You believe it is relevant because you believe that there is a connection between the market place and the number of saves. There is no connection. Those two aspects have neo bearing on each other. The ONLY thing that the save cap does its limit creativity. The only variable effecting the market place is the price.
You’re just describing what the tool ought to do if it were to function correctly. So in a very real way you know exactly how broken it is. However because you believe that you are advantage by it being broken in this way you are in favour of maintaining it.
There are so many loose ends here.
You’re assuming knowledge that may or may not exist in the minds of users who might just want to play the actually game. It’s supposed to be an enjoyable experience is it not?
This is what I’m understanding about your rewrite: The enjoyment that you’re receiving from this newly released design tool -A tool that was sold as a way to enhance individual and group identity- is that it presents such a scarce and convoluted design space as to discourage potential users to the point where they give up and pay someone else to engage with it.
God forbid that actual good skins were created and sold, the winners here are not Eve’s best artists and designers, instead it’s whoever can be bothered persisting with this rubbish tool. I was hoping to get a chance to experience and maybe even buy some really great designs. This is what happens when you put corporations in charge of creativity, they tax every drop of greatness out of it. My whole reply from the very beginning should really just have been, “Needs more autotune”.
It turns out that I’m doing EVE wrong by trying to play EVE and that instead I should be playing excel and photoshop . Somehow you see this as a win… I’m really trying to be kind but I just can’t shake what a dumb take it is when a persons enjoyment comes from seeing that people have been discouraged from participating in a meaningful way.
What’s the problem with a genuinely competitive environment?
Why would a person feel they need to discourage engagement in an attempt to win an advantage?
Imagine if the best designs won the market and not whatever designs were left after users grew fed up with the ridiculous creation process.
Yes you are, and I have been doing my best to try to point out how that’s bad and to try separate those two pursuits apart.
I’m not trying to meta game the freaking market place. I couldn’t give a rats arse about the market place I just want to make incredible skins.
I don’t want to problem solve my design process like I’m placing warehouses to min max my PI. I want to make a ■■■■■■■ awesome skin and then float it onto the market and see what happens.
Instead of being able to make anything particularly outstanding or even good -the one pattern limit is completely CURSED- I’m left to contend with some other ■■■■■■■■ that really has nothing to do with how fantastic my skin might look.
That’s not even touching on the absence of the expression of individual and group identity that was showcased.
If you want to problem solve go do PI and leave the rest of us alone in peace to make art. Why do people insist on ruining everything through financial exploitation? If you want to ruin something, ruin the colour red, splash it onto purple and then add an orange diamond.
When I watched the SKINR preview stream I couldn’t figure out why the artists were so disappointed looking. I thought that they might be upset by how poor in quality the other hosts designs were. Now I know why they were unhappy, they had had their vision of something cool and artistic ruined by the vaporous and narrow minded agenda of CCP corporate.
The art team is renowned for saving EVE, unfortunately not this time.
I’ve described the connection well enough in posts above, and I’ve described what save caps do to mitigate the impact of design scraping on the part of customers that want to skip the “other peoples’ authorship” part of this system. You’re just choosing to will the point away with aggressive language. And I get it; the only thing more effective than strawmanning and sliding goalposts around is hot-taking a quick “nuh uh” when someone says something you don’t particularly agree with – or when you fundamentally misunderstand something, as the case may be.
Again, your lack of knowledge is not my burden of proof.
Again, let’s remember the whole thing about design scraping and mitigating impact, the way in which working outside of a game environment helps to offset the advantage potential customers and competition has to jack up designs and stash them in a vast library, the way that it might work the way you’re hoping for if people couldn’t just snatch designs en masse, yadda, yadda…
I love the pronounced irony of a person that’s outspoken about wanting to avoid third-party tools in favor of playing in game saying that it’s a bad guess to assume that people don’t want to use third-party tools.
Okay, so, for this and basically the entirety of your follow-up reply – this is where I hop out of considering this being a serious conversation, because a lot of your pointmaking risks the tone that a lot of non-artists use when they talk about the merits of AI in the context of commercial artmaking, that it’s ultimately great to remove avenues for traditional artists to problem solve around marketplaces where - and this isn’t a cynical take; it’s just a fact - most customers would just as well like to receive the work they’re seeing for free.
