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I'm loving this idea CCP - a good call so that I can finally fly the Khanid skinned ships that I truely deserve to fly. I absolutely adore the hard work and effort gone into this by the Art and Development teams to make sure that we can (finally) have some more customisation of the ships that we fly other than the fittings/name.

However, the price to pay for this privilege? How dare you. Yes these skins are there as a "luxury" items within the game and I can understand that you require a payment to get this sorted. But unless you either reduce the amount of Aurum it costs to get these skins (the former blueprint prices was fair) or increase significantly the amount of Aurum you get when you convert a PLEX or via direct purchase, only those people that have more money than sense will buy them (which is probably your target market in this case).

Do you not remember the time this caused issues in the past? When your internal memo's got leaked, and players from High, Low and Null sec dropped their desire to blow each other up (mostly) and shot the Jita monument because of a mere hint that some sort of pay-to-win ammunition would possibly worm its way in the game? It destroyed a wonderful project that you had spent a great deal of time on because you misread the community.

Take a good, long hard look at yourselves in the mirror CCP:


You. Are. Not. Valve.


You cannot join in the Hats/Skins game and immediately start pricing at Valve levels for basic skins. It will crumble. It will burn. You will have another Walking in Stations rejection from the community.

Now, as others have pointed out, the term micro transaction is generally indicitive of a small cost. A months sub is not a small transaction. If these were placeholder numbers for the design team, or as example of the differences in costs, then that is fine. Alas, you have banded together in the first pages of this thread and immediately declared them accurate prices.

May I ask, what was wrong with the pricing that the blueprints had? Clearly you are charging for a permanancy that most players do enjoy, but these charges are far inexcess of their worth in most cases.

For example (using straight cash -> AURUM via EVE Aurum Store) :

Khanid Titan - £31.97 / €44.45 (Far too expensive, even for a Titan)
Sarum Tormentor - £18.99 / €26.41 (this is stupidly over the top value for the ship)
Ardishapur Tormentor - £3.99 / €5.55 (perfect)


Please CCP look at your costs. A special ship requires a special SKIN. Titans are worth a bit more than a normal ship, but not nearly 3 months Game Time. And for the love of the hamsters in the Jita node, do not march on with this current price schema without actually listening to those that are forking out for it.

If the speculation had started 3 weeks ago, I would agree with you. But there was a big spike that started about a day or two before the blog. That indicates something happened a day or two before the blog. There were no new threads, or blogs, or updates to Sisi, to account for it. So what's left? A leak. As Sherlock Holmes would say, whenever all other possibilities have been eliminated, whatever is left must be true.

Except the going PLEX/Aur/$/ISK rates put the cheapest of the posted SKINs at 740 Aur, which is about 200m ISK, or roughly $5. Where do you see the 50m ISK ones?

As well as a significant number of SKINs going for upwards of PLEX costs, which then leaves a person with the choice, pay for 1 month of game time, or paint my ship some half obscure color most people won't notice cause they will never look that closely at my ship? Heck half of the color schemes are just a few shades different than the standard colors... This is going to be good reading once it hits TQ.

I can easily see most players looking at even just a short list of ships they fly and schemes they want that would easily equal being able to pay for an entire year's worth of game time, and that is just a short list. I really feel bad for the people that get suckered into this full out and spend 10's of thousands of Aur on SKINs.

You know what happened a day or two before the blog, people realized it was about a week before the change was going live, which is prime time to do market speculation, I was planning to actually do all my speculating this afternoon when I got home (was going to spend this morning figuring out which old skins I wanted to stock up on) but then I saw the blog and it was too late. Anyone that has been following this and having our feedback ignored since the very beginning knew it was coming and the smarter ones just jumped on it a little quicker than the rest of us.

Ok, so three things:

1) I gotta agree with a lot of people that the pricing seems completely off. After you change the aur packages, those 4300 AUR frigate skins will cost $20.28 IF purchased with a $100 aur pack. I get that you're looking to keep things rare, but I cannot imagine who would spend that much on a t1 frigate paint job. As far as I can see, you're pricing yourself into a territory that won't make money here.

2) I really dislike the temporary skins, but I understand the reasoning. Is there any chance that we could get an option to buy a permanent version of the temporary skins? Turn all the existing ships and blueprints into the temporary version. Conversely, give more (or all) of the ships a temporary version. What would the concerns be over these options?

3) If I play around with the url of the nifty ship spinner in the blog, I can apply any skin to any ship. I'm hoping this is a future goal. Please say it is :)

Think about how many there are in game currently versus other skins that are NOT site drops.

If I do that, the only thing I can conclude is CCP/Aurum moneygrab.

I should probably state that I happen to have a few of these, and while it might appear that I'm trying to milk their worth, I'm really not. As you said, there are tons floating around; they're far from rare. It just sticks out like a sore thumb when ONLY these are temporary, and seem to contradict the whole concept of having a skinnable options in the first place.

Maybe a better question would be: what is CCP wanting to avoid if these were to become permanent?

If they have a problem with the dropable skins being too common, just add an "officer" permanent version of the thing at an abysmal low drop rate AFTER the patch.

So that schmucks like me can pay 1 Bil ISK for it and become proud (and space poor) Guristas pilots! Is it too much to ask?

They are avoiding a version that you spend real world cash money on being rendered obsolete from the outset because the version you spend internet space money on is dirt cheap due to over abundance.

Surprisingly, CCP likes making money. Whodathunk?

As a schmuck who would give them actual money for some of the temporary skins, I agree. Although, don't even make it an in game drop.

EDIT: how the hell is s.chmuck filtered but schmucks isn't?

Maybe this decision came about by observing the willingness of people to fly with skinned ships. Considering the relative skin to hull cost I'd imagine loss was a potential factor limiting adoption, thus this addresses that while leaving the skins with their same relative value.