Sir Malachy Karrde

This needs to happen. Yesterday.

Thought as much

The issue is that players speculate and buy up all the teak (not sure if euro trader works or not). In any case they then resell it for several thousand percent markup which I'm pretty sure the insurance won't cover. If you use teak or white oak, that material alone sometimes costs 3 to 10 times what all the other materials cost combined. The developers need to cap markups and control their economy a bit better.

Wasa is not a bad ship, but I've got a lot more things I'd rather spend pvp marks on than a ship.

I said virtually.... and mahogany etc aren't much more expensive than oak. The insurance should cover most of that cost if they go by the npc vendor prices. It's also really easy to find mahogany and sabicu and a few other woods at cost rather than pay gouging prices for them as compared to teak and white oak and live oak for example.

Thickness isn't as important as it used to be for frigates. And I believe there are are crew/fire resistance bonuses with mahogany too if I remember correctly. The way I fight a frigate or even 3rd or 4thrate, I rely on angling to bounce shots from the hull, rather than thickness. using wood combinations like that you will get virtually full insurance recompense for losing a ship, rather than maybe 10 percent from using the popular woods.

If they manage to take your ship, the disappointment is palpable as they realize they weren't up against anything special. That wood combo has always been a favorite of mine as it's very versatile and extremely expendable. I've got 5 or 6 bellonas of that build that average 12.2 to 12.5 knots with repairs loaded. And about 10 connies and 3 or 4 large 5th rates of that build now.

With the pay to win ships, watching people run is a given. For a cheap ship that has good combat abilities, mahogany with sabicu trim is comparable to a cross between teak white oak and teak teak in handling and general durability. It's also not as slow as you'd think. Most of my mahogany sabicu ships are in the 13.5 plus knot range, couple of them exceed 14, after mods and skills of course. If I want to chase someone down, I'll use a fir/teak or Bermuda/teak ship. I usually have a couple fast raiders, but for general fighting, I prefer 4th rates and 3rd rates, neither of which are known as particularly fast anyhow post the sailing changes

Mahogany/sabicu can go toe to toe with teak/wo and at least hold its own, usually win lol and it really makes people mad when they gank you:p

And you get jack squat if your side loses, whether you play well or not. All goes back to risk vs reward for time spent. This game is long on risk but short on reward.

It's not particularly difficult As it is. There will always be people that exploit the system. Good developers include anti cheat programs embedded in their products.

I've always thought marks should be awarded based on damage done, not on kills. Say 1000 or 2000 damage per pvp mark or something like that. That would make some of the more pointless battles have at least some sort of reward for time spent.

The main thing with this game is that the developers decided to link shipbuilding and mod construction to RVR. This was a huge mistake and has led to bottlenecks and one or two factions gobbling up all the resources and making them unavailable except at ridiculously high prices. Basically, the developers screwed their whole economy in an attempt to force people to RVR. All it's done is pretty much exclude newer players from better quality equipment. Instead of this, they should have given another compelling reason to rvr, say production bonuses or something tied to number of ports controlled. Like ive said before, insurance is a band aid attempt to correct a much bigger flaw in this game.

I'm assuming it's just like pirates of the burning seas insurance. Built right into the cost of the ship. In that game, when you clicked on the ship it stated it's insurance value and people were loathe to pay an inflated value over the insurance cost. That ended up with ships priced at a modest 10 percent profit margin or so, not the millions and millions more that you see in this game. In potbs, your insurance usually covered about 80 percent of ships and mods. And yes, even the mods had an insurance value which also kept them from being used to rip people off like we see in this game. Insurance pretty much prevented price gouging.

And by fix it, you intend to do the right thing and implement it as soon as possible, aff?