you along unless you've got speed (or range) skills that match their own because it causes significant logistical problems.  Reducing speed over time means that people will want everyone else's quality and durability to match thier own or they'll face the same logistical problems.  Causing logistics problems isn't a bad thing, of course, but logistics problems that can vary too greatly based on something the planner can't know becomes frustrating.

I don't mind varying quality and statistics based on usage.  I'd suggest that instead of changing speed, maybe add a cumulative chance that it simply breaks down and doesn't move at all.  This would still encourage people to keep their vehicles maintained, but doesn't screw up logistics planning so long as the durability and quality haven't degraded to the point where a breakdown is likely.  (Opposed to a speed decrease that sounds guaranteed after a much shorter amount of time without maintenance.)  It's really much easier to say 'you can come, but if you break down it's your own problem' rather than 'you can't come because you trave 5kph slower than everyone else'.

I'm really only concerned about speed and possibly range if the vehicle or mech's 'gas mileage' can go down with poor quality or durability.  The damage done or defenses don't concern me as much since they're not directly tied to logistics.  Unfortunately, using player owned equipment (as opposed to guild owned equipment) makes a guild maintenance schedule impossible to plan for or enforce (if only because the player who owns the vehicle isn't logged on at the right time).  Now, if there's a way to assign out guild owned equipment and be able to track it and enforce rules on theft that actually would mean something to a would-be thief, that's a different storym then the maintenance of vehicles can become another guild logistics task (if the guild chooses to do so) and I've got no problem with it at all.

Keep in mind that in a player-driven economy, we have to create money sinks to avoid inflation and ressources overflow. Decay is an excellent thing for that as it's equivalent to ressource destroys. That's the reason why we shouldn't be able to have ressources back with recycling or only a few (I'd say 10-20%) . It could be more of course but only if we nerf the ressources supply from mines/harvesters to balance the global economy.

(bleh, damn I'm wordy this morning TL;DR version: I like this idea and expanded in it a little bit)

Getting all the parts back (although I like that idea) means that there is no loss of raw materials that were used originally. Now, to give option of salvaging a weapon (for example) into parts, or into raw materials, would be good. If the salvager chose to salvage the weapon down to parts, instead of raw mats, and only got a few random piece of the item you salvaged back, that would be good as it would take something out of the economy (similar to an items decay that now needs to be replaced. This has the same effect that if someone chose to salvage for raw mats and only received a % back. Also, if the part the salvager wanted didn't get returned, then another item would need to be salvaged, or just create a whole new piece that is needed. Both would now create a need of an item to help the economy by having that piece produced, similar to how item decay would, but is pretty good for a salvage system.

Of course if the salvager simply chose to receive raw mats in return, that is good too. I would think the total raw mats  returned when choosing raw mats/metals should be lower then what it would take to rebuild the parts that would be salvaged as those are somewhat limited now in what they can be used in compared to the raw metals. That would be a good tradeoff.

So if a weapon took 100 pieces of iron to create, when salvaged down to metals it only returned 25 iron. If it was salvaged down to parts, the cost of those parts to create from scratch would be have cost around 40-50 iron or so.

If we can get all components back, I think the money think won't be strong enough, don't forget on the other hand the constant ressources supply from mines/harvest ! At the end we'd be overflowded