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I'm all for more of everything regarding ship skins. But the total lack of any htfu in this change is worrisome.

You know that makes absolutely no sense..
The "I have lots of money" group are the ones who don't care about losing stuff (and can afford to).
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Having permanent skins you purchase, at what will be higher prices, is a good idea. Those buying them will be shelling out real dollars for AUR which goes directly back to every player by allowing CCP to spend more on improvements to the game.
I'll possibly buy a permanent license for a ship skin (as long as they are interesting enough) with AUR/$ but i won't spend $ on a skin that will be lost when the ship is lost.

Eve is not pay to play and hopefully will never go that way by having one use items purchased with money.

If skins are cheap and "only" available for purchase with isk, then by all means, make them single use.

My biggest concern, and the only one I see not being addressed, is how to handle the conversion of existing SKINs.
It should not be complicated at all.

Any existing BPCs grant the ability to apply that SKIN to a ship, functioning how its being said the SKINs licences will function. Any ships already with a SKIN already applied are currently just ships utilizing what will eventually be those licences.
BPCs simply being unapplied SKINs should convert to unapplied SKINs licences. Ships already painted with a SKIN BPC should convert to an unapplied SKINs licence, and a actual ship being the hull that the painted ship was.

These should all be converted to unapplied licences to be fair, as currently painted ships can be traded, as unapplied licences will be. Players should not be punished by suddenly being bound to an item that they could have previously traded simply because the system that governed it changed. Fair impact on players already involved in a system is something CCP seems to take pride in trying to uphold through every change that has this level of impact on a system.

CCP should also take this chance(and I believe I saw it mentioned but I just want to mention again) to clean up a lot of these Faction ship variants that only exist to offer a different paint scheme, and only exist this way because this is just what they chose to do predating the current SKINs BPCs. For example Faction scanning frigates, or the Faction Catalysts, any ships that have identical stats to their base hull counterparts, but are still a different ship just to maintain a paint scheme.

Also I am not a fan at all of these proposed 'limited time' SKINs. I cannot really think of anything else in game that can be purchased through RMT or ISK that once purchased only lasts for X time and then becomes invalid other than for example PLEX, which has a much different impact on gameplay. The only argument I have seen against this from the Dev posts is to not deflate the dropped pirate themed SKINs on the market. If they are afraid of this happening they can simply decrease the drop rate or drop locations of these items to achieve the supply/demand balance they want.

These concerns, for me come from having a decent amount of these various ships existing in various states(Faction, some are BPC form, some are painted ships) and having these SKINs and ships preserved fairly, as well as wanting to invest in more rare and thus expensive SKINs currently available in game(think Rattlesnake Victory Edition and the like).

Other than these concerns I am actually looking forward to this new SKINs system. It will motivate and allow me to fly ships sporting these paint schemes without fear of losing them, moving them from a collector item locked in a container to something I can actually use. Hopefully this will also lead to a lot less physical ships needing to exist to fly them. Which means having to produce a lot less ships just to have them exist, and the hassle that comes with that when it comes to relocating a collection of any large size.

Hopefully CCPs vision lines up with my expectations, and I can both now use painted ships, and clean up a lot of the mess I have from all of these different systems for paint schemes existing at once.

Well, Game marketing has, this week, had a major upset.
The marketing groups of the game companies, have been trying hard to convert their playerbases into a neverending cashpot that can be nickeled and dimed into poverty, and great wealth for them.

This ended this week.

Apple, you know, those people who know something about marketing, have completely rejected this model, and introduced their Pay once, and play policy in their app store.

No more gold coins, paid upgrades, drip drip drip of money going out.

The marketing world has realised the current model has just become extinct

Now, Paying a subscription is fine, no problem there.

Pay for skins, interesting clothes, and other shineys, is now a policy that belongs to history.

We want them, they should be part of our subscription, obtained through playing the game.

The time to make extra money from it is now past, unless CCP marketing knows something that Apple doesn't?

Would you be ok shelling out $5US every time you lose a ship or will you just not buy single use skins but happily hunt those who have them?

Your response here should have been "Micro transactions" do not belong in this game.

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NB; If CCP is hurting for income as badly as the expansion of micro transactions might suggest -
Try, stopping with all the pretty effects, they are pretty much useless on single threaded code as it all just ends up too resource intensive for the average player, so they get turned off - I'm sure the minority who run a single instance with a highend machine appreciate all the pretty effects but do you really want to balance a game for a minority, to the exclusion of everyone else.

