What can you tell us about the current status of item insurance?
TL;DRItem insurance is only in early internal discussion with nothing nailed down, though they see it as valid and want it to soften the cost of bad choices; current insurance covers only the hull and default equipment.
Yeah, we've started internal discussions on it, and we haven't nailed down anything on how it would work, but we do see it as being very, very valid. And then it would be obviously working out... Obviously, we always want time associated with things. So you do kind of have to pay a price in one way or the other of you losing that object. But obviously versus it being completely removed from your inventory, this is I'm just paying the price of...
I think it's important to remember that things like LTI or the six-month insurance or 12-month insurance or the 72-month insurance that you got on your pledge is for the hull of the ship and the default equipment that comes with it. As of yet, there has not been any implementation of item insurance. So I can attest from playing the game myself and watching many Twitch streams and YouTube videos that lots of folks are exhausted with constantly losing their items when they die and having to rebuy them.
Yeah. And a lot of times we know it's not the player's fault, and that to me is the biggest part. Sometimes the game crashes, sometimes the server crashes, or the ship randomly blows up every now and then. So there's aspects, since we're in development, we don't want to punish the players too much, but we're still trying to work out obviously that magic middle ground of... You don't always want the answer to be, let me engage, all the time. It's, should I engage, or should I possibly run away? Should I go stealth? We want these other gameplay choices for the player to make. But right now, a lot of times, the player might not have enough information. And that, to me, is once we get scanning and radar and the heat signatures and the power and all of those things working, so that you understand how much am I flashing my ass out into the universe, versus this other person that I see, and understanding their loadout compared to my loadout. That's a lot of gameplay aspects and understanding, do I want to engage? And I think having the insurance so that in case you made a bad choice, it's not so damaging to the play experience.