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Right. My suggestion:

1. CCP releases the tools that allow us to design stuff. (That's the big effort needed by CCP).
2. Player designs something. Ship skin, clothing, decorations for CQ, etc.
3. Player submits the design to CCP for consideration, along with PLEX. The PLEX is to pay CCP for their time vetting the item. This is to insure the item is in the spirit of EVE, and to handle the TTP issue.
4. If approved, CCP gives the player one BPO for the item. Additional BPOs can be obtained by the designer for additional PLEX.

So I've been asking for Sharkmouth Paintjobs for about 5 years now, in every single goddamn thread dealing with ship skins I have posted some pictures of aircraft with sharkmouths...but never have I gotten any official response.
I'm slowly running out of pictures to post (nah, just kidding here is another one for you) so, please, after all those years, could I for once get an official dev reply:
Are sharkmouths technically even possible or would the current system not support them?

(on a completely unrelated note, while reading this thread, I kept hearing this Rolling Stones song in my head: I see a Blackhawk and I want to paint it red....)

Hot Pink!!!

Dear DEVs, you are expertedly dodging my comments and choosing to ignore them. I personnaly find that both amusing and sadly so predictable.

I guess you don't care to comment on why the designer SKINs are more expensive than others?
I guess you don't care to explain why some frigate SKINs still cost as much as Dread SKINs
I guess you don't care to comment on the fact that the 'buy' button is a bit out of the sandbox and that SKINs would be more interesting if they involved some other professions. Even in the SKINs pilot program, they had to be built using a blueprint.
I guess you don't care to comment on the fact that SKINs are ship specific and not hull specific or even class specific.

I'm not gonna bother anymore actually. Its just disappointing.
In the last few years you have failed to deliver a completely , fully done feature (PI, FW, SKINs, WIS, Tech3) but rest assured; most of the gaming industry is now this way with DLCs that make up for lacking initial content.

Your Artists and devs are always working on something new that is gonna end up deployed about halfway done and never iterated on again.

Saying this i'm gonna unsub and i'll be keeping an eye on the forums to see how things go from here. Eve is a great game in most of its core aspects. Sadly you keep adding more mechanics on top that are not polished enough. And when you ask for real money in return , on top of what we already pay monthly , that just doesnt work for me.

tl;dr you're half-assing and i'll be off for a while.

No you cannot have my stuff

Thank you very much for clearing these things up, Legion.
Does this mean I can stop posting sharkmouths for now or should I continue, just so you guys don't lose track of the goal?

It would look probably like that. If it would be a thing anyhow.

I'll try to reply to your comments in order:

We priced the initial SKINs based on how good we thought they looked, and to cover multiple price categories when a ship had multiple SKINs. As we filled out some of the SKIN lines we reduced or increased the costs of existing SKINs from that line to make them most consistent. The new designer SKINs also follow a consistent pricing scheme over different classed hulls, and none of them fall into some new even-higher category of pricing.

Frigate skins used to be cheaper than skins for larger ships, because they were expected to be lost more often, as the old skins were only good for a single ship. This is no longer the case, so why would we "tax" larger ships by making their SKINs cost more simply because the ship is bigger.

The skins pilot was a failure because the skins were too large of a hassle to manufacture and distribute, and it wasn't worth paying Aurum/ISK to skin a ship you would probably lose anyway. We chose the simplest and most straightforward system in the redesign to avoid these issues. It's easy to access and purchase SKINs, and there is no fear that your cosmetic choices will cost you a recurring Aurum/ISK fee. Now this isn't to say some SKINs couldn't be integrated in to the game in the future. We have existing examples of SKINs as LP store items and loot drops. There is no technical reason we couldn't have manufacturable SKINs in the future if we feel that is a valuable undertaking for the company and for the players.

All of the new hulls for T2 versions of ships have model differences from the base ship, and this trend should continue in to the future. The roles of the ship between T1 and T2 can sometimes be completely different as well, meaning you usually don't fly multiple ships of the "same hull". Why charge people for a SKIN that works on 2-3 ships if they only use 1 variant.
In addition, what do you consider the "same hull"? Is a Bhaalgorn the same hull as an Armageddon/Navy Issue/Redeemer? What if in the future the Blood Raiders get their own completely different ship hulls? Would it keep the old skins even though the model is no longer the same? How many legacy SKINs and QA would we have to do to keep track of all of that over the years? One SKIN for one Ship simplifies this in many cases. Where it makes sense, we will do SKINs which work on multiple hulls, or for a whole class/race, but these will usually not be the norm for the foreseeable future.

I would consider the SKINs feature to be pretty finished. There are more artistic features we would like to roll out in the future, but the codebase has barely been touched since the SKINs feature launched. I can't comment on the other features you've mentioned, since I was not involved in any of them, nor was I working for CCP at the time.

Designer SKINs and the future projection tech are proof this isn't true, at least in relation to SKINs. Even other systems like the new sov were iterated upon with the release of Galatea this Tuesday.

That was the whole reason we wanted the new SKINs to be tradeable in the market, so that players would have an ISK alternative if they could not afford to directly purchase a SKIN. We think the ISK costs for SKINs cover a large price range at the moment, from under 1 million ISK for 30 day SKINs (which are stackable) to multiple billion for the rarer SKINs which cannot be bought from the NES. In addition we made sure this system was not tied to a gameplay advantage in any way, to prevent a pay-to-win scenario.

Overall I would say the SKIN system has been a success, providing additional, entirely optional revenue for CCP, while delivering a well received feature which has made many players happy. We will continue to iterate and expand on this system going in to the future, and constructive feedback is always welcome in improving what we have.
I hope that answered some of your questions.

Sharks aren't canon!

What I would love to see is the ability to change the background in the ship preview. This way I can see what the paint looks like under different lighting conditions. For example, A ship has a dark background in the preview and looks dark green/gray, in another light the ship looks blue. Some of the minmatar ships turn brown to gray and poor lighting does not help you decide to buy the paint.

Will there be a dev blog on your new SOF materials system?
I'm sure everyone would love to know what you are now able to do, and how it has making skins like these easier :)


Nice work team. :3