Player Features and Ideas Discussion

EDIT: Changing this old post to reflect that CCP has recently announced a trial run of something very similar to my older suggestion.

A link to the article.

Everything that follows is unchanged.

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Secondly: There are a lot of ship skins that aren't available to players, but if made available would make a lot of us pee a little.... Probably more than once.... Being able to repaint a ship in pirate or NPC faction colors for LP would be a very nice thing, allowing players many more options in customizing their ships and expressing their playstyle. Naturally there would have to be some limitations, such as no repainting a ship a pirate color if that model of ship is already available in that style. For instance, no repainting an Apocalypse in Blood colors to be identical to a Bhaalgorn. That would be unfair to Bhaalgorn owners in a way, even though they actually purchased a unique hull, not a paint job.

Nothing would change in the overview, the description, or the mechanics of the ship. Just cosmetics. It may be advisable to make this option only available to T1 ships, but maybe not. Charging more for a repaint on a T2 is certainly feasible, since T2's in general are flown longer.

I've seen Blood and EoM skins for pretty much the entire line of Amarr ships, Corelum (or am I thinking of someone else) reskins for the entire Gallente line, etc... And I see no gameplay reason not to allow it. Nobody confirms a ship type by visual appearance alone. It's always checked in the overview or the info window if there is any doubt.

Any objections to cosmetically expanding the variety of ships in the game by several magnitudes with a minimal amount of effort?

Edit: forum just lost my post, I'll retype later.

lolwhut

Alright I know I let this topic die but I've got some free time now and I'd like to expand on this. I'm going to do it here first before moving it to the appropriate subforum because it'll give me a better chance to read through criticism and adjust accordingly if I find the criticism legitimate.

Re-skins would only marginally de-value existing reskinned ships, because you still have the factor of a limited supply of those ships being available to the market if reskins for those models, available in that faction color, aren't allowed. I own the Sukuuvestaa Heron, a Tash-Murkon Magnate, Sarum Magnate, and a few others. I couldn't care less if re-skins dropped their "value" by 10% or even 50%, because the number of them available wouldn't have changed. Any immediate drop in price would likely be a bump in the large scheme of things and the ships' value would recover and continue to increase, assuming you thought investing in dozens of them was a smart way to make lots of isk fast... (It caused me physical trauma just imagining that someone could be that deluded)

Instead you have an easy sink for both LP and isk. I think... If you follow these mechanics:

Paint jobs are a one time use application that gets destroyed when the ship is repackaged just like a rig. No extra slots, no UI design changes need to be made, it simply needs to display a different model in all of the thumbnails, fitting and information windows.

No change in name or anything that would be significant from a combat or market standpoint. You could still sell the ship painted in a contract like we already do with ships that have rigs fitted, or are fully fitted for a specific purpose and we don't feel like breaking down and selling the individual modules. People will be able to tell the ship is actually painted if it is contracted as such by looking at the info window.

In order to get a ship painted you have to be at an LP store that offers the service and you have to have the ship packaged in your ship hangar in the station, just like you have to do with other LP purchases that require items as part of the purchase price (Sister's probes being the most obvious and common example)

After purchase above I see 2 ways to handle it, both of which have pro's and cons:

After purchasing the ship is returned unpackaged. You have to fly it home from wherever you made the purchase.

Pros: This will slow down market saturation significantly, but not stop it entirely. People looking to make a quick profit by farming LP and just flooding the contracts market with re-skinned ships will find the time invested makes it unprofitable. Thus the re-skins become more a personal statement because someone either paid a premium for that specific re-skin or else invested time and effort to get the ship out of a potentially dangerous area, for those LP stores in dangerous areas.

Cons: If pirate colors are only offered in a few select LP stores, those stations will be camped 23/7 with no relief for the easy kills and so that the campling alliance can corner the market on those ships and monopolize the price. These re-skins would have to be available in enough LP stores to make camping every station they're available at impossible.


After purchasing the ship is returned packaged for easy transportation in an industry ship or freighter of your choice, just like any other newly purchased ship

Pros: Less likely to see extortion for certain factions based on availability, but this advantage is more easily addressed by making the re-skins purchasable from a large amount of stations.

Cons: High sec would be filthy with pirate faction colors, which even I find the thought of rather disappointing, and I couldn't under any circumstances be considered a roleplayer. The solution to this is to add extra requirements for flying pirate colors in high sec, such as an extra high security rating and penalties such as even more exorbitant fees if you get caught smuggling. Lots of possibilities here, including maybe having to pay Concord LP for a license? That one sounds rather nice. Fly your pirate colors in low and null all you want, but step into high sec with the ship and you gotta pay not to have it confiscated.

How does this fit into the game? Well, the entire economy as it stand is nothing but a shady back-alley swap meet with a lot of theft and bribery going on, so you're essentially bribing someone who is a part of that faction to paint your ship with the company logo. Given that many of these factions should have thousands of ships flying around under their colors, what's a few capsuleers going to matter? The employees of most of these factions get up to more shady stuff than I could ever dream of, according to Security mission details I read. =)

As long as I can create Farsaidh variant enyos and ishkurs in ImpossiBlack with HyperChrome sparkly bits I'm happy. What I'd *really* like is to be able to create branded ships through invention with ship bonuses (within reason) defined by me at invention time :)

Now that would be interesting. Allowing player manufacturers to essentially make their own brand.

The only issue I see is that market pressure would push everyone towards making the obvious improvements that benefit those individual ships the most. Without some sort of limit everyone would just min-max the already existing strengths of each ship.

Maybe make it so that the industry player researches and invents a "technique" that is then applied to all ships he chooses to manufacture with that technique, and limit the number of techniques an individual industry player can invent?

Materials required and prices of the ship should increase accordingly, of course.

This deserves it's own thread.


Edit: Wasn't CCP just recently looking for ways to improve the industry and manufacturing gameplay?


CCP.... DO THIS RIGHT NOW.

Check the middle of the thread, post #5.

Then by all means point the devs to this thread in their official post. The less work they have to do to implement this, the more variety we'll see before they decide the project is no longer profitable.

I don't think any further discussion on ship skins is going to affect the decision CCP makes in the end. It's going to come down to how many of these custom skins get purchased.


It's not that simple. If the microtransaction skins are popular enough, that means CCP can afford to hire more people, meaning more people to improve Eve. Once the code for the microtransaction skins is in place, LP skins won't require any extra code. Meaning the people who fix bugs will have very little to do with them, only the artists will be needed for more skins.

I already have pointed them here. One person doesn't draw a lot of attention though.

The purpose of simplifying the implementation of ship skins is to reduce the impact on development time and quickly get the project to a point where the only people working on it are the artists. The artists (typically) don't code one whit, but companies like to keep them busy because it's either that or lay them off. Ship skins, if done efficiently, can be a very big bang for your buck improvement in gameplay satisfaction, without slowing down other projects.

Bugger limited edition ships, I own almost a dozen I think?... It's nice owning something rare, it would be nicer if I could undock it in a trade hub without being target locked. Limited edition ships are nothing but hangar ornaments with little to no in-game purpose. You want to talk about wasted development time? Let's talk about that.

I avidly collect limited edition ships, this will do little to nothing to devalue them. There will still be a limited number of those ship types in existence. It is a "Tash Murkon Magnate" not a "Magnate" that looks different, should you choose to look at it.

Those yellow, pink, and purple ships you're worried about are already in the game, you're just too busy shooting them to notice what color they are. NPC's have been flying around in their striped underwear ships for years, why shouldn't we?