Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hey all,

Ship skins, right now, are pretty terrible. It seems CCP has not put any thought at all into the system OR their target market.

It is as if CCP completely misunderstands the market for ship skins. Ship skins are bought by people with a lot of ISK to throw around - and these people are not flying T1 ships when they can easily afford Navy, T2, or Pirate ships.

Most people might have seen the high levels of sale for the Police Pursuit Comet. That is because this is a ship that the more wealthy buy in the first place, amongst frigates, and performs far better than a reskinned cheapo T1 frigate.

Furthermore, ship skins need to be appliable - they need to be something like a paintjob that you can buy that can be applied to a ship.
Ship skins need to be available for Pirate and Faction ships (Police Daredevil, anyone?).
Ship skins should not be polluting the market as CCP seems bent on doing right now - there should be a "Reskin" option or certificate that allows you to pick a skin out of a list, rather than polluting the market window with hundreds of different entire ship VERSIONS.

Well it's not like it costs CCP anything once they've finalised all the data. Re-skin ship, relabel, set in to meta-data. Done.

This, basically. Now I will agree that prices are quite high on the re-skinned ships....the best price in region around Hek for a re-skinned caracal is 52 million. Considering the base hull is 9 million, that's quite a differential for a skin. Now as to why the price is so high, I'm not quite sure. Demand could be pushing it there, but it also may have to do with the cost in Aurum for the BPC. That's not to say I'm opposed to charging money for something like ship skins at all, but I do think CCP shot themselves in the foot on this one by having most of the skins have an attached cost. A pilot project to test demand could benefit from having a larger variety of both free and paid skins to gauge the market for it. However they did release at least one "free" ship skin (I think it's the comet right?). If they look at the numbers when all is said and done and see huge use of the free skin and less use of the paid ones, they may consider lowering the price providing they think there is enough profit to be made to warrant continuing development. That would in turn lower the market cost (probably).

As for faction/T2 skins it would be cool to see more of them I agree, but I think they should be custom designed for each faction...for instance, offering a roden shipyards paint job on a cynabal would leave something of a bad taste in my mouth. Alternative angel appearances could be cool though. Ideally we will see continuing development and CCP may even develop the alliance/corp logos/skins for ships. I would hate to see a cash charge applied to those however...I don't think that anyone should have to pay CCP to represent their particular player group.

All in all I'm not too displeased by the pilot program for ship skins, but if we're all being honest it's not exactly what we wanted. I think the general desire was the ability to create something akin to a alliance/corp "uniform" for ships, and the ability to apply alliance/corp logos to them. But I think this program is very representative of the mechanical problems of making something like that work with the database operating the way it does, so we'll just have to wait and see. With any luck CCP can breath a little bit of life into their micro-transactions program with these skins (within reason) if only to help with EvE development costs.

For the purposes of assessing interest in changing the color of your ship at all, I would say that the current parameters are more-or-less sufficient. For a full and proper rollout of ship skinning as a complete feature (I know, this is CCP, but just for the sake of argument let's imagine) they'll more than likely give us more freedom in what we do, be it additional choices or even the ability to pick the colors we want (from an EVE-appropriate palette, probably) and where we want them. In such a case, I would personally prefer that T2 ships all have their unique T2 models before we go around letting people paint them.

However, if we assume that all T2 ships have been given their unique models, I wouldn't mind being able to buy faction skins with LP and paying Aurum for the ability to custom-define my own personalized paint scheme - complete with corporate logo in place of the manufacturer's mark. I say corporate logo because, hopefully unlike Alliance logos, corporation logos don't need to be completely redone and resubmitted and put through extensive development before they're suitable for placement on ships.

One last thing: CCP said at the very outset of this pilot program that using BPCs was a temporary method and completely unsustainable. A proper, sustainable method will require dev time and that's what they're evaluating the merits of in the first place.

I don't think you read my orignal post.

Pilot Programs (especially this one, which is to gauge interest level) are ABSOLUTELY USELESS if they don't cater to their target market.