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We are still working on the transition plan and will have more details on that at a later time.

What about T3's?

Thanks for this clarification. I was worried that this would be the end state of ship cosmetics.
I hope the work will continue on the level of customization that Seagull showed at Fanfest. This seems like a good interim step between the system that is currently in place and what, hopefully, will be the end goal of total player cosmetic customization.

This idea or method of doing the the "Super Kerr-Induced Nanocoatings" isn't the best way to go about it.
Most of us love the fact that most things in this game are able to be destroyed and created at the player end. The shear fact that its stuck to your toon is some what tacky and breaks away from what I and others believed that CCPs direction was going to be with making more things destroyable.

Death in this game is one of the best parts. it gives you the PVP jitters and that "OH &^%#" moments in the game that no other game does and thats due to the fact you lose things on a permanent level.
The method you are looking at now completely miss that key game mechanic, don't get me wrong i do like the idea of having different looks and so on, but if i kill a painted ship i want to know that it hurt a little more than the standard hull.

The way you could go about it is add a new "rig" like slot that paint jobs are added to the fitting of the ships. Just like rigs they are destroyed when replaced. so would the paint job. This would mean that there would be an ongoing market for the paint skins Maybe even make them mission Lp based or something. Rather than what looks like a Micro Transaction setup form the brief view of it we have had.

I know some people will counter this argument with the fact that you gain nothing but a visual bonus to the ship by painting it but that is still something that you gain even tho it has no bearing on the state of the hull itself, and if you can gain it you can lose it.
This im my opinion is what drives Eve and makes its that much better than other MMOs out there.

Fly Deadly

HypoConDreAct

I'm just cunfused on why we are paying for them when a ship customization screen would let each pilot create their own....

Awesome!!!!!! +1

I have come up with a few more ideas regarding this after reading some of the other players posts. This is in addition to my original post. Here's the list:

• Make this a new station service called "paint shop". Just like we have a repair shop, a paint shop opens the interface to paint the ship.
• When a ship dies, the paint job dies with it. The player then has to pay to have a new ship painted. With this, there are no "licenses" that stay with the character on a permanent basis.
• Corporate paint schemes. Like the corporate logo, a CEO can build a custom paint scheme and have it made available to all corp members.
• Alliance paint schemes. The CEO of the alliance executor can chose to put together a paint scheme that represents the alliance.
• A paint job would cost players around a base price of 500,000 ISK, modified by standings toward the station owner. A corporate paint scheme would be something like 1,000,000 ISK. An alliance paint scheme would be...say...10,000,000 ISK. Not too exorbitant, and not too ridiculously trivial either. The latter two is to make the scheme available to all members of the corp/alliance. The player still has to pay to have it applied to their ship.
• Paint jobs don't automatically change if the CEO of the corp/alliance changes the scheme. Players will have to pay to have their paint jobs updated.
• Larger ships require more paint. As stated previously, the base price is 500,000 modified by standings. However, a multiplier is used based on the size class of the ship. Something like the following would apply: Shuttle: 0.25, Frigate: 0.5, Destroyer: 0.75, Cruiser: 1.0, Battlecruiser: 1.75, Battleship: 2.718281828, Capital: 3.14159265, Supercapital: 6.28. This would make shuttles the cheapest at 125,000 ISK while supercaps would be the most expensive at 3,141,592.65 ISK
• Players can trade paint schemes with other players as they do ship fittings. Just like ship fits, you still have to buy/build the modules. So the player still has to pay to have the ship painted.
• To address the concerns with buying and selling ships, repackaging the ship makes the paint job go away. Additionally, it is free for players to remove a custom paint job at the paint shop. Just click the revert button and click yes on the warning popup. Removing the paint job by any means also removes the corporate/alliance logos as well and the ship reverts back to it's original colors. However, if one of the custom blueprints were applied that changed the ship, such as a Thorax Alistra Edition, then by removing the paint job, the color scheme would revert back to the one for the Thorax Alistra Edition. This way, a player who bought into the old system can keep their ships and can still apply their blueprints while partaking in the new system.
• The new system will not affect what shows up in the overview while the old system will, just as it does now.

Comments?

The point is that they've been selling 5% of all the skins they would had sold if they weren't destructible ingame items, specially since they are bought with real money.

Once that CCP stops reinventing the wheel as a irregular polygon which only spins on sunny days, good sense wins the day and the cosmetic skins become a service instead of a item. Psychologically there is a great difference, and also financially as people easily sets a higher price mark for a perpetual service than for a single use object. It's Microtransactions 101.

Anyway as I said above, I think that painting a ship should have a cost in ISK (as a mean to implement a cost of opportunity, or a trade-off which better suits EVE).

Why don't you just go out and do it for them? :content:

Oh come on!

At every fanfest for the past 7 years you show us a tech demo of fully customizable ships skins with lots of parameters and things to play with to achieve unique badass results. And you say things like "we want to give the tools to the players" or "We want the parameters to be 100% tweakable"

And now you are announcing a system which is even worse than the thing we have now. We re gonna get to chose (if i understand correctly) a few skin licenses that are gonna be race specific (Say i want an EOM hyperion and a Quafe crane... is that possible?) and that are gonna cost aurum.
I'm glad ship skins are being looked at but this seems (and I use this word seriously)... half-assed ...

At least what we have now gives more value to a ship and has a show off factor (also called monocle factor). I mean flying an aliastra thorax is just much more badass.

This would only work IF:

> Licenses are not race specific (kaalakiota Hel for example)
> Licenses don't only apply to a single ship type (seriously?) I f I buy a license with real money All ships should be paintable cuz i got the license! Don't be too greedy. Microtransactions are usually a thing for free browser games. Remember we already pay for Eve. And it's not cheap either.


Remember Homeworld 2 had fully customizable ships (logos, stripes, colors) back in 2004

Regards

Edit: Also it seems strange to me that an aspect of the game is completely disconnected from it's economy and industry. I always thought everything you buy in EVE had to be extracted, transformed, and built by another player using the ingame resources.

Give us Pigments refined from Planetary products into pigmented nanobots.
Give us a specific slot on our ships to fit a Super Induced Kerr Nanocoating MODULE / RIG that feeds on pigmented nanobots
Activating the module opens up a menu similar to the tech demo of last year's fanfest.

If you make it a rig it'll be an isk sink. If you make the skillbook for nanocoating rigs avalable throught the NEX store, its an aurum sink aswell.

Please reconsider before implementing a half assed version of SKINS that will need to be changed again.