Possible insurance payment decrease...

[Mangala]

See SHC thread:

http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?t=33406

[peo]

Wonder why...
As most say it gives a floor to mining profitability and nerfing that isn't a good idea imo as it is already rather unprofitable. If it is to get rid of suicide ganking just change the rules and make it so that ships lost to criminal actions aren't covered.

[peo]

I was thinking last night that one reason behind reducing insurance and the soft floor on minerals could be to change the relative cost of sov-warfare.

A common assumption seems to be that t2 will stay in price, insurance going up should drive the prices up a bit but lets assume prices are stable.
This means moon-goo should stay quite stable as well in isk value.

So with minerals going down and moon-goo staying stable the "capitals/moon-goo" ratio will go up and capitals will become relatively cheaper for people holding moon-goo.

This should in turn solidify the hold of the major holders over 0.0 as the barrier of entry goes up with the deflation that will happen.

[Warcold]

go! go! get that job interview with CCP as economist! 

[Mangala]

go! go! get that job interview with CCP as economist! 

Would do a better job than Dr Eiyjog (think thats his name).

[Warcold]

go! go! get that job interview with CCP as economist!  

Would do a better job than Dr Eiyjog (think thats his name).

Dr Eggyoke?

[peo]

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=746

Our next expansion is focused around planets and all the cool stuff going on there as outlined in Hammer's recent blog.  There will be many more blogs to come in the weeks ahead covering the details of the first release of planetary interaction and other gritty details on Tyrannis in the weeks ahead.

The focus of this blog is to talk about upcoming changes covering two important and linked topics, life and death and something of everything in-between, or, more specifically with less analogies: minerals and ship insurance.

The ABC's of Minerals

Minerals come from three distinct sources in EVE: Asteroids and Mining, NPC combat and loot reprocessing, and Rogue Drone Compound reprocessing.  Of these, mining of asteroid ores and reprocessing of rogue drone compounds are dependent on the value of the minerals to determine that activity's relative income level, whereas NPC loot is one of the total rewards given for NPC combat.

Houston, we have a problem!

Ideally, mining should be the greatest factor in determining the value of minerals since miners can target specific ores where these ores are available and, therefore, specific minerals.  Next up should be rogue drones and their compounds, with the distinction that this activity is not targeting specific minerals but collecting them en mass to exchange for money.

However, the value of minerals is increasingly being determined by the diffused loot reprocessing source which forms only a small portion of the overall NPC combat rewards, yet devalues and slowly cripples the specialist activities, as NPC combat is not as adversely affected in income terms from mineral values decrease, whereas the specialist activities are.

This means long after miners have stopped mining as the ore values drop and you have long lost interest in the drone regions, loot reprocessing will still be carried out since it is only a part of the NPC combat activity and a supplemental rather than only source of income.

It is this scenario we want to make changes to and fix by altering the mineral sources in such a way that each gets a fairer amount and relative income in mineral value and that the specialist activities are stronger competitors in determining overall mineral values obtaining minerals in a ratio which is more equivalent to the manufacturing demand ratios.

So what are you changing with the mineral sources?

NPC Loot

We identified a core set of loot tables which are responsible for contributing to the majority of the NPC loot sourced minerals and these are the first ones we want to adjust with Tyrannis, reducing the quantity of the Tech 0 items being dropped and substituting it with a variation of scrap metals or tags, for example.  There will still be the same amount of Tech 1 meta 1-4 modules being dropped and these will still act as mineral faucets if you desire a source of minerals still from NPC combat.

Whilst this will reduce one of the secondary incomes from NPC combat initially, this is weighted against all the potential rewards of NPC combat activity. With less overall mineral supply, the lower quantity of minerals still possible from loot reprocessing will eventually be worth more.

 

Rogue Drone Compounds

The rogue drone compounds had two distinct problems, which meant that when you analyze the specific type of NPC found marauding through drone space and what they dropped in component terms alongside what the components reprocessed to that the overall supply was far from the actual demand rates required by manufacturing.

The fundamental focus of our changes here was to alter both the quantities dropped of each compound from the entities but also change the quantities of minerals they reprocess to so they more precisely fit with the ratio of materials required by manufacturing and therefore the market demand alongside a general decrease in volume of the loot so will be easier to haul the compounds to station for example.

This provides the additional benefit of allowing drone region dwellers to be more self-sufficient by having a better ratio of all minerals for their own production whilst not adversely oversupplying the global market with certain excess minerals.

Asteroids

Asteroids and mining are a little trickier, economically; you are following the correct signals which are to mine what is most valuable and exchange these for the least valuable minerals.  You would eventually if left reach a point where the supply rate of the rare ores would continue to increase and saturate until you should switch to other ores (dynamic equilibrium in ore values) or reach the physical global supply rate limit of the high end minerals.

In the short term with just the changes to loot and drone compounds, you would experience increased income but only until the economy re-adjusts and more miners return to the arkonor, bistot, crokite asteroids.

The initial changes will introduce higher amounts of low end minerals such as tritanium, pyerite or mexallon to low sec or certain null sec ores ensuring you can make it worth the effort to mine these as a viable alternative instead of purely mining the ABC asteroids constantly.  Here we are following the same principles of better balancing the supply to the demand rate ratio.

And now onto Ship Insurance

Ship Insurance is our mechanic by which we compensate you for death, essentially.  By risking your ship in combat and giving you some compensation to allow you to get back in space and continue fighting whilst ensuring combat and death and the economy that springs from it, is both meaningful and relatively easy to recover from.

The core principle is you are compensated some of the ISK cost needed to replace your ship.  However that payment was based on static ship values decided at the launch of Eve when we set the value of all minerals on the market.  Since those days we removed those caps and relied upon the scaled potential supply and demand rates of each mineral source to maintain relative value.

