EVE General Discussion

I think the next time someone makes a bitchy, "Y devs post on Reddit instead of heer?!/1?!?" shitpost, this thread should be provided as the definitive answer to the question.

Nothing is free in Eve.

Personally, I would rather skins were not sold in packages. I would rather have each skin sold at a price that equals ( price of total package / number of skins in total package ) so I could get skins for only the ships I fly.

Why would I want skins for something I never fly? Answer, I don't.

So, feel free to make all those skins, just sell them at an individual price point.


And, if I don't get it my way, I promise I will start a whine thread to make it known, to all.

You better listen to me!!!

I agree with the OP completely.

There's two conventional ways to approach these skins:

1. The easy way: Do it en-masse.
Apply quick texture changes with little care or attention to detail: The skins don't mesh with the models and the quality of the implementation is poor... But, it's really easy, cheap, and very quick to add new skins. A single artist could churn out dozens of skins within literal minutes. GREAT for lots of skins very quickly for low prices and applied to as many ships as possible all at once.

2. The hard way: Do skins on an individual basis.
Take a ship and personalize the skin for it - Change textures, tweak material values, etc. - This is much more demanding, but also much more rewarding. However, skin prices will be steeper: It takes much more time and money to produce each skin.

CCP management managed to do the worst of both these implementations:
Not only are the skins done in a low-effort, quick, cheap and easy way; they are then applied to a restricted number of ships while simultaneously charging premium rates! It's insulting to players. Skin sales are low - as evidenced by the utter lack of sales on the in-game market, it increases community resentment towards CCP, artists aren't utilized to their full potential, and there are now greater costs in fixing this fuckup years down the road; if it's ever fixed.

What do players even get out of this? A bunch of uninspired, mostly ugly skins that consist of simple palette swaps which could've been done in twenty seconds by someone with no actual art skills at all, and sold at completely ridiculous prices? WHAT A BARGAIN

Whatever management monkey came up with the current skin implementation should have been fired for incompetence. These skins are a goddamn waste of artistic and programming talent.


What should have been done:
Hinted at so strongly when skins were first revealed that everyone pretty much expected it this way - Allow player customization of ships with their own texture tools. Letting players create their own patterns and their own palettes. Monetization would have been as simple as new eden store skin application modules/creation kits, which not only lessens the time and costs for CCP's artists, it also actively engages the playerbase in creating and investing themselves in the game.

Here, check this quick and dirty monetization scheme that blows the current method out of the ******* water:

• Every ship gets a basic "Canvas" made by a CCP artist (We could consider this the default "free" skins we have now)
• Players buy a Canvas applicator/enabler from the aur store which lets players apply a new canvas to their ships
• CCP artists can make more canvases as they need/want
• Players interested in making/selling their own skins can buy a skin creation kit and make customized skins for any particular canvas that exists (restricting skin creators from making skins for canvases they haven't bought would be stupid, but they can still be required to buy the canvas to actually use it themselves)
• Other players can buy these personalized skins for isk and apply them to the specific canvas the skin is made for which they also own
• CCP releases new canvases; extremely talented individuals in the eve community make ******* amazing skins on them that everyone wants to buy, at no cost to CCP, and CCP makes bank with people buying more canvases in a player-driven system
• CCP can still charge their ridiculous $30 for a canvas, and players will buy them because they only need one or two canvases to get dozens of cool ship skins with their in-game isk at much lower prices

Does that quick idea have problems? Yeah, it probably does. But I damn well guarantee you it would be better received by the playerbase, result in higher quality skins, and make CCP more money than this current abortion.


P.S. I love the work the artists do and I only sound angry because I'm passionate and bitter about this game

This is such a predictable and crappy response to negative views: "Don't like it then don't play it/use it/buy it" etc. Don't address any of the actual points being made, just dismiss them with a thoughtless one-liner.

I don't often use the word 'fanboy', and I'm not saying you are one, but it is usually those kinds of people who can't abide any criticism of their favourite game, and instead of addressing criticism will simply dismiss it and/or attack the person making it.

^^ Yay Dev reply
I've got a couple of the skins myself, albeit ones that are a legacy like the Sarum Magnate skin; which looked great on my Raven when the implementation had that feature bug.

More variety would be good, as would options to further personalise/customise the ships within reason. I believe the price point also needs to be looked at as the current prices aren't exactly on a par with vanity items in other games and can scarcely be considered micro transactions; that said they are a vanity and if you can't, or don't want to, pay the prices asked then there is no disadvantage in not purchasing the items for sale.

The fanfest presentation alluded to previously would be a nice place to start.

The concept of creating ship looks in that way is still alive, but it has not yet been determined what such a feature looks like to the player, from only using the capability internally to exposing more of its functionality for player customization.

We'd like to offer the most compelling feature that we can while still protecting the look and feel of the Eve universe. I understand that different players are differently sympathetic to that goal, but it is a priority for us.

What tools we can put in the players' hands, and with what flexibility and limitations, is what has not yet been determined.

Want Khanid skins! Dunno why Tash Murkon and others are so common. Khanid! We are the true Amarr, We separated because we are better.

Your original post contained a lot of speculation about details of how ships were authored that were somewhat hard for me to map to our actual processes, so I had some trouble understanding the nature of your concern.

You are right that in the current system, you can think of SKINs as swapping out packages of material attributes for predefined regions of the ship, though it's more than just color. For example, a metallic look can be replaced with a plastic look. Predefined in-game factions have more flexibility and can arbitrarily replace texture maps on a ship as needed. (This, for example, is how we apply the red splotches on Blood Raider ships.)

That said, different ship hulls have different material counts and thus there's work involved in ensuring that a SKIN material set will apply properly to each ship. Yes, internally our engine will assemble any ship with any material set on a "best effort" basis, but we check SKINs on each ship and quality control each combination separately, because in the case of a ship/SKIN mismatch that best effort can result in regions of a ship being set to default material values. (Also, this will result in large numbers of errors being dumped to the log, which is why we expressed concerns about there being a performance impact when that ship SKIN UI bug existed that allowed applying any SKIN to any ship.)

As I mentioned earlier, the projection-based technology shown at Fanfest 2014 is still on our roadmap, and will much more easily enable the kind of designs it sounds like you're after, like a series of SKINs with racing stripes, for example.

As for the concept of painting custom maps per-ship for each SKIN, while that would absolutely be technically possible, there's no possibility we could deliver that volume of texture painting work along with everything else we are working on currently (Citadels, Force Auxiliary capitals, ship redesigns, etc. etc.)

If anyone fancies having a play with what is possible using the existing textures and artwork, take a look at http://www.caldariprimeponyclub.com/ and play with the options.

I'm rather partial to the murdered out Amarr station myself.