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In Rubicon 1.2, yes it has to be a repackaged hull. Yes, it means you will either not paint a fitted ship, or simply replace the rigs because you will lose them when repackaging the ship.

However if you read the dev blog you will see that they clearly state that this implementation is a case of testing the waters with the minimum amount of effort possible. If the feature proves popular, they'll start work on the "real" implementation. The current implementation is simply a known scope of work with an easily managed budget. The "real" implementation will likely take significant developer resources, so they need to be sure that the financial cost can be recouped.

A reminder to all that during the Incarna fiasco, CCP managed to wrangle a concession from the CSM that it is fine for CCP to sell vanity items as extras above the cost of subscription. Since ship skins are clearly a vanity item, the cost for them will come from outside the subscription of the game. This is why CCP are trialling the Aurum pricing.

Remember to leave your feedback about the pricing, and especially whether you perceive a difference between a custom ship skin that you'd use as flair for a PvP ship, or bling for a PvE ship. I suspect most people would want custom paint jobs for their PvP ships to fall in the same price range as the hull or the modules they typically use on that hull.

Do not be surprised if CCP decides that custom paint jobs are only going to be for the super space-rich, and view vanity items only as a means to draw ISK out of the game economy, or dollars out of the real world economy. While we would all love different "tiers" of ship skins, to suit every level of life expectancy from disposable faction warfare frigates through null sec doctrine fleets through mission boats and super capitals, CCP may have different ideas.

For me, the differing levels of "life expectancy" fall roughly into these bands:

1. A few minutes (typical FW frigate zerg fleet)
2. A few hours (typical cruiser fleet)
3. A few days (low sec ratting ship)
4. A few weeks (blockade runners, covert ops, stealth bombers, carriers, dreadnoughts)
5. "Until I mess up" (black ops, faction battleships, super capitals)

I would imagine that custom skins could be developed to fit that scale, starting with simple two-tone paint jobs at the "few minutes" level, which you can buy and apply to every ship you fly. This would be a similar mechanic to a golden pod where the implant changes the colour of every ship you board, but is limited to two- or three- tone paint jobs that simply alter the colours of the existing skins. Perhaps a corporate "implant" could add the corporation (and alliance?) logo to every ship, based on the defined decal location of that ship.

At higher life-expectancy bands I'd imagine more complex paint jobs such as dazzle, digital camo, jungle camo, all the way through to high detail pain work with trim, racing stripes, and perhaps "metallica teeth" or "hello kitty" logos.

I imagine "bling" skins could operate similar to a rig, being a permanent fixture to one ship. The "bling" skin would override a "implant based" paint job: rather than flying corporate colours you would be flying your own personal polished/brushed platinum CNR.

I feel your pain. I want POSes fixed more than anything else in the game. You'll note that my Twitter icon is "POS #smallportion".



You remember that CCP updated the Jita memorial to commemorate the rage?

You remember the apology from Hilmar?

You remember two successive CSMs saying that CCP has very much learned from Incarna, and is still recovering?

I am guessing you forgot all about this.



CCP has been leaking custom ship colours for some time. There are custom ships skins for most of the NPC corporations: if not ready to roll, at least in the final stages of development.

You do not have enough evidence to claim that "everyone" wants custom ship colours. Seriously, the forums represent a tiny portion of the player base. Even if everyone on the forums agreed that ship skins are a good idea, you don't know that this is representative of the whole population the forums are a self-selected, especially vocal portion of the community.

If you recall the presentations about monetisation that were being flung around during the Incarna period, you'll remember the one about "Battlefield Heroes" where the people on the forums were almost unanimous in their statements that "P2W would ruin the game". But when P2W came along (i.e.: "Power Items") everyone bought them, and the more vocal critics were amongst the biggest spenders.

Now flip that around: if the forums are almost unanimous in the demand for ship skins, how does CCP know that ship skins are worth investing the developer time into before they go spending :18 months: of developer time on a feature that turns out to be a flop? Ship skins might not be as massive an undertaking as Incarna was, but from the tone of the devblog you can tell that CCP is convinced that ship skins are not a simple undertaking. I imagine they have a mechanism in mind, and are likely to tell us (once this experiment is successfully concluded) that proper ship skins will take N months. I wouldn't be surprised if N was in the order of 9-18 months.

Now go back and read my post that you were ever so hasty to criticise. With awareness of the fact that CCP can learn from their mistakes, do you understand what I'm saying now?

