Devs, Please Consider Official Skinpacks like RoF

[SharpeXB]

For Rise of Flight, 777 provides Skinpacks as the method of distributing developer and community made skins in an official way. They are distributed with every update or new aircraft that's added. There are three categories; Official, Community Fantasy and Community Historical. These are then not considered Mods and are allowed on the Mods-off servers. This creates a larger selection than the developer could provide alone and also insures that skins are reviewed to prevent cheats ie invisible skins. For the players, the benefit of this system is that everyone can quickly and easily obtain a huge number of skins with a simple install.

The lack of such a system in BoS makes the obtaining of skins for the players too laborious. There are already over a hundred skins for some planes and downloading them all individually is very time consuming. Then there is the time required to constantly update your library. And the custom made skins cannot be used on non-ranked servers.

There are only 10 planes in the game now but with the upcoming BoM this number will double and of course we all hope for even more expansions in the future. Therefore the lack of a skin system will make skinning your planes unworkable.

I'm assuming a reason that BoS avoided having Official Developer skin packs is the "Historical Decal" issue with the Luftwaffe skins. This issue could easily be addressed with a separate "Uncensored Luftwaffe" pack which includes a User Agreement checkbox that states the user agrees to be in compliance with local laws etc. Since skins in the game can only be seen by a player who installs them on their own machine, nobody is forced to see a skin they if don't choose to.

I hope 1CGS could consider such a system for BoS and future titles.

Edited February 15, 2015 by SharpeXB

[=EXPEND=Tripwire]

+1

[Bearcat]

I hope not.. What they need to do is have a system where the default skin is assigned by map.. so on a winter map the default skin will be a white skin.. on a summer map the default skin will be a green skin.. or whatever the map is moving forward.. and make the default skins unavailable so they could not be tampered with .. This would eliminate some of the issues on ranked servers as well and make it so that if you had to use the default skin because the server did not have your skin the default would be appropriate to the map..

[SharpeXB]

Look at it this way. There are 39 aircraft in RoF which results in an uncountable number of skins available. I think my hard drive has over 16GB of them. It's just exceedingly difficult for players to hunt for them on the forum and download them individually.

Skinpacks don't prevent unofficial skins from being used mods-on but I think the vast majority of them are obtained in the provided packs anyways.

For the skin makers it must be nice for them to know that their work ends up in the game rather than lost on forum threads.

[SharpeXB]

Here's a good example. The Albatros D.Va has 478 skins for it when you've downloaded all the packs. The Fokker D VII has 212. Without the Skinpacks it would be nearly impossible for a player to download all these.

The lack of a system in BoS will make in just as impossible for players to get the skins and new skin makers will get their work lost at the bottom of a 400 page forum thread.

Add to this advantage that all 478 skins for the Albatos will likely appear on any server you're playing on since every player has easy access to them.