EVE General Discussion

You mean besides EVE, which has had it through the portrait swap service for ages (costing the same or more than a full resculpt costs now).

…and flagging your account as having a remodelling available. In the olden days, it was a literally impossible to do in-game and this is just a continuation of the same service.

Nope. Portrait changes were around long before I started playing, and this is the same thing for a new age. Nothing new. Just a new (cheaper) price and an improved, more direct interface with fewer steps.

No. It's a game service, introduced by… oh I have no idea when they introduced it. Quite likely very shortly after the game went live, but you'll have to ask people who were around back then.

No. It's administered on the web page, as it has always been. It's a continuation of an age-old service for a new avatar system. I'm sorry, but your indignation over the fact that a service will continue to exist does change the history or nature of that service.

I'm complaining that this is an in-game mechanic being treated as a service simply to gouge players as if this game were an f2p. What's next, a PLEX to undock my damn ship? Enter a CC# to get station repair services? I play this game in part because I think f2p games that nickle and dime you to death (all f2p games) are bottom feeding filth! It's why I deleted my SOE games I played for years, snapped the DVD's in half, F* SOE! Why, as a subscriber, do I need to pay for features of a game that I already paid for? Same applies to EVE, where it may have been considered a service (due to poooor programming) in the past, where as now it's a a client coded in-game feature? It's clear as day.

And for me it's not about re-doing characters, I could care less if it were even available at all, but it's a question of business ethics. Something we all know CCP needs to be held to account upon.

Still arguing for the sake of arguments, I see, and as usual without actually having an argument.

You already managed to highlight the difference yourself. This used to be a service that required a GM to switch one portrait for another. A service for which the customer paid if he wanted to use it, as part of customer service relations.

Nowadays, there is absolutely no service involved. That an account gets flagged as having a resculpting available by a few lines of code that already existed server-side and on the client previous to the "continuation of this service" and could be triggered by any action other than redeeming a PLEX is not worth the expense of 15$.
There have been free resculptings available shortly after the Incarna expansion, to a select number of players who sculpted their characters during a certain time-frame. This was an automated process determining when a character was sculpted, which then flagged it for resculpting.

Sculpting (and resculpting) your character is part of regular gameplay. It is part of the service we are being provided with in exchange for our subscription fees. The resculpting of character models is definitely a desired aspect of gameplay, so yes there is a demand, and as was mentioned by myself and the person you are arguing with, this could have been used as an ISK sink. This would have been a much more desirable outcome for the community as a whole, because ISK-inflation is affecting us all.

And yet you are arguing, as always, because derailing threads with viable concerns in exchange for negative attention is awesome.

I really like this feature, but is there any way we could get some way to spend Aurum for it? I have all these tokens and nothing to spend them on...

You could change your appearance before at a cost.

You can change your appearance now at a cost.

And now it's cheaper.

Thankfully, in the real world, losing weight, fit a nose, and do a photo shot don't cost: 200 Drones Type Predator or 2 battleship class Iowa, with all crew members in it and full ammunitions.

So you're saying it wasn't a "game mechanic" before, but it is now because CCP made some backend improvements? Oh, and lowered the price.

Other things getting cheaper? I'm not sure where you're going with the slippery slope argument when the first step is "things become cheaper."

The benefit (changing your face) used to cost some amount. It now costs a smaller amount. How does charging less for something change the nature of the benefit?

Resculpting is not a part of regular gameplay. Regular gameplay involves creating your character's face once and then you're stuck with it. You're confusing customization (changing clothes, changing your portrait, etc), which is part of normal gameplay with resculpting your character, which is not. And for some reason you're hung up about the backend process that doesn't matter.

These days, most cars are built by robots, not people. Yet cars still cost a significant portion of the average annual income, and significantly more than the cost of materials. Why aren't cars built for cost these days?