Recently, I’ve created about 200 skins, and sold around 100 of them. It’s not an easy process—the interface is clunky, but the sales tracking system is the worst part. Skins take a long time to sell, and throughout that period, there’s no way to see how many have sold or for what price; there is simply no dedicated record-keeping for skins. When listing a skin for sale, you can’t even see how much it actually cost to produce—you have to rely on your memory or keep notes in a separate notebook. Why have improvements to the Paragon system stopped?
Does someone actually believe that just because a tool “works,” that’s enough? You never finished integrating it; you just dropped it into the code and left it at that! Take the pattern marketplace, for example: why isn’t there a simple checkbox to filter out patterns you already own? Why do I have to scroll through over 1,000 listings every single time?
But the biggest issue is, without a doubt, the lack of tracking—there’s no record of what’s been created or what’s been sold. The so-called “Paragon Headquarters” isn’t really a headquarters at all.
You know, as people get older, their memory isn’t what it used to be. It’s difficult for someone to keep track of which skins they’ve listed, when they listed them, and at what prices. Without a proper, dedicated overview, players will never know if their little “skin business” is actually profitable. Skins sell slowly, there are no notifications in my wallet, and there’s no sorting—how am I supposed to figure this out?
Furthermore, there’s no way to adjust the price of a skin that’s been sitting on the market, stuck. The interface is completely inflexible. Whenever I open Paragon, I feel like I’ve been shunted into some isolated sub-program that has nothing to do with the rest of EVE. Every single time, I have to break my habit of using standard, intuitive interfaces just to remember how bizarrely everything is set up in Paragon. Please, improve this!
There are paragraphs. It’s wall-like because he didn’t add an extra space between them. I’m also not convinced the text is LLM generated (at least, not wholly). There are a number of grammatical errors an LLM would not make. Just because you see EM dashes, does not mean an LLM wrote it, and while recent AI spam has been super fricking annoying, we also shouldn’t rush to accuse willy-nilly.
On the complaint in general, I agree entirely. I had reason to sell some SKINs lately (I boo-boo’d and made a few with the wrong colors) and the experience pretty much sucks. I know some of them sold, because I saw credits hit my wallet history, but I couldn’t tell you if they all did. I guess I’ll find out if they eventually expire and return to my unactivated collection. Sale management really needs to be improved.
As much as FC keeps forcing SKINR components on the players, giving them out with every event and including them in every pack, they’ve done very little with the system itself since it was launched. We still don’t even have even limited (color-only) T3C/D support. SKINR is turning into yet another fire-and-forget feature.
By the way, Gerard, sorry if I came on a bit harsh before. I think my tone was a little judgy and I didn’t mean it that way. This is sort of a hot-button issue for me. The literary world has two major problems right now: the flood of AI generated garbage, and the flood of AI accusations that have, in some cases, ended author careers before they even started.
Indeed, I simply overlooked the need to separate the paragraphs. As for the text itself, I just used Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/). To my shame, in my 50 years of life, I’ve never managed to master English well enough to feel confident in it. Between one thing and another—work, family, children, an in-game event in EVE—I tend to rely on a translator, and then I just forget to fix the paragraph breaks…
Let me elaborate further, in the hope that someone with actual political weight might see this.
I’ve invested in this small-scale venture—let’s say I spent 4,000 PLEX. Now, I want to see whether my investment has paid off, how quickly it did so, who bought these skins, and which ones sold well versus which ones didn’t.
Furthermore, I might even be interested in producing skins for citadels, and I’d want to see sales statistics for those as well. But, as things stand, I have no way to access this information. What does this mean? It means I consider this investment highly questionable, and the next time there’s a promotion affecting skin production costs, I won’t be doing anything of the sort.
Incidentally, in my view, the production costs are far too high. If an attractive ship skin costs as much as—or more than—the ship itself, very few people are going to want to buy it.
Citadel skins are, as far as I know, not sold or produced for others. They are available to people in the corporation with the right roles and can be made by spending the corp’s evermarks. This also is the only way to spend those corp evermarks that I’ve heard of.
So if you want to make cidatel skins, join a group with citadels.
Someone could love flying a certain frigate worth 20 million and they buy a new one each time it dies to continue flying it.
To buy a nice skin for it once for 500m means you now get to fly a prettier version of your favourite ship each time you get a new one.
Skin cost does not get lost when the ship explodes and it’s purely optional vanity, somethhing some players are willing to pay a lot for.
Ship skins easily can be far more expensive than the ship it’s for.
Technically this means very few people would buy that skin, as you said, but it’s true that very few people are interested in spending ISK on skins anyway.
If you sell skins those people are your customers.
Funny, it’s almost like someone raised that very issue over two years ago, and CCP/FC has done little or nothing to address it other than some periodic sequencing sales.
“Value” is of course, subjective. Personally, I’ve spent far too much PLEX making SKINs for my own use, so clearly I value personalization to a degree. I will say though, that these days I mostly wait until FC runs a 50% sequencing sale to make SKINs, and I try to leverage discounted PLEX as well. I took advantage of the last 50% sale period to make a whole new SKIN line for myself.
However, I stand by my assessment from two years ago that the economics of the Paragon Hub are not suitable for a thriving market. If FC would simply change the model to selling designs rather than SKINs and shift the production costs to the buyer rather than the seller, I think the SKIN market would boom.
EDIT to add: Despite having made a bunch of SKINs, to this day, I’ve yet to buy a SKIN from the Paragon Hub.