If “legacy code” is indeed the reason, I think it would be neat to see CCP implement all pod skins in the same way they implemented a la the Genolution ‘Auroral’ AU-79 implant and make each pod “skin” it’s own unique “ship”.
Of course, this would conflict with those who currently have the implant, and I’m not sure how it’d work in practice. Just my 2 cents on how CCP could potentially get us to use more skins for our pods.
Its because skins are linked to item ID’s, which are unique, the issue being that pods cease to exist when you leave them so each pod is actually a new unique pod as far as the game is concerned and because of that each pod by default has no skin assigned to it, the golden pod is different because its checking for an implant and spawning an entirely different pod which has a different default skin, i mean they probably “could” add a feature to set a default pod skin, but i don’t really think its going to matter much as pods generally aren’t looked at so people aren’t going to notice it was a skinned pod as it explodes and most forced pod ejections aren’t going to last long enough for you to enjoy the skin
I personally find all ship skins pointless once undocked, and I only “use” the ones that I’ve picked up for free, though i think i bought Quafe ones for the dominix and tristan. The pod skins I have just turned up, unasked for. effort must have been put into creating them. I understand there are legacy reasons, and the fact that pods are not really “ships” but It would be nice if a setting for preferred default skin would exist. It seems like a lot of wasted effort otherwise.