Player Features and Ideas Discussion

After looking over some of the skins that CCP has designed, just not implemented ( http://www.eohgames.com/labs/Ships/Sukuuvestaa%20Rokh ), and knowing that they're looking for ISK sinks, why not let people get repaints for their ships in the colors of NPC corporations?

Take the Rokh above. Say repainting it would cost maybe 50k LP and 50 million isk, that way they work as an isk sink, but also give Sukuuvestaa LP a real value and give players some customizations over how their ships appear without the mess that is tracking tons of different custom paint jobs.

Good idea? Bad idea?
I know it's a rehash of the old "custom paint jobs" posts, but I figure since these models are already in game it wouldn't put as much of a strain on the servers when it comes to keeping track of hundreds of different versions.

Mmm, dat Rokh.

In seriousness though, I don't know how I feel about this. Different ship skins have traditionally come from two sources, special edition ships and faction ships, both of which usually have a unique bonus. While there is no harm in allowing for "re-paints" of non-traditional faction colors (i.e. so long as you can't paint your raven to look like a navy raven) it wouldn't really be a problem (although the baiting potential would be hilarious). However, I feel that it does, in some ways, detract from the nature of a faction ship, as improved stats and quality of the ship are kind of signified by their unique appearance. I'm a bit worried it would "cheapen", so to speak, faction ships to have regular vessels with such flashy paint jobs.

That said, apparently corp logo's/colors are in the pipe, so we may see a bit more customization "Soon™". I suppose I would support more "standard", or even customized paint jobs if we saw more visual improvements to existing navy faction ships first. For example, the navy faction frigates (like the imperial navy slicer) look different then any of the other frigates, and that's cool.

And if this was implemented, yes, I would prefer it was LP with the associated corp.

If the website is to be believed, CCP has already made these skins. They're just not implemented into any ships that we can currently fly.

I imagine it may take a bit of work, or it could be really easy, depending on the systems they have for calling on data about a ship.

This is mostly incorrect.

Changing colouring and texture effects is easy, and the engine allows for it already (it was build to be able to do this).

It is only when you want new unique textures that you'd require custom designing - and you can easily modify the masks to make more with little effort.

Check out all the custom skins on the eohgames site, 90% of them have only one custom file which is about 22kb that controls the colours and texture effects, which every ship must have anyway...

Yay, they took my idea \o/

So for everyone asking for them to be available for LP and whatnot.

The server cannot identify a Rifter and painted Rifter as an item stemming from the same base, and they require separate entries in the database, killmails, markets, etc.

Because of this, every single painted variant requires a different section of the market. This in unfeasible for any sort of large scale implementation.

In order to fix this, CCP is going to have to spend a significant amount of developer time in changing the way the server handles and tracks individual items so that we can apply paint skins without every single skin having it's own market option. Then they have to design the system of painting ships, the tools to do so, so on and so forth.

This is not free for them. This is a cosmetic issue like clothing or tats, and in order to justify it financially instead of features more likely to draw or retain customers, they need to expect some level of return on the time spent. That is why this initial paint experiment is an interest test run to see if the financial outlay is appropriate for the eventual return.

It's going to be for Aurum for the vast majority of the ships because of this.