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First, I don't loose 20 battleships a month. Second, only fly what you can afford to loose. If you don't like spending money on skinned ships, simply ignore them. They perform exactly the same in combat when compared to their normal counterparts.

I want one each for collectors purposes, and then I'll only fly them with bling fleets, which doesn't happen 20 times a month, but once in a while.

*delete please*

Just like I said:
Oh, and "lose".

On the rare times I post I normally try to be supportive and nice about some of the things you guys at CCP do. Constructive criticism being better than just criticism. So we'll start with that.

Ship painting is a good idea!

There, now that that's done.

Have you lost your minds?!?!

8mil for a frigate paint job? A fully fit frigate, give or take, is 8mil. Painting it doubles the price to 16mil. And I will not, full stop, not pay 16mil for a pretty frigate when an 8mil normal frigate will give me the same bang for my buck. 1mil, sure, maybe. I'll blow 1mil on a fit split between price fluctuations and emergency buys on local markets of items I think I have but don't. At 500k a pop I'd paint every single frigate I ever buy and CCP could pat themselves on the back knowing they're making money off auram because painted ships would be dying in the thousands. Quantity has quality all it's own.

Did you guys really study the market? There are professions, plural, that do nothing but try to keep prices on the market down to compete for sales; and there are other professions, also plural, that try to drive prices up so they can make more per sale. The price we see on the market is the middle point of the two, it's what the market will bare. And the market will bare paying 8million isk for a frigate. Not 16million isk. 8 million. People aren't going to spend another 8million to make their frigate look pretty because they won't spend another 8million on making their frigate better able to handle combat.

And that's the price problem. Let's move onto another problem.

Nevermind that battleship paint costs 64 mil. So, why battleships? In case it escaped your notice, Warp Speed changes nerfed battleships so hard that everyone but mission runners and null fleets aren't using them. In fact we're fleeing from them. Mission runners buy A ship, and so long as they don't do anything stupid they'll keep that ship for years, and the really heavy mission runners have moved to faction variants and marauders. You aren't going to get any sort of market velocity on mission runners. For fleet, the Halloween War is wrapping up and it'll be months before a brand new war shows up to take it's place, so there aren't going to be a lot of fleet loses of battleships either, still no market velocity. You'll see one large set of sales at the beginning of Ret 1.3, and that's it. So again, why battleships?

The idea of stuff like this is usually for it to be a perennial source of income. But you've priced it so high it moves into the luxury category instead of it being something everyone buys as a matter of course. Then one of the two ship classes you've chosen as a test bed is on the wane in usage. Even if you start tweaking the prices involved to bring them down to something sanity minded over the course of this test you aren't going to see battleships paint becoming something with heavy usage. Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers, and Battlecruisers all have a higher throughput, so have higher usage potential.

Use the Rigging/Weapon Fitting system to paint ships

No idea if this is suggested before, and if not I do not know why not, for it is so obvious.

But the game has a perfect system to have painting integrated with as far as I know (or understand programming) little effort and minimum impact on the databases and GPU’s.

If you would create an extra rigging like thing with slots to the fitting of a ship which will hold the paint for that ship it will mean there does not have to be a new ship type ID for every painted ship it just uses the same system as now but instead of showing the much more complex graphical representations of moving shooting missile launchers, rail guns mining lasers, it fills a specific part of the ship with the colour of the paint.

And you can go as wild as you want let’s say a rookie ship and a shuttle only get 1 slot in the paint rig so they pick 1 colour, a frigate depending on the complexity and tec level 2-4 and the bigger (more complex) the ship the more colour slots till like 8 on a titan.

And each paint slot is for pre designated areas on the ship like something that is now dark gray on a caldari ship is 1 slot and the light part is slot 2 and the rest stays the base colour.

To make it so you use the philosophy larger ships need higher ISK to fit, use a system that uses amounts of paint to fill a slot, like it would in the real world 10 l for a rookie ship’s details and
10.000 l for a titan, so only if you got enough paint you can finalise the paint job

You can use like 1 l of a paint to preview a paint job, but to get the paint job done, you need the specified quantity of that paint in your hangar, before pressing the paint button (yes a new button in the fitting menu) but it does save with the fittings so a corp or alliance can easily spread a saved corp fit with corp colours to its members.


