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This is great and all, but when do we get top hats for our characters?

What about all the people who brought skins the old way via the new eden store
will we get them refunded as most of them are limited skins that came from the limited eve box set
which cost real life money to buy the box to get the code from

as i see a lot of players will not be happy having to folk out again for something they all have ready paid for update befores

I still feel like the current system would have been better implemented as say an additional rig slot which housed the custom paint scheme.

And also pretty curious to see if these things will be unlicensed from a pilot, say if I'm tired of looking at my Quafe ship would I be able to remove the license from my character and sell it or would the license be perma applied to that specific character, never to be recovered?

Also, taking the ship skin discussion in line with character clothing and prosthetic, one would presume those would be more of a destroyable commodity than say a license to paint a ship with a certain color. Unless you are saying that when your character gets into the pod they strip down, remove all clothing and monocles and metal arms? Then they re-dress themselves when you dock (which might be why it takes eons when docking with CQ enabled?)?

Call me a purist, but I think that applying the skin to an individual ship should have a cost, so owing a skinned ship was more expensive than the unskinned version (even if that doesn't shows in KMs). This is EVE, y'know.

Anyway I am glad that someone teached Microtransactions 101 to CCP. Was about time, as the sheer incompetence of selling destructable cosmetic items for real money has been offending my intelligence since day 1.

Ship Skins sounds Like a great Idea!

It would also be neat to have player designed skins that a corporation or other group of players could grant them to fellow corporation members or friends. It would be nice to see a fleet all wearing the same skins representing just that group or corporation.

Nice ideas on skins. But could we please adjust some of the current textures that were spoiled since the new realistic lighting was added to the game. The new rendering has improved some textures and ruined others.

I want a train conductors hat and a comedic twirly cartoon villain mustache

Will there continue to be a differentiation between skinned and unskinned ships on the overview/on killmails? A huge part of buying these things in the first place is to show off; if someone has to zoom in on my Rattlesnake Victory Edition to determine that it is indeed a victory edition and there exists no record of flying it into battle it kind of defeats the whole purpose of the skin. (I get that the victory editions and the other super-rare skins will probably be left as they are to preserve their collectability, but the point holds true for all ships/skins)

A few words of warning too: don't get too crazy with the RMT store pricing. Just because the skins are now permanent is no excuse to go on the 5000 dollar jeans tangent again. Even a whole race of ships should never approach the value of a plex unless it's some special edition skin (fanfest,etc). Rare NPC drops should continue to be a thing too (officer drops maybe?). Don't just tie the whole thing to the dollar and sign off on it.

While I think it's nice, I have a better way of implementing this:

Instead of using licenses, why not make it so a player can come up with their own ship skin from a variety of patterns and colors.

The procedure to apply this would be as follows:

1. Player selects a pattern.
2. Player then chooses 1, 2, 3, 4, or even 5 different colors for that pattern.
3. Player previews texture on ship.
4. Player makes adjustments, if necessary.
5. Player pays the paint fee and the new texture is applied.

Additionally, a player can choose to have their corporation or alliance logo placed on the ship as well in a predetermined location so they can sport "colors" to the cluster. So imagine a Goonswarm fleet flying around like angry bees sporting their angry bee logo. So if someone wants a pink and blue camio pattern on their ship, they can have it.

As for the fee, something not too exorbitant, modified by standings with the station owner. It won't cost too much isk, it can be done by anyone who is docked at a station, and it doesn't cost a plex or whatever which is potentially real money. I know a lot of people just go with what the developers say, but I think this is a good idea.

Comments?

P.S. To the Developers: For system load and such, when a ship comes into view, the server sends the pattern code, and the color codes to the client, along with the corporation and alliance icons. The client will do all the work of putting the texture onto the ship, and the rendered texture itself can be cached on the client. The codes can be given a 32-bit integer value to identify it from other textures. So a potential data structure would look something like this:

typedef struct ship_paint_skin_tag__ shippaintskin_t;
struct ship_paint_skin_tag__ {
  int id;
#define USE_CORP_LOGO  0x00000001
#define USE_ALLIANCE_LOGO  0x00000002
  int flags;
  int pattern;
  int color1;
  int color2;
  int color3;
  int color4;
  int color5;
};

I'm pretty sure thats the plan, but they had to figure out a basis for applying skins to the player that would work without having people worry about people trading ships with other corporate insignia's, skins, etc.

This might do it.