They're going to be dropped into your redemption queue, so you can then redeem them and sell them?

If I do that, the only thing I can conclude is CCP/Aurum moneygrab.

I should probably state that I happen to have a few of these, and while it might appear that I'm trying to milk their worth, I'm really not. As you said, there are tons floating around; they're far from rare. It just sticks out like a sore thumb when ONLY these are temporary, and seem to contradict the whole concept of having a skinnable options in the first place.

Maybe a better question would be: what is CCP wanting to avoid if these were to become permanent?

I still wonder if it would not have been better to keep the skins around their old price but instead of making them unlock on account, they are like modules which you slot into a new slot on the ship.
You could have exchanged the skins on that compatible ship as you would have seen fit, so you could either risk them or not, by leaving the skin in station.

This would have cleared up the market as well but still kept the skins in the category of "destructible item" like anything else in Eve... okay, except the golden pod.

I'm still debating which way would have been better. Spending much more money on a permanent skin, or paying less money for a possible destruction.

But wait... what... if BOTH could be done? You know, options are awesome?
Maybe food for thought for future updates c:

Though they didn't exactly implement an "easy to use" test system, as you had to un-rig your ship in order to apply the skin... and I don't know many people that went so far to do that, or to buy a completely secondary ship and put a 2nd set of rigs on it.

So their test use case data was flawed to begin with. And then they went a completely different direction...

The moneygrab is in essentially gutting the allure from the "common" BC/dessy ship skins because they'll be temporary, to the much more fascinating (also, rare as hell now, rare as hell in the foreseeable future) Aurum-provided perma-skins.

Except in most cases with the common skins they were only a few million at most, so losing a Nug Merlin was just another Merlin. Now on the other hand you can spend more than you would to PLEX your account for an entire month. In addition to creating an unsustainable market condition in which you have increasingly smaller target audience.

Having the SKIN as a rig or module slot would keep the market sustainable. And if they went with a module slot option (or even a specialized SKIN slot) then you would be able to remove it or exchange it for a different one, so the risk of loss wouldn't be as heavy.

This is where we have vastly different conclusions then. I, for one, would never buy a skin that is temporary, and thus it becomes entirely worthless, at least to me.

Also, why are we assuming that the skins will make ships more valuable to kill or lose?

You won't be able to BUY the ships with skins on them, there is no LOSS of the skin when the ship dies, and (outside of color scheme) there is no difference between, say, a Quafe Tristan and a Standard Tristan. There will be a rarity factor, sure, but it won't show up in the final value of the ship.

And who's to say these things will show up on killmails in the first place? EDIT: Forgot it was in the dev blog. The skins won't show on killmails initially, but it'll be added later.

Let's take a Sebiestor Hurricane as an example. Under the new system, after I buy the skin, I will buy a regular run of the mill Hurricane and apply the skin to it. When I leave the ship, it goes back to being a regular run of the mill Hurricane until I get back in it. If someone manages to kill me, I'll just go buy another regular run of the mill Hurricane as that's all I've lost. I haven't actually lost the Sebiestor Hurricane. Further, there will be no way for me to buy a "Sebiestor Hurricane" on the market, so there's no way to assess the value of that ship versus the value of the run of the mill Hurricane.

So there's no actual value added to the ship. There's no market to determine the value from. I don't see why there would be added value reflected in kills or losses of skinned ships.

Please tell us how to acquire Aurum without paying money GÇô I'm sure that I can't be the only one who would dearly like to know.

The main reason that isn't the case so far is that we have only released SKIN licenses that correspond to existing faction/ship combinations that have been validated by our QA folks.

Internally, the Space Object Factory engine can build a renderable ship with any combination of factions/materials and ship type. However, because certain combinations may not match up properly (one example is if a faction or material combination assumes the underlying ship has two material types and the actual ship in question has three) it's possible to get a ship out the other end that looks like a mistake has been made, or has undesirable combinations of original and skinned materials.

It is, however, possible that at some point there could be SKIN licenses that are designed and intended to look good on all ships. CCP Terminus would know more about whether there are concrete plans in that area.