I would like ccp to add markings to show where a ship was made in eve like which dockyard , and who made it when looking at the info of the ship. You ask why , for s****s and giggles
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Actually wouldnât it be cool to see a âlogâ of when and where it was built, bought/sold locations and times, maybe kills involved in? I like this idea
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I did like in Pokemon to know where they were born and evolved, sure would be cool to see âThis Drake was made in Xâ
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Short answer: Database says âno.â
Long answer: The database in EVE (as far as we know) works by stripping all unique stats off any item in order to stack it. This means that items you find on the market are completely identical which reduces clutter on the market interface and in hangers.
Now⌠if you want to add a âunique valueâ to each item, you will have to make it a separate entity from every other item of the same type.
Imagine each and every player making a âmakerâs markâ and the database having to create a unique category for each âmakerâs markâ item on the market.
You would also not be able to stack such repackaged âmakerâs markâ items with other items of the same type as they will be considered separate entities.
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That clarifies everything, thanks! Guess we should have known by now since Kill Marks donât carry on when repackaged and stuff.
CCP should change the Player Features and Ideas forum into a Kickstarter / GoFundMe area where ideas (like this one) cannot be posted unless accompanied by a $ cash donation to get them started on implementing said idea right away.
Because likes/dislikes, who gives a crap. You want them to implement this, you give them a donation. If anything can be learned from Star CitizenâŚ
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Each stack must have its own identity, at least item type, location, and size. These are what the individual items inherit when they are separated and unpackaged, but it should be technically feasible to have each unique item instantiated out of a stack inherit more than just the basic attributes of the itemâs class. So, a stack of Drakes could spit out more than just [Drake, Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant, 1]. It could also spit out a serial number, job id, character id or some other identifying entry. RE-stacking would be the more complicated problem, but you COULD literally just stack the serial numbers last in, first out.
Iâm not saying it should work this way. Iâm just saying that it COULD.
If that seems complicated, just consider that a stack already spits out something much more complicated than just Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant. It also has to tell EVE whose hangar it is in and where it is in that hangar, along with the necessary transfer functions relating to both possession and market order/contract fulfillment. Tacking on a â#3857374767â to the end of all that isnât THAT much more complicated . . . or maybe it is for reasons I donât understand or am not aware of. 
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I am harkening back to an EVE trailer that advertised that âWhat you do has meaning. What you create has value.â (I may have paraphrased that.) My understanding is that the OPâs suggestion is well in line with what EVE is trying to do. How cool would it be to become a famous ship or arms or ammunition manufacturer?
I would hope they would forgive us for making suggestions that are stupidly difficult to implement or just stupid, but the alternative is a player base that is silent about what it wants the game to be. Some companies pay lots of money for the kind of feedback CCP gets for free. Itâs actually quite a new and unusual development for your customers to try to help you make your product. Frito-Lay doesnât have customers sending them potato chip recipes to try out. Ford doesnât have customers building them prototypes at home in their garages. They pay chefs and engineers and marketers millions of dollars for that.
When you look at it that way, all this trash that we post and abuse that we heap upon the poor, hard working people at CCP . . . itâs actually a gold mine for them.
^ true story
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If weâve learned anything from Star Citizen, itâs to not drop hundreds of dollars on a game that will never be released.
This is EVE, if thereâs any game that could change based on your idea, it would be this one.
I for one love this idea. The DB may say ânoâ for market purposes but the contract system could be used to implement something like this while retaining the unique traits of the ship. That would circumvent any stacking issues since each ship could be sold as an individual unit. I would love to buy a ship, learn itâs history/what its done before I get it. Imagine hearing about a huge war that took place in EVE and lo and behold thereâs a BS for sale that had 70 kills in that war, flown by one of the most reputable pilots around and you can own it and fly it with the markings to show what it has done.
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Every once in a while I think about this type of thing myself. I used to play FFXI and in that game crafters could âsignâ items so when you examined them it would show who made it. Items made by known or notorious players would become collectors items. Items made by friends could have sentimental value. High end crafters would sign items to show off that they were someone who could make such rare items. One Christmas I crafted beta fish tanks for my friends and signed them as gifts.
As for database we already have kill marks, which means there is a table or place where data specific to the ship (as long as not repackaged or sold on the market) is kept. It would be trivial to add the signature to this already in place system.
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Iâve always wanted this to be a thing as well. unfortunately, since every ship, mod, etc made is exactly the same regardless of who makes it. There is very little someone can do to distinguish themselves from the pack except for sheer volume either of goods created or blueprints available.
