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So why not just focus those resources to fixing/removing the constraints? Instead of develop a completely new thing that "might" not be the long term end goal and will be replaced eventually? Seems it would have been a much better return on investment of developer time to focus on a technical hurdle which you know will have to be tackled down the road instead of doing what you did.

Maybe I was getting carried away with my hopes. When CCP said they were building in custom skins, I was thinking about color choices. Like coloring by numbers, say, Abaddon has 5 color zones, and we could set those colors to anything we wanted, kinda like choosing eye color in the character editor. It would give a nearly infinite range of styles, and my unskilled guess would be all the server has to do is track 5 small numbers to know what ship looks like what.

I still hope eventually this sort of customization will be possible.

CCP could still earn money on it by perhaps charging a fee to 'save' one of our custom color settings. In effect, creating our own skin. We could have limited save slots, and the option to purchase more. I still think that ccp charges way too much for the skins available now, and would sell 100x more of them if they dropped the prices. Selling 10 things at 3000 aurum is still nothing compared to selling 10,000 at 150 aurum.

While the Blood Raider Paladin looks rad as **** (*) I'm

STILL

waiting for my Blood Oracle. Everything else might as well not exist. Unless of course we get V5++ T3 cruisers in which case I'll immediately fly to Amarr to make a 100 MN HAM Legion finished in Khanid Navy and a Blood Laz0rboat. Since latter, due to technical difficulties, is unlikely I'll stick to Blood Oracool.





(*) courtesy of being a Blood Raider skin

So you are purposely splitting your development resources towards temporary implementations into current "non-optimal" designs? The point was why not just focus on these constraints now that you have long ago proven that players want customized ships, instead of also continuing to work on non-optimal ways to deploy new skins in the current system?

What split is occurring here realistically? Maybe I'm wrong but I wouldn't think continued work on SIKN color mapping and QA didn't invoke the same skillset as rebuilding the way the game handles art and graphics. Obviously s system which renders the same hull with different colors is necessary to get to full customization so no work to create SKINs in that aspect is wasted.

Or are you arguing that the extra steps taken to push that specific capability out are delaying further backend developments? If so I'd similarly question the overlap to the refactoring itself and any actual loss.

What happened to the skin customization tools that were demonstrated at the Fanfest 2014 Art Panel? I mean, I'm hoping the ultimate outcome of all this experimentation will be to allow the creation of a corporate-wide or alliance-wide aesthetic that gives each ship regardless of faction a unified palette.

Are you taking into account those that supported the skin program early on and bought incredibly expensive skins with real cash that turned out to have very little value in game?

I'd have thought it's pretty clear by now that CCP doesn't give a **** about your market speculations. You speculate at your own risk.

The new SKINS introduced this month are very lackluster.

First of all, adding just 4 new NPC Corp skins for all the newly skinned hulls just makes them all generic. Why would I want to spend any money so that the ships I can fly all look alike?

EoM looks too much like Kador.
Why would I want to replace the sexy Khanid Curse skins with EoM?
Justice and Wiyrkomi look like the same shade of green.
Intaki colors are the only ones that have any sex appeal. I'll probably pick up Intaki skins for some of my fave Gallente T2 hulls. But the other three races are a step down from the default T2 hull skin, in most cases.

I liked the Marauder skin set. That set of skins was mostly unique to the Marauder class. The Police Kronos and Blood Paladin are amazing looking.

Black Ops ships all have cool skins by default and the new skins are worse-looking in every case. Thukker Panther - why would I want to give it Justice green, and pay cash to do so? Kaalakiota Widow - sex on wheels. Wiyrkomi Widow - blech.

Same with Command Ships.

Minmatar skins overall are undistinguished.

I hope more variety is released soon.

I'm sorry to say i'm kinda dissapointed Gallente skins are only "Intaki Syndicate" and "Interbus", which curiously are not exactly "Federation" skins per se.

How about some Impetus or Fedmart or Transtellar Shipping skins?

I understand you cannot use Roden, Creodron or Duvolle as they are the basis for T2 ships paintwork...but there is more stuff out there.