Dev blog: Changes Coming To The New Eden Store With The March Release

EVE Information Portal Dev Blogs
,
82

Hi, I’m a rather large investor in the skin market. I have over 64 billion ISK in SKINs currently https://imgur.com/a/wKh7N , and I’d like to point out something concerning about the SKIN market that all players considering investing in SKINs should be aware of. Buyer beware, don’t get taken for a ride until CCP clears up some things on how they will handle SKINs in the future.

Please note the fact that I am selling SKINs, and I am warning people away from investing in SKINs. This is not good for my investment, but I have money to burn, and some suckers out there might get the idea that buying plex to invest in SKINs is a good idea. It might be a good idea, but CCP should at least give players some kind of guarantee regarding SKINs and how they are distributed into circulation or modified.

This statement from CCP is a warning sign:

WILL RETIRED SKINS EVER RETURN TO THE STORE?
While most SKINs will be gone for good once they have been retired, we will look for opportunities to bring back popular and thematic SKINs for limited sales in future.

To any long term investor that bought SKINs as an investment because their SKIN was retired, these “opportunities” are a knife in the back of your investment. If you are holding SKINs when this happens, your investment is sunk. If you actually spent real life money on PLEX to get these SKINs, then I don’t know about you, but I’d be furious, because CCP knows exactly what they are doing to you, but they already have your money so why would they care?

On to the second point I wanted to make: CCP has been giving out SKINs from events. SKINs like Spirit and Glacial Drift and Exoplanets and others are given out in events, some have been given out multiple years in a row. If you buy SKINs, and CCP chooses to give out a SKIN you are speculating on for an event reward, once again, your investment is sunk.

The third point I wanted to make is to point out that last year, there were 2 SKIN types (Glacial Drift and Guardian’s Gala) that had the suffix YC119 in their name. This would lead one to believe that they were SKINs from that year. Sometime around October, CCP changed the name of the SKINs to remove the YC119 from the name, and then re-issued both Glacial Drift and Gala(renamed Spirit) for Christmas and the months after and gave them away to ALL players for free. If CCP is going to keep changing all the names of the SKINs, and might just re-issue the SKIN that you have chosen as an investment, well once again, your investment is sunk.

4th point: Saying CCP is “retiring” SKINs means nothing when they “might” come back at some point.

So basically, CCP is doing all kinds of shenanigans with SKINs at the moment, and until there is some kind of outline or promise from CCP regarding their behavior on this, I would not recommend buying them as a long-term investment. We have no idea how CCP will release SKINs in the future, or if they will flood the market with thousands of copies of whatever SKIN you are holding for free on a whim.

A fair compromise between CCP and Players would be for CCP to “seal” SKINs they put on retirement(consider it a rotation, as a retirement with comebacks arent really retirements are they?) . Give players a timer to look at to see how long the skin is sealed for. Forever?(AT SKINS) 5 years? 2 years? 1 year? 6 months? This timer is CCPs promise to the player they aren’t going to screw with the SKIN for that long (sell or give away). That would keep the speculation market stable and active, and would eliminate CCP giving players a giant fisting on investments. It doesnt mean you have to re-issue them.

Seriously, whos idea was it to just rename the YC119 SKINs and re-issue them? That was a masterful stroke in laziness and how not to interfere in the market in eve online. Shaaaame. Shaaaame. ♫(bell)♫ Like holy crap open the material, change the colour and call it frosty drift nips or something. It’s not like you just didn’t do that when you made the glacial drift material available to like 250 additional ships.

If CCP did these kind of things with the PLEX market, or T2 market, or minerals market or whatever market, people would lose their minds. But I doubt most people notice it happening, and the people that do notice it happening are quietly consolidating their stockpiles of SKINs and can accept the random short term losses until the next potential overturning of their market by CCP.

TL ; DR : Casual investor, beware. CCPlease, stop messing with the SKIN market so much, consider the “Seal” idea. If you touch the victory edition SKINs there’s going to be a revolt.

