Player Features and Ideas Discussion

First of all, thanks for a great game.

I and others have long wondered what the idea of skins and clothes are other than purely esthetics. There is no practical reason for wanting skins or specific clothes, except perhaps a bit of private vanity :-)

Why not give skins and clothes (and sunglasses, skull plates, whatever) some enhancing factors other than looks?

For example, some Blood Raider skin for an Amarr Frigate might increase armor, or increase amount of speed of the repper etc.
A Quafe skin for a Gallente Industrial ship might increase agility or warp speed (assuming the Quafe gets you all speedy-like).
An ORE skin for a variety of mining ships might increase mined amount, laser speed or cargo capacity.
A CONCORD skin might increase boosts in fleets.

A pair of cool sunglasses might "increase vision", read: Improve targeting range and/or speed.
Special clothes that add certain value like for example augmentations.
Anything, use your imagination...

Now that would make these items way more desirable, and also more interesting to trade on the market.
Keep up the good work on the game!

It's amazing how eager people are to get Pay 2 Win implemented into EVE. Just mindboggling.

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This is more pay to win than I am willing to accept. If / when CCP decides to make these items available on the market or contracts for ISK then we can revisit this idea. As long as it "requires" real money to buy them they need to stay as appearance enhancements only.

But you can pay real money to win now with the character bazaar, injectors or implants. This is true, the difference between these and the clothes as enhancements is that these things can be bought for ISK earned in game where the clothes, glasses, shoes thingy can only be obtained with real money.

No.

Decoupling function from form is one of the places MMOs have really made a universally good move toward in recent years.

Systems like avatar clothing and SKINs are customizations intended to allow people to personalize the look of the avatar and spaceship. In the case of spaceships specifically because the ship and its apperance are so closely tied to function and providing players with usable combat information on targets the SKIN is the only way a player can choose to visually his ship.

In the case of alpha clones, their choice of race actually has gameplay effects, so there's more rather than less of a reason for them to desire clothes, as they are much more constrained in terms of what their avatar looks like when determining what ships to fly.

If you attach stats to these cosmetic items their entire purpose is wasted, as they just become another fitting slot that actively discourages using what you think looks cool in favor of what actually performs better.

Damn, you beat me by an hour.

Anyhow I quote Ralph here since it would have been my first response too, as big, fat nope.