Update news for 2010-06-11 - Insurance

Spotlight features

Insurance

You can now insure your robots to somewhat ease your loss when they get destroyed. Here are the details:

Insurance can be either private or corporate, whoever pays the fee will get the payout. The type depends simply where the robot is at the time you insure it: if it's in your private storage it will be private, and when it's in a corporation storage then it will be a corporate insurance.
Corporate insurance is of course paid from the corporation account and the payout is transferred back to that. Only CEOs, Deputy CEOs and Financial officers can insure robots in the name of a corporation.
Corporate insured robots can be freely moved to corporation member storages and back, but privately insured robots cannot be moved to corporation storages.
You can see the list of your insured robots in your profile under the Insurance menu and there is a similar menu in the Corporation management window for robots insured by the corporation.

Privately insured robots have a small golden shield icon overlay, and corporate insured ones have a green one. You can also check insurance details in robot information windows under the insurance tab (if they have any).
Insurance fee is 30% of the global average price of the insured robot at the time of insurance. The fee can be lowered with the "Discounted insurance" extension, each level will lower it by 1% point, down to a minimum of 20%.
Payout amount is 90% of the global average price of the insured robot at the time of insurance (this is set at the time the insurance is made and it won't change for the duration of the current insurance). Payout cannot be modified by any extension.
New extensions affecting insurance can be found under the "Finances" category.
Insurance duration is 1 week by default. This can be increased with the "Long-term insurance" extension, each level increases the duration by 1 day.
Existing insurances can be extended as many times you want and also canceled by right-clicking them on the insurance list.
You can insure 1 robot by default, but this can be increased by 3 for each level of the "Expanded insurance quota" extension.
Insured robots cannot be packaged or recycled, the insurance needs to be canceled first for these.
Currently both private and corporate insurances use the same pool of insurance slots of the initiating Agent, but this will change in the future.

New: Added more NPC spawns (including some rank 5 ones) throughout all zones.
New: A few fixes and improvements in the combat and mining tutorials.
New: Infinite containers have been removed from the market, you can now create these from the right-click menu of your private storage for 5000 NIC.
Fix: Wrong error message when trying to deploy with no active robot.

Fix: Fixed the parameters of the MR1000-Boogey lightweight frame as they were the same as those of the standard issue item.

Change: Waspish head bonus changed from missile launcher cycle time to missile range.
Change: The mass of prototype items have been reduced.

Change: The "Research" extension now affects kernel research. Each level increases the knowledge you gain from kernels by 1%.
Change: Set the "All extensions" filter as default.

Change: Only standard and prototype items can now be reverse engineered (no named items).
Change: Removed the -1 level decoder bonus of prototype items and lowered their CT ratio bonuses as well.
Change: Removed the material and time multiplier of named items in prototyping. This effectively reduces material needs and manufacturing time for nearly all prototype items.
New: Kernel research window now also displays how much a certain item has progressed with the current research.
Change: Moved some epriton fields that were still in secure places.

New: Data consoles can now be recycled. They break down to a random batch of minerals, so these don't get shown on the result list.

Change: The price of light industrial robots have been halved (Argano and Laird).
Change: You cannot buy from yourself or sell items to your own buy orders anymore. The direct sell window will not "see" your own orders and skip to the next available one of another player.
Change: Increased the maximum item quantity when placing orders to 1 billion.

New: New characters cannot be deleted for 24 hours after their creation.
New: New characters start now with 20.000 NIC.
New: Added pagination to the mailbox.
New: Added hotkeys for camera zoom in/out when outside (PGUP/PGDN by default).
New: Pressing the enter key will now bring up the minimized chat window.
Change: Revoked the permissions of croissants concerning server shutdowns.
Change: Renamed the "Off-topic" channel to "General chat".