Let's talk about insurance. How does that work?
TL;DRInsurance is still being tuned, with prices expected to be adjusted once more players generate claim data; a recent terminal-crash bug is being fixed, and the expedite price formula was worked out between design and code.
Somewhat. There was an awful bug yesterday. I don't even know the likelihood that you'd run into this, but you could get into a scenario where, if you had multiple ships being claimed at once and you expedited some of them but not some others, you log off and you log back in, the next time you access the terminal, it just crashes, and you could never access the terminal again. So you could never spawn a ship again. So there's probably one Evocati player out there who's just like...
You can log out and log in, you still can't use it?
Yeah. Persistent. Working as intended. The fix should be going in shortly.
And I think that's one of the exciting things about the insurance: we're putting in all these numbers, but we don't know how often people are going to crash. We know how often we crash, which is often. But once better players than us get it, then we can see where we sit on the curve of other players and how often they make claims. How much money do they have when they make those claims? Are they earning enough through selling cargo and things like that? If everyone thinks this is extortionate, don't worry. Prices will go down. Prices will be adjusted: the more people who get to play it, the more we can adjust prices so it's at a sensible level.
And that actually reminds me, going back to talking about how we can affect the user stories and stuff: the design for the most recent iteration of the insurance system, since it has changed a few times. I had that question for you on the equation of how do we want the cost of expediting to increase over the number of claims. So that's a feature we have right now, where the more often you claim, if you want to speed up the processing time to get your ship back, that price goes up. And that was something that wasn't in the design. It was like, well, what's the formula for this price going up?
I just wrote "insert formula." It goes up.
But then when that comes to me, it's like, okay, well, there needs to be code in that "insert thing here." So what's the code? And so I would come back: well, how about we use this logarithmic curve, and pretend to be a designer for a minute. What do you think about this? And then we go back and forth. And then Pete steps in and is like, well, actually, how about this even more complicated curve?