Even without a makers mark, it is still possible to make a name for yourself within an alliance as the âgo to manufacturerâ by having a large and well researched personal bpo library. and by producing large amounts of the doctrine ships and fittings.
In fact, this is almost exactly how a large amount of capital and super cap production works. cap blueprints take a very long time to copy, and so having your own library of them instantly makes you much more valuable to any alliance.
Even if you are selling them on the open market, being able to meet deadlines or produce large quantities will help build your reputation, and people will start coming to you for their ships.
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Yes but if you repackage a ship, it loses the marks.
The problem is with repackaging. Each ship is just s standard packaged ship, an item in the database no different than a module or round of ammo until you unpack it.
Once you unpack it, it becomes unique. The moment you repack it, the unique item is gone.
What this means is that at best you could add where a ship was unpacked and details at that point, but anything prior is unknown.
And before you said it would not be a big load on the database⌠At one time RvB had a 100k frigate free for all. That is 100,000 unique database items that we burned through about half of in a 3 or 4 week span. That is a lot of items. Add in every other ship list by RvB alone (over 1 mil I believe) and that is a small fraction of the total ships produced in eve. Itâs just too much data to manage and too many unique items.
Itâs a cool idea⌠But for EVEâs scale, itâs just not practical.
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It would only remain âsignedâ as long as it is unpackaged, just like kill marks and the dirt on the ship. This mechanic would not change the number of unique items in the game, simply adding another column to the table that has the killmarks and dirt level.
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Another way to deal with the unique item / package issue, is to have a buffer of the âsignatures/historyâ, per player and for the market itself.
Meaning that if a player packages a signed item, then that signature is in that playerâs âsignature bufferâ. When the player assembles one of the same item, then it randomly picks a signature from that buffer to apply to the item of the same type. (or you could give a popup asking âhey which signed item do you want to assembleâ and let them choose, thus applying the signature from the buffer in a non-random fashion) If a packaged item is traded, then a signature from the buffer would transfer to the person whom it was traded to (again randomly, but making sure someone does not have more signatures of a type than they have items of that type). If the item is put on the market, then the signature is allocated to the market. Someone who buys a market item might end up with a signed item if any were put on the market signed.
The idea being, that if you want to contract / trade an assembled item, the signature always goes with it. If you package it/sell on market, then it doesnât matter âwhich oneâ from the packaged stack it is allocated to as long as it goes to one when it is reassembled unless it was destroyed.
Also, another way to keep the amount down is to require a special material or item in the manufacturing process to make a signed item. In FFXI not all items were signed, they required special crystals, which meant extra expense. People would only sign special items which meant less load on the database as well.
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what about you get information on the info page that only you can see, starting when it was unpackaged? i know i thought iâd think it would have been cool to see how much distance my current hauler covers in itâs life up until that point. yes, that would mean you wouldnât know if you wanted to check after you get ganked, but sometimes itâs cool having useless information.
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Thanks Shah, came here to post this. Do you just have stuff like this in a notepad for copy-paste at this point? It seems like there are some topics that just keep coming back up every month or twoâŚ
Nah⌠I prefer to type it out. It keeps my words per minute from dropping. 
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Using customer input has long been used to help companies improve their products, itâs the main reason companies mass collect customer feedback and consult focus groups consisting of customers.
To address one of your examples : Walkers, which is the UK arm of Frito-Lay, regularly crowdsources new flavours, while not a recipe as such itâs certainly using customers to further development of their product.
As for the topic; the database is the bottleneck, any extra fields on a ship entry have to be reproduced for every player ship that exists, in an unpackaged state, at any moment in time. If you want to add the same fields to packaged stuff to retain extra information then they have to be appended to the entry for every single ship that exists at any moment in time; that includes ships on dormant accounts.
I agree that good companies have always used customer feedback to improve their products. Where I disagree is in that, with digital goods especially, the customer nowadays has a much greater propensity to proactively brainstorm, experiment, and advocate for changes to âtheirâ product. It is not since the days when artisans made one item at a time for one specific individual that this level of producer/consumer cooperation has been seen, at least for mass produced products.
. . .
If you look at an item, lets say Drakes, in the market window, you may notice that there can be two stacks of 16 Drakes in the same place, for the same price. There is already a uniqueness to them.
You are of course correct but you know, we could focus on unpackaged ships. You know, those you can board, fit, and bounce off other things. There is a precedent actually - Audit Containers.
Iâm neither pro or against the OPâs idea. Iâm just pointing that technically it is doable.