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Nice job CCP, in Buckhingham server you already got the alternate paint schemes. :D There's no information on how to use them, sell or produce them however.

But they didn't have skins, which are awesome btw.

My guess would be we choose which one we want as a Christmas present as they explore the whole extra skins thing.

Just like they should have offered special editions of all the other races industrials other than the one race who happens to have Quafe? Not that I don't agree, but its rarely fair.

I sincerely hope Aurum isn't going to be used to magic the Catalyst hull into existence like that infamous Scorpion from the 2011 Summer Fiasco. To reiterate, Aurum for a skin that confers no benefits is just fine. Aurum for a ship, even one as cheap as a Catalyst, crosses the line.

In a perfect world, that would be how custom skins enter the game. However, CCP is a company determined to embrace microtransactions, and cosmetic microtransactions are the only type that are appropriate for EVE.

They likely already weighed the pros and cons of making the system a rig/mod based texture swap item or making them complete ship variants which flood our market, and deemed it easier... or more "practical" to just to flood the game with different variants.

I doubt it.

If Ii was employed by CCP, and wanted to introduce painjobs (even if predfined colour schemes / textures to apply as rigs to a given ship), I'd already have introduced them at the cost of 1 AUR per skin. 1 AUR is something most people will have, and at the rate the ships may get destroyed, it will start generating income after a while. I'd also have made it a sellable, fit for all ships (well maybe 1 AUR for firgats, 2 for cruisers, 5 for battleships, 10+ for capitals), on the ISK market. It'd probably be worth it, and people would never be forced to use them, and it would be a quick way of making players (eventually since AUR is finite per player) melt a plex if they want to keep using shiny textures.

In the last CSM minutes, they already discussed using multiple venues to provide "paints".
Aur of course being one of them. Just as they did with the last big avatar clothing batch. Some were rare drops, some from LP and FW, and some from Aur.
Since they are using full ship variants and not some module. They can easily sell or drop bpcs of special skinned ships.
The crushing problem with the Nex market is it is unable to handle multiple currencies such as ship + Aur = custom ship. That's why the Ishukone Watch scorpion never came (same stat as vanilla scorp with gold fade). They were going to skip manufactures and blink whole ships into existence just for Aur. People threw a fit.
Nex store still needs to be overhauled if they plan on ship swapping for special painted versions. (Also needs better sorting like a real market) Yet bpcs via LP or drops could work right now.

Last time I looked at these too the skill reqs were lower than for an actual Catalyst which seemed odd.