SKIN Scarcity and Rotating Stock

The now standard turnover of items carries on in the New Eden Store, the in-came cash shop in EVE Online.  We got notice of a new set of SKINs, the Octopus Orange Flight SKINs for some Caldari hulls.

Octopus Orange SKIN on a Raven

Not a bad SKIN if you like bright colors.  A pity that the meta in null sec is mostly about armor tanked ships, so I don’t fly Caldari ships that much these days.  Plus I might have enough SKINs for Caldari already.  Either way I won’t be rushing out to grab any of these SKINs just yet.

Actually, there is another reason I won’t be rushing to buy them.  They’ll eventually be removed from the store and put on sale when that is announced, as happened to a bunch of SKINs as part of teh Octopus Orange Flight announcement.

On the news item, after the list of hulls for the new SKIN, there is a long list of SKINs that will be leaving the New Eden Store.  The Valkyrie set will be going, along with the EoM sets for Amarr ships, the remaining Ruby Sungazer SKINs, the Kopis Edge SKINs for Gallente hulls, and a few others.

I’ll actually miss the Kopis Edge SKINs.  On Gallente hulls it is probably the best looking set of SKINs after the Quafe set.  I picked up a couple of those on sale for hulls I might fly some day, though for some reason the Oneiros isn’t on the list though the Exequror, which shares the same basic hull, is available.  But I have the Oneiros version already… though now I can’t recall where I got it.  Was it an EVE Vegas give away?

Kopis Edge Oneiros undocking with a fleet

Anyway, this the the natural order of things in the New Eden Store. Like most online shopping interfaces, it isn’t made better by having more pages of products to scroll through.  CCP weeds out old items as it adds new ones.  This also lets them play the scarcity card, encouraging players to buy things they might want before they disappear, either for their own use or for speculation.

This has turned into an issue for the Reavers.  While we don’t have a required ship SKIN (though there was a push to get people into the CCP Blaze Ishtar SKIN, which you can see in the background of the screen shot above) we do have an official jacket.  The idea is that when we blow something up the kill mail will have a list of participants wearing the same jacket in front of the same background and in the same pose.

Almost the same pose…

However, in a previous purge our jacket, the Interbus Marshall model, disappeared from the store.  I think it was purged back in March when I had RL issues on my mind, because if I had noticed I would have bought a few to have around for new members.

So now we’re in a bit of a lurch on that front.  It is a bit like real life where, any time I buy something and end up liking it I wonder if I should go buy another because by the time I need another the item will have been discontinued and have disappeared.  This seems especially to be the case with shoes.  Oh well.

At least things that get retired from a virtual store front can be brought back I suppose… eventually.