3 Likes
83

You may never know CCP might bring back CQ and WIS after they have developed a 64-bit version of Eve…

CQ was very old and outdated so they could bring it back sometime in the future…

But i would be happy with a less room idea, for example docking port with window and then a door to your office with a desk and a bed. There is no need for a corridor and a large area for your avatar.

3 Likes
84

From someone who buys apparel.

1 Like
85

So the next batch is on sale. Cool.

@CCP_Falcon did you find my suggestions reasonable? Is anything going to happen to SKINs UI anytime soon™?

I think Ship Tree window, NES and SKINs tab in character sheet need to merge somehow. NES is nice showcase to sell stuff, but it lacks many things. It doesn’t show if you have a skin already active for example. The delay after you buy a skin is like 5 seconds or more until you can activate it. Why is that? Did you try buying several SKINs? Did you try buying all the skins from your sale batch and activating them? It took me half of hour the last time and I only bought half from the list.

I’m pretty sure Ship Tree window is only ever used by newer players. And it could be used to showcase ships and skins collection.

SKINs tab in character sheet looks like work in progress, early alfa or beta state UI piece, this is outrageous. Is this what your monetization should look like? When I open NES I should be screaming shut up and take my money, and now it may look nice, but it is inconvenient place to make purchases. Its easier and faster to buy from show info tabs. FFS, really?

2 Likes
86

you never know…

1 Like
87

If you’re talking about CCP Rouge I thought much of us agreed to never hold that part of the past against him. God, I really hate that whole “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” mentality.

88

To be fair a part of what’s wrong with the current skin market is people who buy skins and don’t sell them at all or charge 4-5 times their cost in plex when they’re already hideously overpriced by CCP.
I’ve seen frigate skins for over a 100m. No frigate skin should cost more than 10m it’s just a frigate skin.

There can’t be a healthy market if no one offers realistic prices on anything and CCP overprices anything. They might as well remove the ability to trade skins entirely because if I want a skin that isn’t dropped in game I have to buy Plex and buy it myself otherwise I’m wasting money.

The buy offers are too low, 10000 isk, the sell offers too high thinking they’re gonna charge hundreds of millions or billions for a single skin. They sit there, CCP floods the game with more skins trying to get people to buy them and it stagnates to where we are now. they weren’t meant to be investments tbh.

CCP needs to drop the prices drastically I encourage an actual ingame skin market that isn’t just 3-4 offers on a few skins and some skins are missing entirely from hubs like jita or amarr or they need to remove all skins and just add in a custom camo maker/livery editor like you would in any other game over the last 15 years.
Ship customization shouldn’t cost real money anyway it should be built into the game as a feature.

89

To be fair a part of what’s wrong with the current skin market is people who buy skins and don’t sell them at all or charge 4-5 times their cost in plex when they’re already hideously overpriced by CCP.

If people didn’t invest in SKINs, then CCP wouldn’t raise any of those extra funds from SKIN investors. The fact that CCP is retiring SKINs creates this segment of the market where people buy retired SKINs as an investment. You’re saying that’s a problem. Let the market decide, or buy the SKIN when it goes on sale.

I’ve seen frigate skins for over a 100m. No frigate skin should cost more than 10m it’s just a frigate skin.

Rarity matters. Do you think you should be able to buy Alliance Tournament SKINs for 10M ISK and therefore devalue all those SKINs and the months of work they took to obtain?

There can’t be a healthy market if no one offers realistic prices on anything and CCP overprices anything. They might as well remove the ability to trade skins entirely because if I want a skin that isn’t dropped in game I have to buy Plex and buy it myself otherwise I’m wasting money.
The buy offers are too low, 10000 isk, the sell offers too high thinking they’re gonna charge hundreds of millions or billions for a single skin. They sit there, CCP floods the game with more skins trying to get people to buy them and it stagnates to where we are now. they weren’t meant to be investments tbh.
CCP needs to drop the prices drastically I encourage an actual ingame skin market that isn’t just 3-4 offers on a few skins and some skins are missing entirely from hubs like jita or amarr or they need to remove all skins and just add in a custom camo maker/livery editor like you would in any other game over the last 15 years.
Ship customization shouldn’t cost real money anyway it should be built into the game as a feature.

