when I first started playing Elite I found the painjobs in the store perplexing, in every other game I have played, there are the "pleb colours" and then the fancy skins you can purchase to stand out,
I would have much preferred to have been able to earn some base colours in game, like Red/Green/Blue. and have the more exotic colours be in game's cash store,
I mean if they wanted to be cagey about it they could have locked it behind gameplay, with Ship Paintjobs being locked to federal and imperial rank... or even Combat/Trade/Exploration rank,
As it stands the majority of the paintjobs in the game are incredibly low effort (Fdev literally move a hue slider and call it a new paint job or copy and paste a texture between ship models).
So for me, buying new painjobs has been a way of showing the dev support when good work and progress is shown in the product that's also why I buy platinum in Warframe as a show of support, with the recent missteps and bug ridden messes my ships have all stayed factory standard.
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In my opinion (and that's all it is, an opinion), Frontier need to take a page out of Digital Extremes (DE) book and be more open with their development, I'm drawing the following conclusions based on both games needing ongoing micro transactions for income, so its kinda related to paintjobs.
Fdev show us what you are working on, don't do dates or anything... like the ice planet stuff... it looked great, the mistake there was them saying that it was coming with 3.3. The game director at DE (Steve Sinclair) literally shows up to the Devstreams, and is like, check out this cool new lighting thing we're working on... its still early days but we hope to have it in the game sometime this year or early next year, no promises. Go look at
Steve Sinclair's twitter and you'll see what I mean
DE will make a mistake, laugh at themselves with the community and fix it, they don't take themselves too seriously and are all there to give you the best game they can and their passion shows.... where Frontier feels very corporate, they try to be super professional and rigid, then make massive blunders and pretend like it didn't happen or don't see the humor in their misstep. It shows in their community managers engagement, everything feels rehearsed and too much like politician speak. it feels like there are unnecessarily strict gag orders and confidentiality agreements in place at Fdev
Take the last livestream for instance, where they said "we understand that the forum vote may not have been the best option, will will take that into consideration in future II's" beep boop, robotic. whereas a little bit of chilled humor would have been better for me. I would have said "so we see how well the forum vote was received, so... we've spoken to the devs and we are looking into moving more of the game to the forum, features you can look forward to is, forum based commodity markets, galaxy map route plotting via the issue tracker.... I joke, we hear you guys and will be working closely with the devs to make sure future II's are entirely held within the game, thanks for the feedback"
This post was way longer than I hoped and went way off the rails, thank you if you made it this far.