Now to monetize it just make blueprints to produce the paints.
Keep the high quality ones in the aur shop (and plz do not specify the $ costs just tell ppl they can pay plex/ISK for them as well and leave it at that so you do not get the riot from a few years back)

Like for the aur shop: the Blackest black, whitest white, gold, silver maybe even pure red, green, bleu etc so these are the premium paints (T2 or T3)

For the LP shops: use the npc corp colours to sell at their shops but if they use black, just make it greyish and if they use red make it duller in colour so like these are common colours (T1) and this way players that want to produce a specific colour have
to get LP with a NPC corp that sells that colour paint blueprints

So the making of the paint is regulated by the blueprints, the different amounts needed make it a titan costs more to paint than a frigate. Now to keep the paint flowing and the market healthy paint is used up in a paint job, so for each new ship or repaint you need to get the required amount of paint. (only preview uses 1 unit of a paint)


If you sell a ship on the market you have to repackage it so it has no damages and no paint job (that is lost in the packaging process, if ppl want to sell painted ships use the contract and trade systems.

If you want to remove a paint job just repackage it, if you got rigs on it you want to keep, use the needed amount of paint but now a paint remover or transparent paint (an extra but low cost commodity).

So this way you do not have to have tons of different ship models or ID’s for each paint job, older API systems like kill boards keep functioning because the just show the base model till they update their systems to handle paintjobs, your GPU just uses the base model only fills specific parts with a colour specified in the paint “rig”.


And while you are at it add a decal rig as well :)

Use blue prints to give 4 types of decals T1 corp decal, T2 aliance decal and T3 personal and special decals.

Depending on which one you fit in the decal “rig” the basic empire icon, on the ship, changes to your corp logo, alliance logo or special logo like a pirate faction.

The personal logo is prob a bit more work for you would have to have a place where you store personal logo’s for a palyer (these are made in the same way as the corp logo’s so no flying obsanities but just a bit more personalisation).

So when flying for let’s say an alliance with a bee in the logo, it can paint their ships yellow and black with the alliance logo on the side.
Now if someone would drop the alliance/corp to a NPC corp te paint stays but the logo changes to the empire logo (if an alliance decal is fitted) or to the new corp if a corp decal is fitted.
But a like with the paint "rig" a corp or alliance can easily save a fit and then, mass fit corp ships in the colours and logo of the alliance or corp.

When I said I know nothing about programming I meant exactly that, so almost all of your post went right over my head.

But thanks anyway for making the effort.

That's a pretty good news, and I understand your beginning very carefully, as Jester said on his blog, but your really need to lower your price if you want this to be a success.

Prices are too high here, so people won't use these, thinking it is NOT paintship, but collectors ships.
If it's expensive PvPers won't buy it ; why do it? it's gonna blow up soon, and it's more hard to get one.
And PvEers risk becoming targets with more expensive / visible ships : more points on killboards.

High prices could be okay if the process was automatic (applied to your ship without doing anything), and / or if the painting was for life (you'll get the new ships painted for free).
But on this situation it's not interesting.
I understand you can't make a good system easily as it takes time (and something close to rigs would be nice yeah), but don't destroy the idea by making it too expensive. We wan't this, but you teached us that money is power in EVE, and that you should not undock with what you dont want to lose. Why would I want to loose my new painting that was costly, and that I'll need to import again from highsec?

So please lower your prices. You're not here to sell a few high items, you're here to sell a lot of small little things ; that's the point of something hyped right?

cool, i like that, let's hope this to be a first step.

i really would like some customization could be done, like:

have several mask, with various colors (2-3 / each) and let us select said colors

this would be a good compromise between customisation and work on CCP side (custom mask could be a pain in he rear to handle).

also, what could be really great, is that corp alliance having "official" paintjob, like they do have logos.

it would be really cool to fly with a paintjob only your corp / alliance can have (and you corp / alliance logo on it too :) )

we could even dream about some paintjob attributed as a reward by CEOs, like a special one for your best PVP ppl, flying a distinctive paint scheme, so other players can spot them right away, then shake out of fear.....or rush to hunt them!

alliance / corp one could have a specific mask they shall submit to CCP like the logos making them unique.
regarding the microtransaction side of it, go ahead, that's ok, since it doesn't give an advantage to said players, no problem here.

but while the frig price seems OK, the BS one seems a bit high, and while i'd like to see cap paintjobs too, i fear their pricetag.

last, don't include pirate ships, they already are awesome as they are, and don't include their mask to be available to others, they shall remain unique imao.

I like the skins, but if this feature increases the load on the client hardware, I'd rather not have it.

I wholeheartedly approve of spilling buckets of paint on ships.

I do agree that the prices are a bit high though. Half of the current price would be much nicer.


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