However these supply sources and rates have changed over the years as we added new sources or favourable activities but the insurance values never changed relative to the market cost of your replacement ship.   This means you might end up getting more money than is really desired to the extreme of occasionally getting more than the replacement cost of the ship itself making death meaningless and going far beyond the intention of allowing you to pick yourself up again.

So ship insurance will be marked to market?

Yes, ship insurance will now revalue itself periodically based on a trimmed mean of the ship's manufacturing materials global market weighted average prices.  This means the insurance quote when you are buying insurance will be now estimated and may change if the payout occurs during the next insurance period.

But there is more to discuss!

Our new insurance system recalculates the value of all ship classes which includes Tech 2 and Tech 3 classes establishing the base material cost of the ship.   To this we have added the ability for us to define more precisely how much of the total material value of each ship class should be paid out.  Our intention is that we can make certain ship classes pay out much less, some closer to the full value.

Here we can then say that a tackler class which is a highly dangerous role and prone to see you dying a lot might pay out more than say a specialist covert ops class of ship has a higher survival rate.  So players who fly the ships with short life expectancies will be more sustainable to fly on lower incomes, and the same can be applied to more casual ship classes such as cruisers or battlecruisers used more by newer players to allow them to get to grips with the game whilst not losing everything constantly.

On the high end game play side of this is the role of strategic ship classes as valuable targets.  Here we refer to them as supercapitals, the largest classes of ships in the game which cannot dock in stations.  Currently they get a default payout of 40% of the old static value of the ship which is around 5 billion ISK for supercarriers and 20 billion for titans.

The idea is that these are cut to a fraction of their current payout values so they might only get 1-10% for example of the base build value of their ships.  This is done with the intention of making strategic ship classes be more valuable targets and their death have much stronger meaning and value.

We have our own ideas for how much of the full insurance value we want to payout for each ship class which generally is 100% for Tech 1 ship groups, 20-60% for Tech 2 and 100% for Tech 3 ships (those this is only a portion of the value of the entire ship since subsystems are not included currently).  However we are interested in your feedback on what you think they should be for each ship class and why.

In closing

So there you have it, many and wide reaching proposed changes to many parts of the proverbial circle of life of the capsuleer.  This is understandably a large balancing change and one which many of you undoubtedly have opinions on.  We would love to hear your constructive feedback and your own ideas.  Look out for updates and new threads in the test server feedback forum in the weeks ahead as we move to public testing with more specific details on the gritty numbers on each of the changes.

Ave - Chronotis

[peo]

They seem to be going further than I expected which is good. But this will be a nightmare to balance and they still haven't said anything about the balance they want to have.

In either case, as I can see it these are the pressures which will affect the market after this goes live:

1. T1m0 loot reduction => less minerals => upwards price pressure
2. Mineral distribution changes => downwards pressure in general on the minerals they are boosting in 0.0 (mostly trit and pye I expect)
3. Insurance on T2 raised => demand up on T2 as they are made more affordable => upwards pressure on moon-goo (this effect is probably not going to be very large as the demand on T2 isn't very dynamic and the basis of warfare will still be battleships)
4. Insurance made dynamic => downward spiral on minerals (this effect is uncertain, it depends on IF the m0 loot reduction are larger than the usage of minerals by "insurance fraud")
5. Supercap insurance changes => supercaps being used less => reduction in supercap losses => reduction in demand for minerals => downwards pressure

Then there is one they haven't mentioned.
6. Capital insurance??? Are these changed to the same as supercaps? if so it will be a massive change on demand for minerals as sov warfare becomes prohibitively expensive for all but the largest of entities. Which in turn will solidify the mega alliances hold over 0.0 and that is a pet-peeve of mine

Overall effect is difficult to see as CCP are tweaking a lot of nobs at once.
Ideally the two major forces will be meta0 reduction and insurance made dynamic.
To know if the price will stabilize around some decent number or just have a downward spiral depends on if the "insurance fraud" mineral sink is smaller or larger than the m0 mineral faucet. If assume that 50% of all minerals are used in "insurance fraud" and 10% of the total minerals come from the m0 loot they are reducing then prices will plummet. If it is the other way around, prices will go up, unless stabilized by the insurance change to supercaps.

Ideally the m0 reduction and "insurance fraud" have about equal weight, preferably slightly larger for the reduction to offset the other changes. Which would leave the mineral price around where it is right now. This would of course make warfare more expensive, losing a BS will cost around 30-40m more than today.

[peo]

How I would have done it would be to tweak one nob at a time.

1. Remove reprocessing of m1-4 into minerals. ALL of it. Instead add them reprocessing to some new items. Lets call it module components.
2. Remove m0 drops completely.
3. Add the ability to use a m0 item + module components to make m1-4 items.

This would remove all minerals from shooting npcs.
If this doesn't solve the issue then the following should be done.
4. Change insurance.

Redistribution can be good regardless.

[Mangala]

Gotta love CCP when they go balls to the wall they really do it hardcore, thats an awful lot of changes just to existing systems, let alone the new PI stuff they are putting in (and is currently testable on SISI) which alone looks more involved than the POS system was when that got put in (and added too on and off over time).

Wonder what will break

[peo]

Gotta love CCP when they go balls to the wall they really do it hardcore, thats an awful lot of changes just to existing systems, let alone the new PI stuff they are putting in (and is currently testable on SISI) which alone looks more involved than the POS system was when that got put in (and added too on and off over time).

Wonder what will break

My guess is mining will be even less profitable hehe also inflation will go up if it is npc goods that are made in PI as thats one of the few isk sinks there are.

[Macrune]

its all shot to shit. You should never ever stack major updates all in one go. The house of cards will fall over far to quickly.