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It's an ongoing process that's still happening. CCP Thomas sits right behind me, we talk fairly often, and try to keep each other up to date. If we feel the data supports a shift in our pricing scheme, we will modify our pricing scheme and let players know.

There's nothing intrinsically irrational about different corps charging different prices. There are legions of examples of e.g., car colors being tiered. More desirable finishes command higher prices. Exclusivity is desirable for some brands, which is why you see $15,000 phones that are just $500 phones encrusted in bling.

This guy has a point, however:

Only if there's a recording of the comms where the comet pilot calmly calls in for backup for a domestic disturbance before lighting said cyno.

I'm thinking it's directly proportional to the number of characters that have the ship trained.

I like the qib about QA... because just think how awesome the rest of the game could be if they actually applied the same high level of QA to every part of the game they change? But no, they don't even barely consider QA in comparison... can't have some random black pixels on the ships, that would break everything. Oh wait, everything else is already 1000x more broken.

If you are putting "so much effort" into the art, and can't apply those manhours to actually fixing problems with the core game itself, I know it sounds silly, but maybe you should re-appropriate those funds to core game development. A pretty game that is broken is still a broken game.

So if you haven't finished figuring out where you want to go with SKINs and are apparently still 'feeling out' the demand for it... why develop a new system that was completely opposite of anything that we had suggested in the many threads of feedback? You guys asked for our feedback, and then turned around and ignored all of it and released something nobody had asked for. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the entirety of the last several CCP started SKIN and/or ship color customization threads)

Because I was interested, here are the Jita market volumes of the skins released since the new system starting with the letter A (as well as erebus):


Here's the ones that existed before the patch and got converted:

Now I know this isnt wholly representative of the actual use statistics since no doubt a good portion of people converted plexes or bought aurum directly but I do believe it is indicative of the general trend of skin usage. The market prices on all of these follow the aurum to plex conversion pretty closely, so the market should be a viable option for players who dont wish to spend real money on microtransactions (if they can be called micro) or don't have a round amount of aurum in their accounts and want to buy the items as efficiently as possible. I didn't look at Amarr/Dodixie/Rens but since you can apply skins remotely Jita should have the majority of market volume.

Theres a few things that stand out to me:

1. People are far more likely to buy skins for expensive ships than cheap ones. Look at the numbers for the capital or supercapital ships and compare them to the cruisers or even the battleships. The archon is far and away the most popular skin, followed by Aeon and Avatar.


2. "Budget" skins tend to be popular in their size classes. The Intaki atron is a decent example of this. Although it is a inexpensive tech 1 frigate, people buy a relatively large amount of those skins since they only cost 740 Aurum. I would like to note that this is the cheapest skin in the store and still costs nearly 200 million isk, which is completely ludicrous for a ship that costs well under a million for a fully fit example.


3. SKIN cost is a very important factor in which skins players buy. The abaddon skins which got converted to the new system are currently priced between around 1/10 to 1/20 of the price of the other Amarr battleships, and the increase in volume sold on the Jita market is almost directly correlated to the price.


4. Visual differentiation is important. Players enjoy radically different paint schemes from the stock tech 1 look. Skins like Ardipashur which are only subtly different from tech one sell abysmally next to Khanid and Tash-Murkon, even when the price is lower. I put the Erebus sales in for this reason; I was really disappointing with those skins looking hardly different than the base ship and I haven't bought one for this reason. There Erebus skins selling ~40% less units than the Avatar does not surprise me when you can hardly tell there's a skin applied to the Erebus.

All in all, it's pretty embarrassing in my opinion to have market volume in the single digits (or even zero volume in the case of the Augoror Ardipashur) 6 weeks after the feature released. Hell, the old 6 billion isk monocle sold more on the market in this period (30 ish units) than nearly all of these skins. I still have hopes for the feature but damn you guys make it hard when you're sticking to the same rhetoric in the face of all the feedback and data.

Edit:
Here's some more food for thought. The Paladin Blood Raider has sold 85 units on the market in just the first week of its existence. This is more than any other subcap that I've checked and nearly passes the mark set by the Archon Kador. Although the Paladin is a considerably rarer ship than the base Apocalypse, people are far more willing to buy skins for it. It's very good example of a combination of the things I listed above that makes it sell well even when the market has essentially rejected the standard apocalypse.

For the record, I think 2390/1750 (4-pack) is an acceptable price for a tech two battleship. That's around half to a third of a price of the hull, which seems fair. Now of course this cant be scaled infinitely up and down (please no 50bn skins for titans) but this is a good example of an acceptable price point where skins that are hundreds of times more expensive than the ship they applied to (frigate skins) are just a bad joke.

Im confused.. the title of the advertisement says 100+ skins added to the store, Is this just stating how many are currently available? or that 100+ more will be added throughout this summer. When I logged in today I literally thaught they added 100 new skins on top of the 4 marauder ones.

am i missing something?

Hello,

We need duster on some Caldari ship :

Golem base skin (default) :
Problem : The Golem new look is too dirty. And the corners and edges of vessel worn are very ugly. The ship did not look real. The ship definition level is poor.
Solution : Remove dirt and upgrade the ship definition.

Widow :
Same too dirty and definition problem as the Golem.

New Kaalakiota Golem skin :
The ship definition level is poor and we have the same "too dirty" problem (same as above).

Thank you in advance for these fixes and improvements

Note : I use the Max resolution (High) setup for Graphic content, Texture quality and Effect

Try setting shaders to medium, that will remove the dirt, and make the ships look clean.

Show me where this was said to be a unique ship never to be release again.