I believe RMT fluff items help a game.  First they allow the company to get more money.  If someone wants to pay more for something that has no effect it supports the game I'm playing without affecting me.  Second it tends to prevent cancellation.  It's more investment which makes canceling harder.

For the "monocle aristocraty" you describe to exist it requires the active participation of those without monocles.  They only way the "monocle aristocraty" can exist is if those without acknowledge it.  If you /ignore or mock them then there is no "monocle aristocraty."

I do agree that player created fluff is a great idea and every game should have it.  I see a place for both.

I believe the robot paint should be player made a should be reasonably expensive. The tokens to apply the paint should be a very small fee $1 and should be gift-able codes like subscription codes are.

You don't feel equal if your bot isn't pink?

How do you sleep at night knowing that I walk around in a heavy mech and you can't for a month?

I think we both see where this is going -- but I hope we can both agree that vanity items are nothing to worry about...who cares... if you feel you need a pink robot for $1 dollar... you buy a pink robot for $1 dollar....

These same concepts hold true in real life... however in real life, money can also buy power... as stated in perpetuum this will not be the case.

We both share the same views, really.

But allow me to push things a bit. In a MMO, a social game, power is not only about money or weapons. It can also be about gangs, influence, and... appearance. Like, being seen in a big battlemech just isn't the same as to be seen in a small bot huh ?

How you look is part of what's making the game exciting for many. Even those who wont admit it.

After all, everyone takes time to make his own avatar. Wouldn't it be nice if there was the same option for your mech ? If everyone could make his mech looks "unique" ? Wouldnt you use the option yourself if it was a part of the game ?

In that point of view, RMT for paint could be seen as a "cheat", because it's not as futile as it sounds.

I conceed this reasonning is extreme, but you get my point.

What's happening in EVE has to be taken in context.  It's not just the monocle.  CCP has skipped (for years) on 'Midas' the indie expansion, the boot.ini fiasco, the 18 months quote (still has 6 months to run btw), a series of bad and broken expansions, the "no MT in EVE" from 12 months ago and so on.  It's all been simmering on the promise that Incarna will be the one true expansion we've waited for and fix a load of low hanging fruit in the process.  If Incarna had been anywhere near as good as the tech demo's shown all those years ago were then a lot of this wouldn't of been a major problem for the game.  It could have been spinned as a secret indie expansion because hey: player created content's got to be built right?

Keep in mind the majority of EVE's players have nothing to do with the forums, Singularity or Duality and took no part in sucsessive CSM elections. Most don't even have Local and Corp chats visible (and thanks to the 11% NPC corp tax they're now in one-man-bands being utterly single player, thanks CCP derp). The first they knew of Aurum, cash shop & Incarna = Minmatar only CQ was patching and comming face to face with it on release day. 

At which point they then went to the forums to start digging, found the CSM votes that were ignored and such, did the math on how much stuff in cash shop really was then exploded along with the general population.  It's the first time I can remember the eve-o forums actually lagging badly and doing so for two days solid.

You mean like the official CCP Trinity demo that had an Iteron with Red Alliance's logo on it's nose?  About erm... 4 farking years give or take.

Then again, why the RMT ? Why such an option wouldn't be implemented as part of the game, as well as other gameplay features ?

I dont get it.

It's also in the dev's interest to avoid RMT completly. Especially since the game is a sandbox.

Let me explain quickly :

--> Add a feature that allow the players to personnalize the mechs
--> all the community enjoys it freely
--> the community experiment the feature, share skins, etc...
--> the community attract other players and grows
--> more subscription for the devs

Look at the perfect sandbox example : Minecraft. No RMT whatsoever, more and more free features, HUGE community, and not even a subscription to pay !
I know the difference with a MMO such as PO, but you get my point : a sandbox needs futile features such as "personalize your skin" to live.

If you sell the option, ok there is a quick cash-flow. But the truth is : there is no gain in the long term and it frustrates the 80% gamers who wont pay for the feature.

The only reason it should frustrate any of the gamers who wont pay for the optional feature, is if it became game-changing.  a Non vanity item such as changing your mech color is of no importance to the game, other than for pure vanity and asthetic value to the player behind the mech.

What it does do, is it gives that player behind the pink/blue/green/gold/chartreuse mech a little individualism which helps to further their own immersion into the game.  And as I stated before, the few (maybe 20% of the perp population right now) who would pay for the vanity colors helps increase the cash-flow for the company which helps them to expand both the functionality of the client as well as upgrading servers to a more robust server.

So where we are paying 9.95 a month to play this game, having a few MT items for colors or other vanity items (even a monocle for your mech)-- especially where-in the dev's here has described the difference of MT being that you will have to interract with the game in order to utilize the MT -- isn't necessarily a bad thing that people portray MT's to be but in the grand scheme of things even if the game company only makes say 500 USD per month of their MT's (or 93,614 HUF - being as PERP is based in hungary) that is quite a lot of $$$ for them to put right back into the game to make it better, and even helps to create more jobs in hungary for further dev's which in-turn makes the game better. 

So MT's make the game better any way you look at it, as long as it remains a vanity-item shop.

But to be against MT even vanity-item only MT's just for the sake of being against it is also a flawed thought process.  While I see both the down-sides and the upsides to MT's, I have not chosen to purchase any cash items as of yet in any game that had MT's.  That is not to say that I wouldnt in the future.

But to even have a community, each individual player has to be immersed in the game on their own personal level and if it takes having a pink mech than bring it on.

I'd rather have someone next to me fighting in a pink mech who is immersed in the game both as an individual and as part of the community whole than someone who is just going through the motions because its what they learned to do.

Yeah and I haven't read anything about 'custom skins' being able to be made via MT or anything like that though a few people have suggested it.  But like you've pointed out here that could open up the game for a few exploits and nastry-grams.  On top of that with all us eve players coming over here, if there was a custom skin generation option, you know it would be an eve player to figure out how to use it to his advantage first -- that is afterall what we were groomed to do in eve's pvp scene..  build it, buy-it, expose it, and prevail.

All that I have seen that they have planned in MT here, is the ability to change the mech colors (solid colors only i believe -- although a metallic pink or pearl blue would be nice)...

Yeah corp logo's on bots I'd imagine could be a fairly difficult task to complete.  Unless of course they utilize the same type of numbering system that eve does where all images are issued a number and in the database it makes a call to the proper image based on that number to display....

Now tagging an enemy before you kill them, i'd like to hear more about this proposed feature of yours.  I am intrigued and you have me on the line