Suggestion - Insurance for cargo
A compensation feature for cargo, made with the intention of improving the experience of large cargo haulers, and also looking to secure a future for even larger ships, if people want to completely fill them with cargo.
Why cargo needs a compensation/insurance feature
Personally I’ve loaded and unloaded a lot of cargo, cargo for sums of around 100k gallons, in buying prices, and what have I personally learned from this?
Well a ketch can fit 241 cargo, or 12k gallons worth of cargo, and playing on a PC that is a bit slow, is a horrible idea. That fully loaded ketch was 12k gallons down the drain, since the game crashed, possible because all of the cargo cause issues.
It took my around 4 hours to load the ship too, which was the actual pain.
My proposed idea
There would be added a function that could work on 2 proposed ways, both with their own functions.
Automatic compensation for all players
Whenever you leave the gane, you would be compensated for 50% of the worth of all cargo you had bought, but only compensating if you left out of combat, this would help people that purchased cargo, but did it by accident.
The function would not work on stolen cargo, since why would you compensate something that was already free.
The purchase of insurance at shipwright
Alternatively one could purchase a insurance of once cargo at a shipwright, at 10-30% of the cargo’s cost, the insurance could only be purchased once for a islands cargo, requiring you to buy insurance at another islands cargo, to prevent abuse.
The insurance would work in such a way, that if the cargo is lost, then you are paid back for it’s full cost.
The insurance would stop working, when none of the insurance’s cargo is available anymore, but also gradually readjust, based on the cargo remaining.
Example:
200 cargo, insurance cost 1k gallons, lost all, 10k gallons paid back.
200 cargo, insurance cost 1k gallons, lost 100, 5k gallons paid back.
Conclusion
Either system would help players against throwing away money due to connection problems or straight up bad luck. Though the need and risks and time both systems might take to implement them, can make them “useless”.
Problems with cargo compensation/insurance
Automatic compensation problems:
First of all, there comes the trouble of giving the information, but this would mostly fix itself over time, since people would learn of its existence.
I do fear the possible abuse of this system, so it would have to be tested against this, to prevent huge inflations of gallons.
Insurance problems
Well simply put, too complicated, and to easy to find loopholes and therefor abuse. The fundamental addition of insurance would be amazing, but I’m well aware of how fragile economic systems in games often are. I don’t propose for this suggestion to be added on this way, unless very hard fought of, and tested, so no accidents happen.