Guild Wars 2

Dear ANet,

There is no question that you have some great artists capable of creating some amazing looking pieces of equipment.

However, it has become painfully obvious now that you simply cannot create new skins fast enough to satisfy the community without resorting to hiding even marginally desirable skins behind ridiculous grinds or RNG. For a game like GW2, whose entire endgame is based mostly* around horizontal progression and attaining a particular “look”, this is practically a kiss of death because even players who desire horizontal progression will give up eventually if the progression is perceived to be unreasonably slow, or capped due to the lack of new desirable skins.

The answer to this is to let the community take over the creation of the bulk of your content that is purely aesthetic, i.e. skins. This is really the only feasible way to keep up with user demand in a (mostly) horizontal progression system, and it can work spectacularly for regular players, content creators, and developers alike.

Valve is a pioneer in this field and has had tremendous success implementing user generated content for TF2 and more recently, Dota 2, both of which have horizontal progression as a major focus. For both of theses games, players enjoy an almost endless supply of new skins to work towards acquiring, content creators get recognition and revenue from creating and selling skins, and Valve has a majority of the burden of creating purely aesthetic content taken off their shoulders so that they can focus on refining game mechanics, adding new features, telling new stories, creating some of the more “special” and theme-fitting skins, and planning cool events, all of which, I think most can agree, is a much better use of their time (not to mention they get a majority cut of the skin revenue as well).

TL;DR: Give the community the tools and infrastructure, and we’ll make better skins at a faster pace than any professional team of artists anyone can possibly assemble, as has been proven in other games like Dota 2 and TF2. Players will have an endless supply of great skins to choose from and progress towards. Content Creators get acclaim and income from popular skin creations. And ANet gets a majority share of the revenue from selling skins on the Gem store, and can turn their in-house artists’ focus to creating timed content-related skins and artwork, which is a much better use of their time.

Think about it.

I would love to see user generated skins/armors etc.

I think this would be particularly nice for guild armors/weapons. I’d like to see it that the Guild Leader creates the design.

This could be implemented by have a few different skeleton options for each weapon/armor type, then several texture choices, several cut choices and finally several animation choices. Assuming by several, I mean 4, that’d be 4×4×4x4 or 256 possible combinations for every weapon/armor type

Let’s play “How many skulls, spikes and flames can you put on a greatsword?”!
Don’t need this, and thankfully it won’t happen either…

Zorby.8236:

Let’s play “How many skulls, spikes and flames can you put on a greatsword?”!
Don’t need this, and thankfully it won’t happen either…

lolol thats not true at all. Have you seen some oft he contest winner skins from gw1? they are very very good, and are implemented in the game now. A lot of amateur designers might try to do somethin stereotypical like that, but anet can filter through those.

Epic idea. I think we need a lot more skins. A way to customise our own would be amazing. I would like to see more guaranteed user-suggested content also. Perhaps a monthly competition (or even every two weeks?) would be cool, where players submit their concept art, and 1-3 of them are implemented into GW2 (like the Dragon Bone Staff that EVERYONE loved in GW1, including myself – the white dyed and black dyed ones were the best in my opinion)

I don’t see too many amazing skins right now, in fact that’s why I’m hoping that this changes in time (and in the meantime, wear kitten looking armour that simply has the stats I need/want). What happened to skins like the voltaic spear? Why is that not in GW2? (Well, I think it’s available as a PVP skin from memory, but why not in PVE as well? And why can’t they be dyeable?)

I thought I’d make a quick bump of this thread, seeing as Guild Wars 2 is still stagnating in terms of cosmetics.

In the past few months, we’ve had a handful of new weapon skins and even less armors, with widely varying levels of reception.

In the same period, the Steam workshop for Dota 2 and TF2 have had thousands upon thousands of new submissions, and have no problems sustaining their player bases through 100% horizontal progression.

In the mean time, Everquest Next, a very promising upcoming MMO, has also announced that it will feature a user created content store.

If you weren’t taking this idea seriously before, I’d say it’s time for a reassessment.

“In Team Fortress 2, just to be really clear, the community itself makes ten times as much content as we do. We have people who are making $500,000 a year selling things in the workshop. We can’t compete with our own customers. Our customers have defeated us, not by a little but by a lot. They’re buiding content that’s just as good or better than what we’re building and they’re building it at a spectacular rate.”

-Gabe Newell at the DICE summit.

Deserving of a free bump

This sooo needs to be implemented. And perhaps skins could be unlocked with badges of honor/dungeon tokens/boss kills (and those skins would be from the weapon/armour that boss drops) etc.

I have decided to shamelessly bump this thread yet again in response to the Collaborative Development thread started by Chris.

Please consider taking the concept of Collaborative Development a giant leap further by introducing infrastructure to support Community Created Content.

Here is Legendary GS I made, this can be first one!

I would also really like to see this happen in the GW2. the way I image it is this way, a new Crafting Tab, where you can combine different Weapon/Armor Skeletons together and modify by adding or removing sections of them. for Example, lets say you wonna add another Sword Blade( or 5) to your Greatsword, it will cost another GS blade (or 5) in the Crafting process to make. Different Skeleton can be bought from each of the Racial Cities, Dungeon Tokens, and Gem Store. I believe this will give a huge selection of skins that players will be satisfy with ( well… at least for a while at least)