I get that you want art and expression in the system and that you want to have the work be sold with the artfulness of it as the only real metric, but, by your own admission earlier, you’re selling to a consumer base that can just copy whatever they want when they’d like. I certainly want art and expression too, but I want both the protections for how that art is received and the limitations that might allow it to compete ahead of folks that might rather copy the art sooner than buying it.
I get that it’s convenient for the purposes of your argument to make artmaking/expression and problem-solving mutually exclusive values, but, as an artist that works and teaches commercially, I’d be nearly obligated to laugh you out of the room if you told me to leave my business sense and creative problem-solving at the door.
That said…
I thoroughly agree with this. And hey! The more complexity they add to the system, the harder it is for average consumers to just copy what they like.
Also, here’s a somewhat related question that sort of serves both of our interests: how would you feel about them removing the numerical information of the pattern slider? Personally, I feel like getting rid of that information boosts the advantage of the designer and creates a situation where the designs are strictly eyeballed. It would also remove any possibility of folks using third-party documents to “save” ideas. How would you feel about that as a change?
Just a quick follow-up to apologize for hyperfocusing on perhaps the more negative bits of our back and forth here and to loosen my grip on some of my arguments. I went ahead and compiled a post on potential skill changes that I think you’ll find interesting, and I’d value your input. Sorry for the hassle!
Describing it does not equal proving it and you have not proved it. You have no data, no evidence, other than your own anecdotal experiences and imagination with which to suggest that save caps are affecting price.
My lack of knowledge has no bearing on whether you have established a fact.
You haven’t provided clear and concise evidence that would prove a direct connection between save slots and price.
I didn’t say that people did not want to use third party tools, I said that they shouldn’t be necessary to operate the game effectively.
I don’t care about selling it. I care about making it. I’ll keep all the designs to myself and never send any of them to market. All five of them… … …
The problem that you’re having is that you can’t imagine a world that’s not dictated by your own values and commercial interests.
Not everybody is motivated by profit margins and edging out advantages over other people. Some people -and if you can get your head around this it’s going to shock you to your core- just want to make beautiful things and then move on with their lives, for no other reason than to make something beautiful.
The whole time we’ve been in discussion it’s been about you and your values, and your commercial instincts, and your problem solving skills, and your keen advantages, and you don’t want that to change because you think that you’re winning and you don’t want that advantage threatened or taken away from you.
All I’m asking is that CCP don’t deliberately make it virtually impossible to make great works, great skins, that the designers of the game don’t actively install, effortfully install, deliberately install, unnecessary limitations that would directly effect the possibility of making great skins.
You believe that these ‘friction’ creating devices are improving your art. They are not, they are limiting your output. You believe that these ‘friction’ creating devices are improving your market edge. There’s no proof of that. There is proof that they’re prohibiting less wealthy players from participating.
What is likely improving your market edge is the cost of entry, which is prohibitively expensive for the average player and which is ultimately a class issue.
The save caps are actually hurting your design process which you’ve compensated for by turning toward outside resources to solve.
You’re a commercial designer, you’re a craftsman. You’re applying a formula. That was something when Andy Warhol did it, it was edgy when Damien Hurst took it further, doubled down on it. It’s not a relevant cultural expression anymore, at least not if it’s being done consciously. If it’s for money don’t make it art.
There has to be a better way, my first thought, and it’s not a good one, is to increase the number range 0-1000 and then randomise the start point. I.e. your zero point, and my zero point are probabilistically unlikely to be in the same location relative to each other.
The numerical slider is a useful tool that allows me to calibrate my movements more finely and if it didn’t exist I’d probably be asking why.
There appears to be no Undo function as well, or, if there is I have not been able to find it.
