Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Regarding that web page tool, are they selling on offline version, and do I need to just send them all my money or do they also need my firstborn? I don't have a child at the moment so I need 9 months to organize payment.

As far as letting people make skins in games, the usual argument I hear is that it takes away more control from people that want that control, and the worry that player based stuff might end up so much better then the company stuff that the game store stops being used.

It's worth watching the Eve Vegas presentations, including the keynote section on SKINs.

The "Upcoming Art & Visual Effects" presentation on Sunday at Eve Vegas introduces new skin technology called Pattern Projection. It starts 1 hour 47 minutes into the stream. https://www.twitch.tv/ccp/v/98036891

any chance we had of custom skins went out the window when CCP started selling theirs. it would of been grate and added a lot to eve but $ comes first for them

so how well do you expect it to go over when CCP tells players they can now pay them to literally make their own content

I have a variation proposal of this suggested feature.

What if SKIN Licenses were not used to USE a SKIN but to MAKE a SKIN? With your proposal, the process of creating the content is actually free, which would have the "issue" of allowing a flood of new content that will not be free to use, even for the person that made it. What I propose is this:

Every player has free access to the the skin customization tool (that would look something like this, in which he can have all the fun in the world selecting a hull and applying to it a series of customisation options like patterns, colors, logos (only in-game ones, of course, not out of eve stuff like Hello Kitty). WHen he is done, FINALIZING the creation of the SKIN would prompt a cost in AUR. This cost will of course vary depending on the hull, but possibly also depending on the colors or patterns used (some cool colors or cooler effects like gradients might cost more for example). When the player finalizes the SKIN, the relative SKIN object will appear in his inventory in game, or in his redeeming system, whichever is easier. Then, the player may activate the SKIN himself, or sell it on the market, or gift it to someone else, whatever they choose.

During the finalization process, or even during the creation, a chance to "save" the skin project may also be given, so that if someone else is interested in that SKIN, the player who made it may recreate it and put it on the market. Another possibility is that someone at CCP might review all the SKINs players make and select the best ones to put them on the NES, or put every player-made skin on the NES for a short period of time. In this case, maybe the original creator of the SKIN may receive part of the AUR cost people pay for the SKIN, so they also obtain some kind of revenue for their work, but without costing CCP any real money, quite the opposite in fact. This would also allow a successful "SKIN artist" to create more SKINs, or to pay for his game time by purchasing PLEXes (when and if they will become available in the NES).

Corporations and Alliances CEOs and directors may be given the chance to make a few free SKINs available only to their members, or maybe a chance to create for an AUR cost an official pattern that would automatically be applied to all ships, again available for free only to members.

Also as a long term projection if player generated content like actual players making and shaping the way eve looks, not only brings a whole new meta into an already super unique game, but saves ccp money and time. Allowing them to.focus more on important issues.

Also this would bolster subscriptions due to the artistic design side of the game being unreal and un- like any other

Like I said a whole new meta.

~Garz

No thanks that's just gonna be nickel and dining which is already what the autumn store is. There should never be microtransactions in a subscription based game but having a shopping cart feature in effect while making skins for gradients in patterns would essentially be microtransactions within microtransactions.

The base system should be free for everyone, design any skins you want for your own ships. Any license needed should be to put it on in the store for a cut of the profits like you said and sold to other players. Popular skins compete against each other for dominance. If your skin isn't popular it gets knocked out naturally by player selection/flagged by ccp and removed.

Oh man lets see, issues with this:

#1 Copyright. CCP legally can't allow player created content into their game if it violates someone else's copyright, so now they need an entire vetting process for anything anyone designs, or they need to make the entire system very very limited (like, for example, the existing SKINs system?)

#2 Time To Penis. This was brought up by CCP the last time they addressed this, which would be less than 5 minutes from the time a tool like this went live on TQ. Sure vetting things would limit this, but I doubt anyone at CCP wants to stare at **** picks all day.

#3 Server and network overhead. Transmitting completely custom skins would be pretty bandwidth intensive, so either you'd need to make it something like the guns on ships where you only see it if you "Look At" someone's ship, or you need to take a major performance and networking hit to a game that really can't afford it considering who plays it and how (multiboxing, people playing on old machines, large fleet fights, ect)

#4 This is actually harder to do than you think, at least in a way that looks good on every ship you could put a SKIN on. If a player purchases a SKIN and then it doesn't look right on the ship they wanted to use it on (it's warped, the colors are wrong, ect) then they may demand a refund or at least take up time from customer support. It's not even hard to find examples of this in CPPC's skin toy you linked, like putting almost any Amarr skin on a Caldari hull, you end up with something that's mostly using Amarr secondary and tertiary colours because those slots are what Caldari uses for its primary colours. That's why the current SKINs are released per faction.

There are also some lore considerations on CCP's part, apparently not wanting to put one race's colors on another's ships.

So yeah, good sounding idea, waaaaay too many problems.

The only real question is how many variants of the 'Hello Kitty' SKIN we'll have to choose from...