I was interested until I saw it required Aurum... I think I will pass but I was really hoping to get a hello kitty paint scheme just to be funny... Tired of having to pay for schemes that may not last. Id like to have seen it turn out like the character custom design. I do like the designs you have shown to us, but I really do not like the fact that it requires Aurum. If you change it I would be more then happy to support the decision and be excited to put on paint schemes on my ships.

Did you read the dev blog?



It's not server load they're worried about.

Did you know that some players use pirate faction frigates, cruisers and battleships in PvP? Yes, they really do!

Just because you can't afford to throw billion-ISK hulls into PvP doesn't mean that everyone is space-poor. Don't expect that you know how much people are willing to spend on bling.

Here is a kill involving a Machariel as the victim and a Stratios as the attacker: https://zkillboard.com/detail/37314157/

Now sure, you have every right to claim that pirate faction ships are "better" than their empire counterparts, but given that I can barely afford to lose a few frigates a day in PvP but these people are throwing super-expensive ships into combat on a regular basis, it is not conceivable that some people will want to throw bling into the fight too? Some of them might want to do it for fancy screenshots. Some people might want ship skins just so they look cool in a fleet of custom painted AFK T2 sentry assist dominixes.

Custom ships skins aren't here to please everyone. They are here as an offering from CCP to those with the space-cash to make CCP happy. Ship skins are the new monocle.

We can simply sit here telling CCP that we would like some cheaper skins for our poor people's ships, but what value are ship skins for everyone, when the point of selling custom ship skins is to give people bragging rights?

So stop being poor, and you'll get ship skins too!

(PS: this post is baseless speculation mixed in with a teensy bit of trolling)

What if …

Did you know that studies of app pricing on the Apple iTunes App Store have found that there is roughly a hyperbolic curve defined by price vs demand? That is to say that you can sell one copy of an app for $50, and if you drop the price to $5 you will sell … ten copies. This means you have the same income, but more than ten times the support costs.

CCP is clearly choosing to put their money on the "one expensive copy" table rather than the "ten cheap copies" table. If their concern is the GPU load of the client's computer, doesn't it simply make sense that you would start that way rather than having people complain that their GPUs are melting on launch day?

What if custom tones (i.e.: simply adjusting the colours of the existing ship skins without changing any detail) were easily accomplished by just twiddling a number for each ship in a scene? What if you deployed this ship skin idea for everyone, and then found out that half the video cards in existence can't handle more than a few dozen ships rendered with this style of colouring due to some bug in the drivers or a fault in the graphics pipelines, or aliens?

Releasing to an exclusive clientele to start with achieves a number of things: one, it gets CCP's new feature into circulation with a very slow ramp-up so CCP will have plenty of time to address any issues as they come up. Two, it allows the "snobby elite" players to lord it over the paupers for a few months while CCP sorts out the backend engineering, gathers feedback on GPU load and graphics glitches (because there will be bugs, there always are). Three, it builds anticipation for everyone else as CCP starts indicating their revised intentions for pricing (if that pricing is revised at all).



An alternative would be to spitball the idea internally. Then consult with the CSM to see if they have any better ideas. Then open the discussion up to a wider set of players through some kind of interactive medium where people can post questions and discuss options. Which would be something like this forum thread.

Email surveys are so Twentieth Century.

With the Incarna expansion they over-promised and grossly under-delivered. I'd much rather they promised a little, and then delivered over and above the promise.

The NEX store is tarnished. It's initial release was, as you say, a blatant cash grab; the greed is good leak, the unanswered "gold ammo" questions and the ill considered $1000 pants dev post didn't help the situation much.

It's about time it was rehabilitated, it needs cheaper goods and ship skins could be the ideal way of doing so. The entry price point has to be right if they are to succeed, especially as skins look like they're going to be destructible, unlike monocles and clothing, which are harder to destroy than devships.

Personally I don't like Aurum as a currency or even an idea, but as pointed out by both devs and posters, you'll be able to obtain ship skins by other means such as LP and eventually the market. Availability wise that'll put them in the same situation as clothing, you don't have to buy from the NEX.

Welcome back, you should now start pestering CCP by sending them all your ship art and ui concepts

8mill is not a crippling amount of isk, after all, you aren't spending much of anything on the hull in the case that the skin costs more. In the other 4 cases it costs much less than the hull price. Also, no, asking people what they want will not reflect results as accurately as simply placing them out there. Putting your test case out there will always yield more accurate results and reach a wider sample than a survey will.

On a 500k hull? Of course it is - unless you're one of EVE's mega-rich.

It would show what is the best method to put out to trial, instead of the misconceived shot-in-the-dark we have in this pilot.