When you select the Camera feature while using the Pattern Tool it’s very easy to ‘forget’ how it works and to hold down your mouse button in order to shift your perspective on the ships hull and of course this completely alters the projection of the pattern. Having the numbers written down then is the only way that you can recover your design. I’D SAVE IT along the way - IF - I HAD MORE SLOTS! I just LOVE how the tool makes me the creator, me the experimenter, into me the idiot.
I’ve only put a brief amount of thought into the problem of fakes, and copycat designers. I think that it is a problem that can be largely overcome by improving the storefront. Designers need a MySpace. Consumers need a way to be able to distinguish genuine designers apart from ■■■■ designers. There needs to be prestige in owning a particular players designs.
At the same time instead of inhibiting our ability to produced incredible and amazing skins, if that development time had instead been dedicated to creating obstructions against piracy… who knows.
I don’t have time to think of many right now, but my first thought, and again, it’s not a particularly good one, Is that once you’ve payed PLEX to secure your design you basically own the patent on that particular combination of elements and anybody else trying to recreate that exact combination of colours and patterns in that particular order can not actually pay to publish that work.
This method would be enhanced further if there were an additional Pattern option.
The addition of a second pattern would also benefit single element patterns such as a single diamond rather than always tessellated patterns such as tessellated diamonds. A single elect pattern would more resemble a logo. This really begins to pop as an addition rather than as the primary element. Otherwise it just colour, colour, colour, single diamond, print to market. As opposed to colour, colour, colour, colour, fade, diamond, print to market.
Okay, I can’t resist. I need to poke the bear on this one haha.
Look, I get that we probably have very different levels of actual experience with artmaking in an a professional space, so I understand why you might think an attempt at artspeak and artshaming is appropriate here (it’s not), but namedropping some hazy and mostly mischaracterized portrait of 20th century art history over what you think I should or shouldn’t be doing with my art just isn’t going to cut it. I’m happy to discuss the careers and philosophies of both Warhol and Hirst in a separate DM or whatever at length, but you can check your conveniently narrow, poorly reinforced definition of purity at the door.
I truly don’t mean to offend because I do think you’re loving the rabbit a little more than the racetrack here a little at this point so to speak, but I’d also like to avoid taking any cheap insinuation like the above lying down if I can help it. Artists can’t make a living and keep their integrity as expressive creatives at the same time? C’mon.
Ugh, yeah, this’d be great. If I’m understanding the reference right, I also very much want dedicated designer storefronts. I think it’d make a big difference.
Well the parts making up the design belong to CCP along with the ship model and such, however the design itself (how the individual parts are arranged) are the creation of the designer and should be their intellectual property while the individual parts and the model belongs to CCP.
Unless they specifically mention such IP and artistic rights being owned by them too if someone uses the ingame design tool and even then not entirely sure if it is actually enforceable, not everything written in a contract is actually enforceable in court so signing some right off in an EULA doesn’t necessarily mean the courts would agree with it or judge in favor of CCP.
I have wondered if there’s anything in the TOS that is flexible enough to serve as a kind of proxy copyright. Short of that, a good guess is probably that it’s similar to copyright law found in culinary spaces; you can’t copyright a specific list of ingredients and measurements, but (essentially…) you can copyright and/or trademark the branding and language surrounding the recipe. McDonalds’ secret sauce and/or Pumpkin Spice Lattes are probably fair examples of that kind of thing.
Hey! Sorry for not seeing this message earlier. The feedback to SKINR, both positive and critical, has been very helpful to us. The plan for SKINR was always to build on it to add features and functionality. The teams have taken in your feedback and will look to have some updates - keep an eye out for news items in the coming weeks & months.
Can we please get weekly/semi-weekly content updates at least? ie: new design elements including colors and patterns?
Is CCP looking into what EverMarks could be spent on with respect to SKINR? I don’t recall who suggested it, but the idea of engine lights, running lights, hull lighting and FX (such as electricity, flames, smoke, etc.) was a really good one.
Even if not through Evermarks these would be much welcomed features in SKINR.
Is it possible to have a negative -10% market tax on the Paragon hub. That would make a lot of sense since people could save money by buying skin from “Artists”.
Why is there the 30% again? Oh right to screw artists instead of supporting them
