EVE General Discussion

Have ship skins and color schemes.

Time limited and permanent ship skins that can only be applied to a certain ship that is based off of lore and consistent with the universe and offer time limited and permanent color schemes that resemble the skins but don't have logos that can be applied to any ship.

This would let players choose. Do I want a Police Comet or do I want an Nightmare that has the same type of appearance but without logos. I agree that the lore aspect is important and that it needs to be consistent but CCP also needs to consider the people that pay no attention to lore.

There is a huge opportunity here and being too conservative could cost a lot of money. I think skins limited by time shouldn't cost more than five or six dollars and color schemes should be three or four. I would pay more for a particular faction because I want that faction's logo but if I just like the colors without the logos it should cost less. Think brand name and generic, very similar products but one has a name you're paying for.

Permanent skins should around $15 and color schemes should be around $10. I would love to have a Blood Raider Prospect but the most I am going to pay for a permanent skin is around $15 but if I could get a similar color scheme that I could put on my Prospect or Algos I would pay $10, no problem. The scheme wouldn't have the logos or the exact pattern but it would be close enough for me to enjoy it. Keep skins within lore but allow color schemes on any ship.

Very interesting, may I ask how many skins you would be willing to pay these sums for?

You are clearly someone who has declared oneself a customer for this product, it would be valuable to see what income CCP could earn from customers such as yourself as opposed to the income generated by the subscription model and using the skin technology to drive that.

Logged in this morning to no more Quafe Confessor. Needless to say I'm disappointed.
But most of all I'm a target consumer who feels rather burned.

We know what the system can do, but CCP Darwin seems to be the only dev willing to talk about it. We've been given no long term plants for how the system will be used. No explanation for the random pricing. No indication that they will offer us what we want from this "glitch" that clearly showed that as players we don't want Lore and an excuse to not let us paint our ships however we want, or at least however existing skins would permit.

Now I invested in Aurum before the patch happened. And I have a stack of almost all the SKIN's that existed before the system changed, less the Scorp and some ships I didn't care for. But now I'm not planning to invest anymore. I'm someone who would gladly pay for skins for ships I use regularly.. and for ships I don't just to collect, but I'm not spending any more on this system till CCP either Delivers, like the bug did, or provides some feedback beyond "Ya we thought that was fun" and "Lore says no.."

The lack of feedback over a bug that's caused more excitement in Eve than I've seen in a long time boggles my mind.

The bug did clearly show that there was an interest in the idea of personalising ships beyond the current approved release.
Generating player interest is of course a valuable goal in a subscription based product.

However monetising interesting features is not going to have that desired effect, and in fact may have negative consequences to the overall product, if such features only enter the game through additional cash purchases.

If the feature was available to enter the game through player activity in the game,( as opposed to traded) as well as "whale" purchases, then both goals could be achieved.

It will be interesting to see whether this is a considered decision, or a power struggle between different departments.

Hopefully in the long term both the player community and CCP will be the winners.

Have you done a meeting for uping the ship price too ? or that a punishement ?

Well, it would be great if you give the community at least some of the decisions that will be made on that meeting. That would at least calm the people and gave us something to look for.

With the prices around what I was saying I would probably try out some time limited color schemes till I found a few I like and then go for the permanent ones. I would guess I would probably spend $10 - $15 every couple of months. Which is double what I spend now. I may by a PLEX every 4 months as it is now, just for the extra ISK because of my limited time in game.

In my eyes they need to aim for volume. I might even change it to all color schemes are time based and all skins are permanent. With a lower price point I would be much more willing to buy cosmetic items. Micro transactions stop being mirco around $5 to me and the point of micro transactions is to make money from volume.

I am much more interested in making my ships look how I want over having a particular ship look a certain way. To me, they don't need to be DL or Blood Raider but I do want a black Astero, Hulk or Algos.

I don't mean to imply that they aren't reading, or listening. But they aren't engaging. And I give a huge kudos for you for doing so, even if I don't always agree with your assessments :) Even a once a day post by the devs in charge of this, with a response to some questions, or their thoughts on what's been said, would in my opinion be Hugely beneficial to all.

In my experience the best changes in Eve happens in Dev's get engaged with the players in the topic at hand. I'd rather hear, now, what the devs are thinking. Then we can provide feedback.. a Yay/Nay. Rather than us vent, they read, come to a conclusion, and implement it, followed by another thread like this cause we still have issues.

It's one thing if something isn't done the way I want cause the Dev's feel that their way is the best. It's a WHOLE other if thinks aren't done because they didn't consider or were never exposed to counter arguments.

If CCP could have just implemented this bug as a feature on Sisi, and left it for a month, imagine how much Data they would have got? What ships to we fly, what skins do we want, how do we want to mix and match? They would quickly have learned that our interest in skins do NOT limit themselves to racial lines. I mean they should have got the picture when we figured out the WebGL Ship Viewer and started mixing and matching there, but test server would likely give better info. Hell, even better, do it on TQ for a week. Any ship. Any skin. Free for all, lets get the data of what people want, then act on it. Not as a weekend bug that lets face it, many if not most players are totally unaware of, or unable to use cause they don't want to buy a Skin JUST for playing with the bug.

I get the performance issues with a few skins, those specific skins for specific models could be blacklisted. Finished skins can be indicated, with unfinished/optimized skins also indicated. Then let the players have a week at it. Imagine how much Hype that would have generated for the SKIN system? Not to mention all the data on what the Players wanted.


Even without all that, some feedback on what they long term goals are would be great. Is the plan to stick to skins applying to racial lines? If so, I'm not keen on it. As we have seen in this thread, and reddit, and in game, neither are a lot of other people. Is the plan to open it up so almost all skins are available for almost all models? Well if that's the long term goal, and the only reason it's not been implemented NOW is the QA issues mentioned before, then that's a totally different situation. I'd be far more forgiving in that case, and patient. Knowing that we are going to get there, so I can truly own a Quafe or Syndicate Marauder would make me thrilled.

Speaking or Marauders, there's been skins for them since Dec, that haven't been Seeded, and despite my bringing it up in almost every SKIN thread I've been in, no Dev seems willing to acknowledge them, much less let us know when we can expect to see them. I'm VERY Thankful that I didn't resub my alt for this SKIN update. I was going to originally, just to get her into a Quafe Kronos, which is one damn sexy skin, but decided to wait and see what what the prices would be. Imagine my surprise when I logged in to see that none of those new skins for Marauders were seeded at all. I can get the Chinese skins being added to the TQ DB, but why add other skins that haven't been seeded anywhere, on any server, and leave them for Months without a word? Even after there were several threads about them and the other skinned ships added ( Pirate Skins for normal BS's, Police Skins, etc..)

Anyway, there's my thoughts.

The only thing that bugs me about all of this ...
... is how a company called Crowd Control Production ...
... didn't come up with the idea of doing this intentionally.

Because that would have been brilliant!

I've already posted on reddit, but obviously I'll share here too.

To follow up on this thread, we've had a sit down today to talk shop over SKINs and everything surrounding them.

This meeting included Team Size Matters, as well as a few of the art guys, myself, CCP Seagull and our CCP Thomas, our Monetization Director.

We should have a dev blog for you guys early next week that's going to have a decent amount of content in it for you to take a look at.

All I can say right now is that your questions and concerns have been taken on board, and we had a super healthy discussion about all this today, where everyone involved within CCP is very much on the same page