Finish the new code base as a high priority, Then all your pretty effects will have a place to belong - Remember, the more crap you add to the existing outdated codebase - The longer it takes to fix it.

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Get the fundamentals sorted so you don't keep losing long term players hand over fist - I'm really tired of getting emails from friends I have played with since I started eve (in 2007, not with this guy) , telling me they are out, enough is enough and eve is just not worth the time and effort anymore. (When someone who has dedicated 10 years to Eve decides LOL is more fun - There is something terribly WRONG)


This time last year when I logged in there would be around 25k to 30k online - now it is like 18k to 25k (often dropping to 12k as downtime approaches). It would seem the current direction of development is not the right one, unless a reduction in players is desired - After all, less players = less server load (a desired out come on outdated unstable code)

I so wish I could afford to go to Fanfest so I could tell Devs face to face how much the content they keep changing/removing is affecting players.

PS; Sorry for the rant but just got told by my CEO we are looking at another 2 or 3 months of structure grinding so another alliance can increase their space. FIX SOV, or at least let us know the basics of the planned changes, waiting till fanfest may just be too late for some to bother staying around.

No not rocket science and as long as you put no value on the time you spend generating isk - Your a winner.
At 200 mil ph ratting, 1 plex @ 800 mil it is costing you around $100 (if you value your time based on minimum wage)

How much would you pay for a skin?
How much is your time worth for an item you may lose 5 mins after purchase?

Sorry but your wrong about a completely destructible universe.. Being podded now has no consequences (no sp lost), special edition pods (golden pods) can't be destroyed, stations and outposts are completely indestructible (reinforce and take control is not destroying).

Yes many people currently have skins and a large majority of those have never seen the outside of a station, they were installed and used for ship spinning. There are quite a few posts in this thread along the line "it will be good to be able to use the ship I have skinned when they change".
I have spoken to a lot of others (several hundred were approached) while discussing the chance of a corp skin design, the majority were all for a skin design reflecting a personal corp design. As long as it is permanent and doesn't need to be replaced if you lose the ship.
1 skin, 1 ship type that will survive destruction of the ship to be put on a replacement ship.

Destructible, single use ship skins, sure - T1 skins @ 10k isk, T2 @ 50k isk, Carrier and Dread skins 5mil isk, Titan and Super skins 100mil.

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As for the "YOU won't, or so you claim". Since late last year, all the nerfs and changes, combined with the secrecy around the future of TQ, I have reduced my spending on Eve, 9 characters down to 2. When my current isk supplies are diminished (about 6 months worth of plex) I'll decide whether the 2 remaining characters stay subbed or not.
Yeah, I am only 1 disgruntled player who matters little in the scheme of things but I know I am not alone, so just how many subs is CCP prepared to throw away.

NB; the "minimum wage" as estimated by our government is actually a little under $25 ph it is stated to be $22.28ph ($780pw @ 35hrs). Sorry for my misleading information.

Well, that is an argument, and you are entirely entitled to that view.

Other people who may or may not be in the majority, choose to have another one.

Now the question to be asked is quite different.

Do CCP make a tiny amount of extra cash by nickel and dimeing customers, and let there be no mistake, this is what it is.
Or do they incorporate this into a game that people pay for, regularly, and willingly, fostering customer value and customer loyalty.

Remember those clever marketeers and accountants, who shrink the product, or repeatedly remove an single olive from the jar, whilst enjoying short term profits, and nice bonuses for a year or two, are usually working somewhere else when it hits the fan and the question is asked, "where have all the bloody customers gone?"

Slightly OT but gets back on topic.

The "Limited edition ships" category is for all intents and purposes useless.

I was initially very glad when the "limited edition ships" category was added to the game but what was the point?

Many of the ships in that category such as the Gnosis and a number of the frigates are still entering the game through real world purchases and vice versa the standard ships category contains ships like the megathron quafe edition which was given out at a particular event and in the meantime the rattlesnake Victory Edition isn't even listed on market at all but only contracts.

What is going on here?

It seems like there is a perfectly logical system in place to categorize ships but it's not being used by the devs.
So how about this idea. Let's use the current system as was intended by SOMEBODY at CCP who implemented it.

Perhaps this can be addressed while the team works on this ship skin project.

Apologies for any sarcasm that seeped through there.

If only there was a name for these kinds of sales transactions. Small transactions? Tiny transactions? Perhaps, microtransactions?