CCP is setting their SKIN prices at a decent point to raise them money. The real problem for CCP is that they are also going a little crazy during events and giving out hundreds and thousands upon thousands of SKINs during the events. Because of this, the market got flooded, and things are totally unbalanced.

Take the Exoplanet SKINs given out for project discovery as the supreme example of this. There are like a hundred thousand or more of those SKINs. Way too much for the market to bear. Those SKIN prices tanked to below 1 Million ISK each, and now when players have the option of what SKIN to buy, they will probably buy the 1 Million ISK SKIN instead of the 200 Million ISK SKIN (or one direct from CCP with PLEX) unless they really really want a specific SKIN. CCP screwed themselves on sales until the current supply of exoplanet SKINs sell off because they look decent and are a low-cost alternative to spending real money or buying plex for SKINs. My advice to CCP is stop giving out so many SKINs so easily, they are screwing themselves.

The buy orders are so low because there are too many SKINs of certain types that were easily farmed putting downward pressure on the whole market. All the people that want them bought them and are currently wearing them. Most of the buy orders are bots, or info savants like most of Jita, all I can say is that it’s real suspicious when your orders are instantly 0.01 ISKed 10 seconds after you update. The sell orders are what the market can bear. People will lower their prices if SKINs don’t sell eventually. Anything can be an investment. It’s all timing. If you think SKINs are cheap right now, buy, and sell later.

You suggested dropping the prices for SKINs (again). If CCP does that every single investor in eve online will never touch the SKIN market again, and they would lose income from that segment of eve. The fact that CCP is retiring SKINs is the way CCP is stimulating this segment of the market. My concern as an investor is CCP will retire a SKIN and 2 months later say “LOL J/K” and reissue or even give away that SKIN, which is why I suggested the “seal” idea. I’m not going to invest in the SKINs being retired right now, because I have no idea when or if they will come back. They already scared me away from the market when I used to invest 10,000s of PLEX in SKINs then they changed all the prices.

In a way, it seems like CCP is unsure of what they want to do with the SKIN market, it seems like it’s the wild west at CCP when dealing with SKINs, when it should be treated more like PLEX under a single manager who understands all the consequences to their business. A single SKIN giveaway can have drastic and far-reaching consequences for their bottom line and ability to make money. I hope CCP reads this and understands this. People can only wear one SKIN at a time. Sure, they should give them away in events, but the events should be points based and not a SKIN every time or they are going to shoot themselves in the foot again.

CCP changed to a free model, SKINs are how they make money. I think the idea of allowing players to design SKINs is interesting, but they would have to monetize and control distribution or CCP ends up with the same problem of no income again.

Making all SKINs free would be the death of this game financially. Way to suggest the destruction of the universe because you wanted something to wear.

1 Like
90

Given the number of people out there still able to fly capitals (freighters count) and T2 ships, I think it’s fair to say those of us either subscribed or paying for our accounts with PLEX (which at some point do all originate from real-world money) are not anomalies.

91

So. The March Release is deployed. SKINS have been going on-sale for retirement for weeks.

The New Eden Store is STILL just a tiled grid of every single item vomited up at once. No ability to sort the order. Minimal filtering. No improved presentation of items that are on-sale or featured, in order to drive sales.

IF YOU WANT THE NES TO BE EFFECTIVE, CAN YOU MAYBE FOCUS ON IMPROVING THE UX RATHER THAN GENERATING WHOLLY ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY?

2 Likes
92

With the March release they added 98 new SKINs separated to a dozen of categories.
4x4 faction Hunter’s Quiver SKINs drop from Guristas Event sites. Some others I think will be given out as 15th anniversary gifts or something. And some will go to NES I think.

@CCP_Falcon , as far as I remember nothing about NES or Ship tree or SKINs Collection was mentioned being in schedule in CSM minutes. There is no hope? Is it far future?

