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The "rust" could just be a natural color variation to the materials used, which the Amarr/Caldari latched onto, to use as a taunt. The Minmatar adopted the term in pride, as a display of defiance. Making fun of our ships? Meh. We'll join in on the joke and own it.

I'm not sure if I like the look of it though. Orange splotchiness... it's close in effect to giving the entire Minmatar fleet camouflage paint. And I am not a fan of camouflage paint. I think some of the TQ Minmatar ships could use a little variation in color, particularly the capital ships. On Tranquility they currently look like they are made out of Hersey's chocolate bars - monotone, sterile, waxy... But the test server probably overdoes it.

As for the dirt, it can look cool I think. But it could become an annoying feature. Having the clean your ship all the time if you don't like the look of it would be a drag. Even worse if there is a fee. Maybe just make it a free SKIN that you can toggle. So it would just add some variation to the ships, and people can RP whatever reason they want to explain the dirtiness.

Or just make the dirt skins cost aurum and milk your players some more.

From a technical standpoint: good job.

From a utility or "fun" point of view, you're refusing to give us the shiny new colors we asked for, and are instead adding dirt, grime, and rust to the ships, to basically make them look uglier. So, meh.

Speculation: We keep bringing up "shipwash" services, but CCP hasn't really announced anything. So I'm guessing that the "how dirty it is" timer will just be based on how many days have passed since the ship was assembled. Which means:

1. We have to annoyingly repackage ships (and then re-fit them) to "wash" them.
2. A really dirty ship is an indicator that it has rigs.

CCP, you should add dirt to our avatar faces, to indicate that we haven't been podded in a while (and still have our implants).

That's comedy.

Do you not see players getting upset when they buy a ship on market and find it is already dirty? Have you tested/considered whether this will make ships unstackable, like BPCs, now that ships carry a persistent, unique point of data?

Because this is the first confirmation I've seen that dirt will or won't be reversible through repackaging. I thought for sure, there would be a way to reset the dirt. Isn't it logical to expect that, with the attention SKINs and ship appearance has received recently.

I'm not complaining. I'm asking whether it was considered.

Am I missing something? The current implementation is using a static dirt value per my understanding and not degrading over time. There effectively isn't anything to reset unless I've overlooked some details.

If/when dirt becomes variable I'd be upset if there were no ways to reverse it, but for now what we've seen of the ships as they are launching leaves me quite satisfied.

EVE Ships already have had, for years, dirt on their surfaces.

Nothing is changing in this regard, other than that we have laid the technical groundwork for that amount of dirt to vary, should someone wish to implement such a feature in the future. Such a feature has not been designed and to my knowledge it's development has not been scheduled.

Note that, as of right now, the ONLY difference between High and Medium shader settings, both now and with the upcoming Carnyx release, is the presence of that dirt pass, so if you prefer the look of the ships in the game without dirt, you may set your shader settings to "Medium." I cannot promise that at some point in the distant future there may not be other differences between "High" and "Medium" shader settings, but for right now, that's a workaround that addresses what you don't like about the look of ships in the game.

As for "refusing to give us the shiny new colors we asked for," I recommend keeping an eye on future SKIN announcements rather than assuming that we can simply snap our fingers, like magic, and wish instantly new SKINs into being. If only it were that simple.

It's news to me that ships have had dirt for years, thanks for the heads up.

I know its 8 pages in, but as a graphic designer and computer programmer, I think this change is a work of art. Absolutely beautiful not just in the presentation but in the backend work to make it happen. I think these in depth art/coding dev blogs are pretty unique to the Eve community but I enjoy them the most. Much better than reading page after page of (much needed) sov changes :P.

So the online ship viewer that lets us pick any ship with any color combo... or the session at fanfest where the dev was asking people to pick ships/colors and rendering them on the spot... guess it really is too difficult and time consuming to set up a new SKIN.

But since CCP ignored most of the feedback about how to correctly implement the SKIN system from day 1 of initial idea feedback on the terribad BPCs through this new system, I guess we shouldn't really expect much in the way of understanding and consideration for players thoughts. Heck, they didn't just not use ANY of the feedback from those many threadnaughts, they went off in a completely new and different direction nobody in those threads ever thought about, and they did it terrible too.