Insurance
Now with fraud!

An emerging game genre in the real world is the extraction game, or extraction shooter game, with titles such as Escape from Tarkov and The Cycle: Frontier. I choose these two titles out of a growing list of them for a specific reason: insurance mechanics.

These games are PVP games where players collect equipment and gear to stake it all in a 'raid' where they may die and lose all of their equipment behind. Sound familiar? As one could guess, these games have the same issues of risk aversion that Sindome does, with an extensive discourse on the matter that Sindome could not rival with a hundred BGBBs. One search of 'tarkov gear fear' on Google can get you dozens if not hundreds of threads and videos on the subject of people being worried about taking their equipment out and losing it.

I am getting to a point. These two games (Frontier shut down, so I guess this one game) have a system in place that is meant to alleviate these concerns and anxieties to an extent while still making death undesirable enough that you don't want to be playing like a doofus. Insurance returns in Tarkov simply return your gear back to you after a day or so if your equipment was not taken out of the raid (not ideal for Sindome) and insurance in The Cycle pays you back a portion of the cost of your equipment if you lose it. Both of these require that you stake a percentage of the gear value in order to enjoy the benefits.

In Sindome, a CNC-esque anonymous booth that scans your body or individual items to get an idea of the average prices of the equipment and cyberware at hand, makes an offer on how much money it costs to insure it (10-25%) and subsequently pays out about half the cost of the insured equipment if your insurance claim is accepted (in a similar system to the loan terminal) could be an alternative to slashing prices wholesale. Then, people who staked a large kit on a fight that didn't pan out can fall back on their own insurance claim to recover some of the cost, even if it isn't enough for a complete rekit.

Rather than a new automated system though, I think this is easily solvable by allowing Johnsons to reimburse even for failed operations resulting in death. Reimbursement budgets are massive and if a solo were to die on a job for an entity with access to such, I think Staff team should (and probably already are) be more accepting of someone framing it in a way that sees the solo reimbursed for some part of the loss.

Additionally, and I can't say this enough, the game desperately needs to remember that selling back gear/returning it in exchange for work to make falls/death easier would alleviate a lot of the concerns rather than taking all of someone's equipment to just stockpile it.

It'd be more RP and allow more flexibility while encouraging players to involve themselves with higher risk organizations.

And you have to bear in mind that gangers, TERRA and so on recover easier from losses as they encompass the early-mid game where you're not meant to really be walking around in hundreds of thousands of chyen in gear, and losses are meant to be easier to recover from as you didn't have much in the first place.

I think reimbursements should be made available to every faction from gang members to the higher echelon of shadow guild. The money is there. We are supposed to ambiently account for 90 million people but also act like a small corporation with a government contract has no money, or a gang that collects ambient tolls, drug profits, mugging profits, dip profits and all other things that go hand in hand with crime don't have the available funds to cover things?

I also think entities with reimbursement ability could easily begin making things better for solos without system changes by adopting a practice of giving a percentage of the total sum up front. A deposit if you will, that isn't refundable. That rate can be negotiated IC.

At what level? There's no levels. Some of the game's deepest bodycounts in both directions were from bartenders, or cab drivers, or lease holders. I swear syndicates should just be deleted completely, it makes players totally myopic about the rest of the game that actually does everything while they stand about complaining about how expensive it is for them to do anything

If a character that isn't a combat character has no avenues of making chyen through RP or their skills, and needs an automated system to cover their losses (which tends to be way, way smaller than a solo's) then I don't know if that's encouraging the right kind of play, driving players to automated systems.

As far as budgets go, is the chyen note not just paper and the money machine goes brrrrr as far as the Withmore economy? I think in the last 48 we have had some real good discussions on either slashing prices or paying out more, but I admit I am ignorant to the entire concept of a factions budget, so I don't know.

I can not speak for now. But I can say that, in the past, I had a corpie character who almost always aid up front, at least in part. I did have to negotiate it with GM controlled PCs but they were fairly accommodating about it at the time. I had the same view. The job should come with pay, fail or succeed. At least some. So I guess I am saying that it was possible and likely still is.

Regarding what jobs or organizations can get reimbursements... I think that some are well known to support this. But I suspect that many, many more will fork up some chyen or gear if engaged with. Though it might not be as much as one would like or one might be told no.

I will say that I am happier when the organizations that PCs are a part of take a back seat and the onus is on the PC to go and shine or fail. I have seen these organizations (syndicate, gangs, corps and WJF for example) prop up their PC members before and I personally felt that it hurt the game more than helped.

I would also say that, in a way, all of these organizations DO support their PC members. Gangs get rackets. Most jobs get a salary and some benefits. Some get access to NPCs to help them out, even in combat. I am a fan of providing PC members with well known and consistent resources like this then letting them go as far as they can with it

I certainly don't want these orgs to be stepping in and forcing victories for their members or saving their member's bacon too often. If that happens, I think we just become the org's PR face and who gets to succeed or fail is determined by staff and their idea of what orgs should win or lose. I prefer to be the deciding factor, not being a third leg for the org I am in, along for the ride.