93

New batch for sale again. So, @CCP_Falcon do you personally think buying and collecting SKINs UI is fine as it is? No need to improve? Any dedicated CCP guy or team there to help marketing guys do monetization convenient and user friendly? Or is it user friendly enough as it is?

94

I think that’s a question best reserved for the customer.

95

CCP seems to be creating a false sense of urgency in regards to these SKINs being retired. The thought process being that if you retire a crap load of SKINs you then force the player into buying them now or risk never having them at a reasonable price. So you add a new batch as you remove an old batch thus creating a flow of product where you constantly remove some and add some to force a higher sales throughput…know what other company is currently doing this? Netflix, they go through once a month and “refresh” their streaming service, removing popular programs and adding new ones all in the name of change and growth. In reality you are seriously turning players off from using this service as a result.

I mean I used to sub to Netflix but they refresh too often. Granted they do not charge by program but by month. However, the business model is the same. You might can pull that crap on the average joe paying 200 bucks for crap they will replace in 6 months but to assume EVE players are that stupid is a joke. You guys need to stop wasting time with this and start focusing on the real issue going on here which is woefully inadequate UI in NES. Instead you hide behind the “the store is too crowded” excuse to validate the very way you try to screw your player base over. If you want to scam me, come in game and do it in Jita, leave the game mechanic and development changes OUT of the scam please.

The NES seriously needs sorting, better filtering, more viability of sales and new items. The home page should not look like someone took a huge crap on the screen and arranged the turds into a grid. You guys run a website filled with ways to spend money I am more than certain all devs have bought on several websites shopping, do you see the similarities in a lot of commerce website? Why? Because it works plain and simple, start using that format. Use the home page of the NES as your featured page displaying sales and new items. You can break them down into a slider for new and sales and one for popular buys each with the ability to view all in that category. You can have drop down menus to sort by type and offer more variety there. You can also have a filter option where you select from a list of ticked boxes to indicate what you are looking for allowing for multiple selections. The point is you guys could really clean up the UI big time. The issue is not too many items on the store, the issues are the ways they are presented are so f***** up that it is hard to look for what you want or browse.

1 Like
96

Just one problem with that master plan. They’ll eventually run out of ideas for new skins it that’s the case. If the end goal is to declutter the NES then I agree with your statement that they should just implement better filters. But if the idea is keep the list of items in the NES small then retiring the skins is the better option although it would be nice to have better filters in the store.

97

I was asking @CCP_Falcon to try and buy some 50-100 SKINs and share his opinion on SKINs UI, as a customer. Who else can I ask that question? @CCP_Habakuk and @CCP_Lebowski as QA guys might have something to say maybe?

@Rin_Vocaloid2 What’s your answer? Did you try buying whole recent sales batch?

What I did I opened news piece with the list of SKINs on sale, then I opened SKINs tab in character sheet, market ship SKINs category, and I opened NES. Then one by one, check list, search market, check if I have it activated already, buy or skip. Buying 30 SKINs took almost an hour, so I thought I’ll quit collecting SKINs altogether until some reasonable changes to UI come, cause I think that amount of time wasted is ridiculous.

BTW they stopped posting exact lists, its the whole categories in news pieces now, but not all of the SKINs out of a category are on sale. How do you know? Cross check several times between SKINs tab, market and NES?

I admit if most people only buy skins for the ship they fly the most, or for a couple, then there is no problem there. Hoarders or collectors are rare I guess. The effort to change UI is then unjustified. But one really has to have some determination to collect SKINs, and I’m afraid that’s not me then.

98

do you have a ps2? i can mail you my copy of syphon filter omega strain (from 2004) that has full character customization and color choice from head to toe and its all built into the base game.

customization is not a premium feature. its base material.
games already going downhill, ccp just makes palette swap skins and overcharges, everything you said is false.
they need to add a player system in and let us make and sell our own

99

I will admit I splurged a bit although I am a bit picky on styles. You should see Rin Vocaloid2’s wardrobe.

100

Wooow! How can you not use this concept art? Seriously?

101

No canal, 0 chat again.