We need to talk about insurance.
I just went through a complex procedure to make sure all my real cashmoney vehicles have lifetime insurance (LTI), and I would like to explain why I bothered to do this, first and above all to myself, and then to anyone else who might be interested in this.
So right now all my vehicles have LTI: Scorpius, Hull A, C8R Pisces (in my alt account), Cutter, Mule and STV.
Why bother going for LTI, especially considering it can get complicated and even a little expensive?
Partly it's due to the collector's mindset. It's just annoying to see different types of insurance when I scroll through my hangar: there is 3 month, 6 month, 120 month (10 years) and lifetime, that I have seen. Maybe there are more types, but these are the ones I have seen. And it was just annoying me that all my vehicles had LTI except my Cutter. So I made a little rearrangement and spent a few more bucks, and now my Cutter has LTI too [ > ].
Are there any functional benefits (or disadvantages for that matter) to going for a full-LTI fleet?
That's hard to answer since we don't know how the final game will play. Right now, insurance is meaningless since while the game is in alpha all vehicles have automatic insurance. So right now, the insurance status of your real cashmoney vehicles makes no difference. But once the game is released, those 3 or 6 or 120 months will start counting down, and you'll need to pay for insurance for ALL your vehicles, real cashmoney AND UEC-bought ones.
So the question becomes how much money precisely will insurance cost? We know how much money EXPEDITED insurance costs, and it's quite a bit of money! But CIG has said that regular insurance won't be much, and you'll be able to pay for it easily just by earning the credits in-game.
However... we're talking about a game with near-100 vehicles already, and whose business model revolves around the devs pumping out a bunch of new vehicles a year. By the time the game releases, there could well be hundreds of vehicles, and they will probably never stop coming. So if you want to buy ALL of them in-game, that's a tremendous amount of work. It's so tremendous, that past a certain point I don't think any single player can do it. It's already next to impossible to do so: a player worked ONE FULL YEAR in game to get the 890J, and that's just ONE SHIP. If he wanted to get all the ships, I don't think he can do it between wipes, or ever really. And we're still at merely 100 ships. And we still don't have BASES in the game, which will cost fortunes and have their OWN insurance, I am sure.
So... I am sure the game will be perfectly playable with in-game insurance purchase, once it releases. I am sure CIG won't price insurance in a predatory fashion.
BUT...
This is a game of infinite scope where rival organizations will fight for control of resources and territories, which means that... every last bit of resources you can grab by any means possible will count. I am ALREADY making alt clone accounts so we can double the number of characters and vehicles we can bring into a situation like a real-time tactics game, so I don't see that aspect of the game going away any time soon, or ever. If anything, I bet this aspect will explode in importance as the game gets more and more mechanics and content added to it.
There are DEFINITELY things Chris Roberts and CIG can implement to avoid this arms race between players and orgs spiraling out of control and spilling out of the game and into... our wallets, but it makes ZERO FUCK SENSE for them to do it, considering that if they just leave things be, they can make literally billions of dollars WHILE STILL LEAVING THE GAME FULLY PLAYABLE for those who aren't out for world domination. If you just plan to be yet another "citizen" in the "verse" going about his business and having his adventures etc., you can do it with just a $45 starter pack and 3 months' starting insurance, and then you buy more ships in the game and you pay for more insurance in the game. But if you want, like me, to build up as big of an org as you can and grab as much property and influence as you can amass, then every bit helps, and then LTI vehicles are certainly a bonus so that insurance is one less thing to worry about.
How does all the above match my real-cashmoney-vehicle-purchase policy, where I said that I don't plan to keep the vehicles I buy, but keep exchanging them for newer ones as they come out, and buying the older ones in-game once they become available?
It doesn't mesh at all because if I keep replacing my fleet it means that only the latest vehicles will have LTI, and I'll be needing to buy insurance in-game for all the older ones, once the game goes live.
So where does that leave me?
It leaves me somewhere in limbo, because it's hard to nail down a definitive policy when we aren't 100% sure how the finished game will play and how it will be balanced by the developers. Complicating matters further is that none of this really matters until the game goes live, which could be DECADES away or even NEVER.
So, for now, my entire fleet is LTI. As new vehicles get released, I will TRY to just KEEP BUYING ALL OF THEM with LTI, and see how it goes. If it's too much money, I might start replacing older vehicles with new ones. It also depends on what the rest of the clan does. People have been buying SOME vehicles, so if they keep buying stuff maybe we can have all the new stuff collectively instead of me having to buy all of them. The character clones that I am about to introduce might help here, as they might allow us to pool resources and thus buy fewer copies of the same vehicles etc. We'll see how that goes.
In short, I have no definite answers, only a current direction, and this is: I am buying everything new LTI and KEEPING IT, for the time being. And we'll see how it goes.
P.S. If you have any questions about how to convert your current vehicles to LTI, post them in this thread and I'll help you out. It mostly consists in buying small cheap LTI vehicles at specific times of the year when LTI is offered (or new vehicles which generally come with LTI) and then upgrading them to whatever your target vehicle is. One question that I would like answered is whether I can use store credit to pay for these upgrades while retaining LTI status. I think so, but I haven't tried it yet so I am not 100% sure.
And finally, if you end up having to melt some non-LTI vehicles and end up with store credit that you don't know what to do with, you can always spend it on paints, armor, clothes and random gear that doesn't have insurance. You're never going to completely "lose" money you put into the RSI website: and you can always keep melting this gear for other gear, so you can basically try all the gear in their website if you want (after a short cooldown period).