Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With the new expansion rolling around I can't help but look at the new marauders and think "wouldn't the --insert marauder name here-- look great with the --insert faction here-- colour scheme?", which gave me an idea for a possible implementation for the much rumoured and long awaited implementation of different colour schemes or 'skins' for ships.

There has already been talk of implementing this system using ISK, different ship 'hulls' for every scheme, an Aurum charge to repaint a hull of your choice, and one or two other methods. One avenue of acquiring / implementing this concept that I feel may have been overlooked would be loyalty points.

Imagine, to acquire a certain type of colour scheme for your ship, in this case say Kor-Azor, you would have to build up a store of loyalty points with the Kor-Azor faction, and purchase a small / medium / large (/capital?!) 'respray ticket' for a sensible amount of LP / ISK. This ticket would be a physical item until used, like a starbase charter, for example. This also means they could be sold on the market, so, like other faction items, grinding for LP is not the only way of acquiring them.

Once used, the ticket would be similar to a rig in terms of what you can do with it. Once it's on the ship, it's on for good. You can't remove it without destroying it, and it only applies to that individual hull you have used it on. Repackaging a ship would 'destroy' the paint scheme, just like a rig.

Precisely HOW this system work would in terms of applying a skin to a ship, prices for different sizes / tech levels and limitations on which skins can be applied to which hulls would be something CCP would have to decide on. Considering CCP has already made thousands of combinations of skins for NPC corps / factions, the physical content is already in the game files, and just needs suitable, low-lag method of making the ship skin change depending on the equipped 'ticket'.

TL;DR: make ship skins a LP reward based item based on the faction the colour scheme belongs to. People willing to mission grind will do so, and those who lack the time / standings to do so can buy them from other players, just like any other faction item.

At no point did Rising say anything about allowing players to create and upload their own ship skins. Your reply has no relevance whatsoever.

Personally I envision a ship painting system working much like the ship painting did in Earth and Beyond. Or the army painter in Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. That way people can paint the different parts of their ships different colors but can't drawn giant phallic images on them.

But that still leaves the potential issue of skin colored Stabbers/Vagabonds.