Well, passing through the archives, the suggestions, the general, the faq's.. the whole shebang!... I find it mentioned an awful lot that the ship is the player, is your avatar, all that.

Well, since were basically saying over and over again, you are your ship, what if the game had the theme that, you really are.

You, the player, could be playing the role of a race of self aware, intelligent computers.

Rather than actually being the ship, which is destroyed quite a lot, the player could be a small pod, with cpu and memory and the interfaces to run the ship...

This pod is heavily armored, with no weapons, a hud that only shows you stations and wormholes, no targeting capabilites, and a super engine and unlimted battery for flying.

This means, when the ship your controlling gets destroyed... Pop!, suddenly your this little pod, that can zip away amazingly fast, fleeing for the nearest station, or station of your choice, to go buy another ship to be put into.

Also, the pods could be destroyed, but would have an insane amount of armor to make it difficult. 30000? 40000?
If your ship, and your pod are both destroyed. You die a temporary death. This results in you ending up in your home station, or home sector, where the station tells you it found you adrift and damaged, and has repaired you for the fee of half your available money.

Am I explaining this well enough? :( its kinda complicated I know.. but it just sorta works on the idea that.. your ship dies.. now your something tiny, RUN!!!... :) Go buy new ship?

i like the basic idea
I would however propose the following changes. =)

1. we can't be self aware computers, the devs have already stated that we are humans, cut off from earth by an unstable wormhole millions of lightyears out into the universe. If each pod was merely a flyable escape pod, it would fit your idea just fine. Then when the pods are destroyed the stations can CLONE you from a cell you left there when you homed, for a fee. :)
Any damage to the escape pod could be repaired as if it were a normal ship.

2. half of your money is a tad much, especially if you happen to be a noob (how often do noob's die, wouldn't that be terribly inconvinient) I would suggest the following. have each STATION have a fee for cloning you, and that this fee be clearly posted so that you know before you home there. that way, home sector stations could do it for free, (this way n00bs have somewhere that they can respawn without loosing any of their credits) sectors like sector 4,6,12 could have a minimal fee (say 10 credits). other stations would vary, could even be a percentage, just not 50%. stations that are far out in the middle of nowhere (sector 5 anyone?) would have a lower fee for respawning there(say 10,000), While sectors that are in hig demand (sector 9) would have a higher fee (100,000)

EDIT// please note that I am pulling the credit amounts out of thin air and they would have to be adjusted to fit whatever economic balance the devs end up with. //EDIT

Didn't know the dev's sad that... how about the slight modification of,
Yes, the pod is an escape pod, however, instead of holding you, it just holds DNA and a memory pod.. to remake you from..
This way its still a tiny little thing that zips along.. no human to hinder acceleration rates... not much weight..

Also, pod could still be damaged/destroy, where you wake up after your pod has been found, ... with just enough intact to clone you from.


Also, yes, have the money is probably too much, but 10 credits is way to little. The idea of taking money for being totally killed is a punishment. If you keep it at a % of your money, you actually make it realistic. Meaning, if we ever get the ability to clone humans and bring em back from the dead, which are they more likely to charge a rich man.. $10000... or %25 of all you got or were killin ya again? :)

So maybe 20-30% would be a better amount. Not enough to complete take out a noobs bank account, but enough to be a punishment if you are totally killed.

Also, for a third possiblilty, When you are totally destroyed, your home sector simply clones you from a DNA storage they keep of all their pilots. Might that also make sense for a rebirth method? So if your ship is destroyed, you fly to what station you want, if your pod is destroyed.. back to home sector. Then, instead of a punishment fee. You set it up as your home sector being your bank. You get to keep funds that you bring to your home sector and deposit, but if you don't make it back, the money you earned while out, doesnt make it with you? :)

"""--Also, yes, have the money is probably too much, but 10 credits is way to little. The idea of taking money for being totally killed is a punishment.--"""

10 credits is not unreasonable when you consider that those sectors are primarily intended for people who are just learning the game/just starting out, aka botting vs the home sector bots.

If an experienced player wants to home there and go get into fights, thats fine, but he then has to fly from the home sector to wherever the battles are taking place. (and since most of the fighting is in sector 9 currently, thats 2 wormhole jumps, inconvinent to say the least.) And in the future, when we have even more sectors, the newbie areas will be even further from the combat zones.

"""--So maybe 20-30% would be a better amount. Not enough to complete take out a noobs bank account, but enough to be a punishment if you are totally killed.--"""

a %of cash is fine, until a player just buys up a lot of ships, outfits them all and spends all his free cash. then he dies for 30% of nothing, grabs a pre-bought ship, and is right back at it. A specific cash amount means that when you die you DO loose that money. If you don't have any money to loose(aka can't pay the fee), you are automatically homed in your home sector, and start from there.

the other problem with a % is that it isn't fair. If someone with 1 mil dies, it costs 200k at 20%. if someone who has 10 mil dies, it costs them 2 mil. that isn't fair to them. thus the need for a set price.

Once again, the prices would need to be balanced to whatever level the devs set the economy at. Meaning that in an economy where it was easy to get 5 million credits quickly. the cost for a revive would be much higher than if it took weeks to get even 500,000 credits.

A percentage works out fairer than a fixed ammount. Think about it, no matter how well off you are, 20% is still 20%. that could be 20 credits or two million credits. It would hurt those with more cash less than those without as many credits. However, what could be done is something along the lines of a death tax, which would be calculated based on the following factors:

net worth of player (including ships, weapons, and other commodities owned, calculated at worth in sector where kept)
distance from home sector or volatility of sector they died in
kill ratio

If a player funnels all their money into ships, they would need to sell ships in order to be revived. If a player gets themself killed in a hot sector, the tax would be higher than if they died in a friendly sector. The kill to death ratio gives us a rough idea of a player's skill in combat. A more skillfull player would be worth more than a less skilled one.

