I had my wings shot off in the 'baby' PU (ok,ok, I actually crashed into something) and my guns went with them. Will I have to buy new guns every times this happens when the game 'goes live'?asked by Creapola

So that is a pretty good question. These are all the "lovely" edge cases that come up with the lifetime insurance or the insurance set up.But generally if you damage your ship when you are flying out there and you have to go and get it repaired you're going to have to pay to repair it and typically, just like it would be in the real world if you drive and get your car messed up and the wheel goes and stuff then you have to pay to get that wheel repaired or whatever. If ... depending on what kind of insurance ... because don't forget we're also going to sell, besides the basic hull insurance, which is the normal insurance and the lifetime insurance, which covers you from catastrophic loss, there will be additional insurance you could purchase for item or weapons. So if you put a custom weapon on your ship and you take it out and you got in a fight and it got blown up, if you have the right insurance then perhaps it will pay out.But that kind of insurance will obviously act a lot like real insurance would, so it's not blind. If you go back and you make claim after claim after claim after claim after claim then your rates are going to go up and at some point they may not want to insure you any more. Because the one thing we have to juggle on the whole idea of your ship actually being something that you want to hold onto and keep and patch up and repair, and our insurance set up, is that we don't want people to abuse the system. You don't want people to just go and destroy ... like "Oh look I've lost a wing so I'm just going to suicide into rock now so I can get an insurance claim to get a brand new ship back and not pay for the repair".So we are going to work in systems that will try to watch out for that and people aren't going to be able to just claim, claim, claim, claim, claim, claim, claim, and get a ship instantly back. So there'll be some penalties for going ... losing your ship, and insurance covers it, but if it starts to happen too long then maybe it takes a while for you to get your next ship, maybe there's a little extra scrutiny. Because what we don't want to do is people use it to abuse the system, which you guys have come up with a thousand different scenarios of how that can happen.It's one of the good things about having the Alpha stage, it's why we're going to do Alpha UEC, sharpening the persistence up there and a lot of this stuff, is a lot of this kind of dynamics will start to experiment with the functionality of how the insurance and how you would respawn and all the rest of stuff, during the Alpha, Mini PU, basis. And of course we're going to adjust it as it develops and that's why we really want to have hundreds of thousands of you playing it. Because it is way, way, way, way better way to test it out and see what works and what doesn't work compared to just the Dev team doing it. Because you just don't have enough people and you are set in a certain mindset. And you guys can see it every time we take something to PTU, and then even sometimes Live, there are bugs or exploits that show up that the Dev team never even considered, that the QA team never came across. Mostly because we set on a certain way and the QA team, even though it's a pretty big QA team now, there's ... it's a huge game and a huge universe and lots of stuff to be done.And so we will be working on exactly these things as ... some of the key game mechanics that I've talked about, that I think can be really interesting, but I'm not stupid enough to say "it's definitely going to work exactly this way" because you've got to get out there, Live, and play around when it's Alpha UEC and we can reset people's accounts and no one's really lost anything at that point. So hopefully with all you guys help, and playing it, will come up with something that is a really nice balance between making you want to hold onto your stuff, care about your character and care about your ship and not sillily blow it up or sacrifice it, but also not be the other extreme where it's so frustrating that you have to start from scratch every time you go out and some pirate shoots you up.So those are all things that we will work on together. And that's the beauty of the Mini PU cycle that we are doing.