EVE General Discussion

Can it be done easier from a player's standpoint? Certainly, we've all seen it before in many flavors in previous games.

But from a technical standpoint this is NO easy task. Having poked around in the art assets of EVE with TriExporter and somewhat following the devs talks about regarding the features this is their main problem:

Every unique skin in the the game, be it NPC or player, of any faction, are all considered a different itemID on the database. While things like HP values, fitted modules, and current name of a player ship are all things that a ship is capable of on an individual scale things like art assets are certainly not.

This test program for ship painting is being done because if the response is positive then the devs can devote the large amount of time and effort into doing it properly. And that means a fairly involved refactoring of the asset system to accept extra ship skins that are able to be applied to an individual assembled ship just as easily as giving it a new name.

It all boils down to CCP fighting with a system that was designed in 1998 to never had had ship customization at all because it really wasn't at the forefront of their minds when they were creating an entire universe from scratch in relative isolation from most other games companies in the industry.


Now as far as paying for it goes, well vanity things like character customization for money is a standard thing in a F2P game. You really don't have any argument against this sorta thing besides a self entitlement from paying a subscription. The subscription + MT model is actually pretty cool because it gives CCP a little extra revenue for the things people care enough to buy instead of not having MTs at all and raising the price on the existing subscriptions to get the same extra income.

The impact this has on the PLEX market is a different conversation entirely and hope there can be something CCP can do to relieve the massive stress the value of the PLEX is seeing right now.

Perhaps the amount of AUR you get per PLEX should be scaled with current market values. PLEX prices are nearly double what they were when AUR was introduced.

Or what about separating AUR form PLEXes altogether? Why not just buy mass amounts of AUR tokens and sell those on the market so that we can have a separation of MT value from subscription value for people that pay their way with ISK bought PLEXes.

Are you able to comprehend English? I don't think I at any point stated I don't think that ship customisation shouldn't be added. I asked a question of where lines should be drawn - to the customer ship skins are just another visual treat like fancy warp effects, new missile trails or sorting out tidi (which CCP are obliged to do as prior to tidi the game was frankly unplayable). Frankly most won't give a **** that its currently hard to add due to lack of foresight at CCP. They'll just look at other games and go "well I can paint my fancy armour for free in Guild Wars so why can't I in EVE?". Fine, add some micropayments for ridiculous skins with flashing lights but paying money to change the basic colour of your ship is really rather ********.

Also, your facts appear to inaccurate and anecdotal.

This ship skin thing has all the potential to be a "lag bomb"... are you people imagining undcoking in Jita or warping to a grid where a big battle is taking place and your client downloading all the paint schemes on field ? I hope CCP makes them an option...

If people whine enough CCP will scrap the ship skin prototype wont they? Then we will have people whinning for ages about ship skins that never happened. Just like walking in stations "never happened".

New features in eve?? GET PISSED! That always makes things better doesn't it.

I'm more worried about this then anything. What happens when CCP has more then just the EVE universe making cash. I have seen so many games go stale for other ones so many times.

EVE is paying for the other games currently though, so at least there is that reason to keep working on it.

Why is having a conversation and making your point of view on a matter known considered whining? In addition, I do not see many people getting pissed. If having a dialogue is getting pissed of for you then maybe you should stop whining because that sounds like what you are doing!

Thing is, those ship skins are purely cosmetic. Having them offers you no advantage whatsoever. Furthermore, just like with PLEX - someone will buy them, apply to a ship and put on the market. You can already grab a Rifter Krusual Edition off the market for ISK and not even touch AUR.

In addition to being a cool thing, they offer a smaller-scale exchange of $ to ISK (Without PLEX involved - just pennies via NEX) and an AUR sink since those skins are destructible (fitting well in the universe of EVE, where you can have something shiney but you can also loose it.)

All in all, it's a really good implementation and I hope we'll see more!

(EDIT: Also unlike the Monocle they're reasonably priced, and were shipped with another dose of long-awaited fixes - including, finally, changes to DSCAN and a buff to a frigate many get really nostalgic for.)

Except we're not talking about visual upgrades. A kador Abaddon is rendered the same as a normal T1 Abaddon. We're talking about nonfunctional visual assets. Yes, you could argue that any visual asset is the same, but you'd be hard pressed to make a logical argument out of it.

In all honesty if the only argument you have is the hyperbolic, "Let's make it look like [insert game with simple graphic here]" it makes it pretty clear your grasping at straws for an issue and looking to games which still can't draw parallels since they don't sell separate total visual upgrade packages.

Actually, looking at path of exile, unless I'm mistaken the offerings seem cosmetic as well. I see nothing regarding unlocking shader/texture qualities so again, unless I'm missing it, it's a point that is against your argument in that even in an FTP unlocking the full visual quality of base assets is not something which has a price point attached to it. I'm not terribly familiar with the game, so I don't know if there are actually, for example, flame swords that won't look like flame swords unless the package is bought, if so let me know, but just looking it over it looks like it's skinning, not selling individual effects.

So long story short, the distinction comes because of industry standards. The visual capabilities of the game are part of the core package (which strongly tend to include visual representations of any act the developers want to be seen ESPECIALLY those that have gameplay implications, IE cyno's/warp bubble/etc) and customization beyond that which is "standard," a concept which varies greatly from game to game, can be sold at a premium.

If this was true it would be a disappointing statement on the implementation of the code. Most games use multiple levels of detail (LOD) for rendering objects. That ships with different skins are on field should make no difference unless you can view them all simultaneously. Even then it should be entirely client-side.

No. They would be paying for ISK, which is already part of the game.