Now this is great for bounty hunters, and the like, but traders, explorers, other professions would need to have their own valuation system.

Enter a new facet to the economy.. Life Insurance. You die more, your premium goes up.. or something like that.. haven't given this a heck of a lot of thought really.

I think a system in which the respawn cost was a percentage of your income based on your total wealth would work best. The more you have, the more you stand to lose. We would have to cap it at 50%, however. There might also be secret stashed of credits you can keep that are not included in the calculation, but have them time consuming to reach. If you end up in debt, you go into negative credits and you become indentured to a corportation within the game (NPC or real.) The corporation would then have you work off the debt at a fixed rate by doing odd jobs for them. Things like trading, cleaning up sectors, killing bots.

At least that's how I imagine it.

/me drools all over the thread...
I like Magus' idea of becoming an indentured servant... That'd be pretty interesting...

"10 credits is not unreasonable when you consider that those sectors are primarily intended for people who are just learning the game/just starting out, aka botting vs the home sector bots."

Yes, i know, but lets try to get this point across.
If you charge 10 credits.. or a minimal fee of credits.. anywhere, people will just go there to respawn. Afterall, 20minutes of wasted time flying along is worth saving anything worth more than a cost of a new ship.

If you charge percentage based fee's, you cant escape to someplace cheaper. Maybe a few point lower percentage, but not enough savings to bother flying around for.

I skimmed the posts, and it appears we're talking about how detatched/attached a player gets to his ship, and what penalties there are to dying.

1. How similar is a player to his ship? I hope that the pilot's name and his ship are two different things in the final game. For instance, my character's name is Bacix Tenra, but his ship's name is Defense Ship 4.

2. Charging someone a flat or percentage fee for dying is stupid. What benefits are there of getting rich if you're gonna be losing [insert percentage here] of it when you die? There's no logic involved. Where does the money go? Why are you being penalized? It makes no sense.

Remedy for penalties when dying:

Make it so that you can withdraw money from your bank account and carry it in your ship for making purchases that you want to be invisible (not have a paper trail). For instance, normal purchases require the shop/station to connect to the bank you have an account at, verify your identity, and make a transaction. This would be avoided if the person was a criminal or shady character. Also, some items could only be bought with cash. It would be better for this person if they actually carried cash around on their person/ship so they have it when they need it. Thus, if they lose their ship, any cash stored on it would be lost as well. It would be the pilot's choice of how much money he would risk losing.

""--Yes, i know, but lets try to get this point across.
If you charge 10 credits.. or a minimal fee of credits.. anywhere, people will just go there to respawn. Afterall, 20minutes of wasted time flying along is worth saving anything worth more than a cost of a new ship.--""

ahh but time IS money
what if the "20 minutes" is the difference between that player succesfully completing (x) mission. Or succesfully defeating (player B) who happens to have a high bounty. Or what if, in the final game, the sectors where the minimal charge applys arent 20 minutes from the front lines, they are 40 minutes away, or an hour. ok some pilots will still home there and then spend the time to get to the areas where they can make real money. great for them, while they fly for that 20 minutes, someone who paid the higher fee might make it back because s/he is allready AT the place where they make real money.

Camps, the Idea is that we are in the ships, if the ship is destroyed, give us a small, highly maneuverable, reasonably tough escape pod that we can use to get to a station, no weapons.. no cargo. if the escape pod is destroyed, then a monetary fee is assesed and you are revived at your home station.

hmm I kinda like the cash&carry idea, but it could still be combined with something else. where do you withdraw the money from however, i assume theres not an ATM at every station or it is self defeating. oo ooo or maybe when the stations are modular you have to find the bank docking bay i kinda like that idea.

Ok, I suppose we could make this a little more complicated.. but it would be wierd...

The 10 credit or minimal fee has another problem. Lets say your a pirate, or a group of pirates, or whatever, shooting the noobs and cargo vessels with oodles of money. You die. You fly off. Your not on any missions at all, so its no problem for you to fly off to someplace you know is cheapest to get a new ship or body or whatever you have to go get :). Since your not on a mission, and have nothing else better to do but get ready to kill some more players... you get a cheap job done.

So whenever a player is pirate, rogue, whatever, they get no punishment. Whenever a player is on a time critical mission, they might happen to be in a sector that's expensive, and they get punished for needing to complete there mission?

That seems it would just discourage people, leaving them to abandon missions if they got killed, not knowing if reviving themselves would cost more than what they'd gain for doing so.

The % was a punishment for anyone, regardless of occupation, as is the cash&carry, which might work better.

Either way its supposed to imply. You fly somewhere dangerous, you might lose a chunk of cash. If your a noob though, with little cash, you don't lose much, so you have enough left to become a better player.

Oh, and lets add to this. :) All the money that gets taken from players for revivals, has to go somewhere. How bout a lottery? You can buy tickets normal, just like walking into a gas station IRL, and that adds to the pot. But the game adds to it too buy dumping in all, or half, or whatever, of the revival fees. :) Money goes back to the players.

I'd suggest something like the.. pick 5 numbers and a Power Number (so 6 numbers total). For the winnings, with the system set up like real lotterys.. (2 numbers.. get your money back.. 3, get 10 creds. if ones a power number.. 100 creds.. 4 numbers.. 1000 creds.. ones a power? 10000 creds.. 5 numbers.. 100000 creds.. and so on :) )