For some time now(years) ive always thought that its cool new ships come out..but it takes a LLOONNGGG time to build a ship in STO I imagine. all the weapons and stats coded in and whatnot. Today I was dropping a new visual for my impulse engines in and came to an idea. What if a ship appearance slot was added there for complete ship appearance changes. take my amarie freighter...never cared much for its appearance but I thought it would be kewl if I could get that tuffli appearance.
Well take its skin....make it into a visual slotted item...put it in the visual slot.then in game it looks like a tuffli instead of an amarie. all that would be needed is to have the ships weapons use the tuffli's nodes for firing and that's it. you could use all kinds of other ships ..keep em by faction of course and so on. It allows much more appearance diversity yet gameplay would be unaffected. It would also allow them(you guys) to make totally new looks for sale on the store. Heck id throw my money at you to be able to do that. Id love to be able to make my toons(who are all merchant and trader captains) ships look like freighters and such(they would be Q-ships actually).
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But then what would be the point for the art on all the other ships?
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
But there would still be the questions of acquisition and usage and I doubt we'd be able to find a way that works for the players withouth charging them an arm and a leg but still leaves cryptic some money.
Essentially, let's say that you absolutely love the visual appearance of the Tier 2 cruiser. You want to fly this same ship as you level up, upgrading it as you earned access to the new tiers. You could upgrade the core of the ship - it's hit points, stat bonuses, weapon, console, and BOFF slots, which allowed you to do just that, in a way that is very close to canon. We see hero ships on the shows and movies getting upgrades all the time. I even suggested that these upgrade kits could be exclusive to the C-Store. Cryptic still sells Zen, which in turn buys these core upgrades at the same price as current C-Store ship costs, and the players are happy.
Unfortunately, there was a huge amount of player opposition to the idea, almost all of it coming from the PvP crowd. How would they know your ship capabilities and how to instantly counter them, if your ship was able to be modified beyond it's initial capabilities? The same argument was used to get the ability to choose the color of your beam weapons removed. Yes, we actually had that option.
Anyways, there's no way something like this could be implemented now, even though they DID kind of go that way for a minute, with the T5-U system. That's essentially what I was proposing all along. They still could have sold ship costumes for a premium, by including the gimmick consoles they started sticking on C-Store ships. Maybe, some day, when I win the almost $1bil lottery, I can start my own space game, and do it the way I would like to have seen STO done lol.
I've always said PvP ruins everything. But with PvP mostly dead, maybe we can get back our beam color choices.
I'd be against upgrading your T1 ship to Tmax for more in-universe reasons: No matter how much you upgrade a canoe, it can't match a battleship. T1 ships are so tiny, there's no way they can match something with many times it's volume. (ignoring the whole 'its bigger on the inside' we get on temporal ships since obviously a larger temporal ship SHOULD have more magical space than a small temporal ship so ship volume should still matter)