There has to be a certain amount of soft and hard capping involved to keep things competitive. The advantage of a pay-in premium insurance concept (though again I'm sort of handwaving away the difficulties of price adjustment and valuation) is the more insurance players take on, the more they're spending, which makes it less likely to advantage a group of 10 players versus 1 player.

I've only pushed that independent solos that don't fit in as things stand don't have any of that coded support. TCS could have filled that in, but so far, some form of factional support/reimbursement help/perks don't exist for those types. I think the game is fine otherwise as things stand when it comes to recovering from losses for most cases of conflict, be it corp or mix.

I don't know how to make the quote pretty and italic forgive me. Yes though that was included in my comment about ass-kissing because the only way to get paid well as a solo is to be the go-to of a syndicate, a corp or both. In the case of the former that watering hole is already pretty small, and now even the latter might be too as players reroll or change jobs as is the usual eb and flow of the game.

If the concept of PvE didn't make most of you recoil in disgust I'd suggest taking a page out of Some Other Game's book where solo types get paid for completing contracts against randomized NPCs, which would encourage going out and street conflict a lot more, BUT I'M DEFINITELY NOT SUGGESTING THAT.

Really imo a good start is creating a coded solo role so as long as they're taking contracts and trying to get them done they can slink over to a terminal at some shady location and cashout their ramen money for the week.

Once a neutral faction hires up all the combat talent in the game, it usually ceases to be neutral. Other solos shouldn't necessarily all be your friend. If a faction were to begin hiring solos to just be solos, it would have to have very strict rules on when you are or are not allowed to refuse a contract, heavy consequences for leaking contract details, and so on. And then who wants to play that?

But if you don't apply this to a 'neutral' faction that conveniently consumes all available solos, then they pretty quickly start covering for their friends, themselves, and other employees who will follow suit. Syndicates and corps have clear 'these are our employees, and solos are just solos' rules and regulations that prevents their assets from riffing off of the organizational power too much, which is the issue when instead of direct asset relationships, they all have to go through the Solo Terminal and hope the players inside haven't unionized against them.

I acknowledge that my idea is tricky and that I'm not sure how best to suggest implementing it in order to avoid those concerns, the gist I guess would be ICly accepting solos are independent and neutral but OOCly having some coded consideration for the role that we kind of handwave IC so no one cares or wonder where Joe Solo is getting his steady 3k a week.

And just to agree in concert with Batko on her point, there is no such thing as a neutral faction, as the Hall of Justice has thoroughly demonstrated over its lifespan. Any faction with money and power and hitters is just another syndicate with a different coat of paint and the four we have now didn't exactly solve a lot of these problems.

We should be moving more and more to distributed and automated mechanisms of conflict support that don't require favouritism or politicking or access. Insert coin, achieve outcome, these are the most reliable mechanisms to drive highly active engagement. As soon as it becomes about puppet requests and who gets what and subjective staff intervention we're just in the same place we are now, spinning tires.

In fact, if it's a time based thing, like six month contracts maybe, it could be a consistent money sink even for the more wealthy among the murder populace.

It's sort of like Pay For Policy => ?? M A G I C ?? => Reimbursed For Loss.

Almost need like a part time policy writer on staff just for that.

A piecemeal demonstrator option might be something like nanogenic loss insurance since their value is fairly static and their loss is always total.

In this case, the loop looks like this.

Player enters booth/office/whatever.

Booth scans them. All armor, cyberware, and weapons on and in them are listed for insurance.

A price is given to the players for whatever percentage of the game value the sum of these objects costs.

The player can accept and pay the money. If they do so, all the item IDs are recorded in a note for staff. If a player tries to claim their insurance, staff can do a simple investigation into those unique IDs. Are they still in possession of the items? Did they even die/get robbed/etc? Did they only lose part of their kit, mentioned in their note they left when claiming the insurance?

Approved or not approved. Payment or refusal is delivered by the same booth or office. The faceless insurance company can decide to only partially pay it out if there was only a partial loss, etc.

Is this a perfect idea? No. I am just suggesting possible alternatives to the whole 'everything is way too expensive' dilemma since Slither has mentioned pushback on item price slashes and has asked for alternatives. This is the only method I can think of that doesn't involve throwing more money into the game (macguffins and cargo) or reducing costs wholesale.

A potentially common situation of that type, for example, would be characters insuring with their best armour, weapons, nanos and cyberware, but actually dying with just the nanos and the cyberware because they were in street clothes with a daily carry weapon.

In any case though, I like the idea. I'm not totally sure if in a world where the devs can set prices on everything at a whim it's better than just lowering prices, but it's absolutely interesting as a solution where master pricing tweaks are unpopular or impossible.