Guild Wars 2’s endgame is very much focused on making your character aesthetically pleasing. Personally, I have always thought it was important to have awesome looking weapons and armor. It’s the reason I stopped playing Final Fantasy XI and started playing WoW, it is also the reason I quit WoW because Blizzard became aware that the mindless herd majority audience would follow no matter what and the gear sets became boring gear sets without particle effects that could barely distinguish the class they belonged to; you could tell Blizzard made no effort for season 4 gear and on. However, WoW did originally have wonderful looking gear. If you’re going to make a player work hard for gear then it should look great, right? Right. Guild Wars 2 does exactly this, it makes a player work for their gear and many sets look very nice with the exception of a few sets such as the Ascalonian Catacombs and Sorrow’s Embrace set. The former looks like vendored white gear and the latter makes a character look like a human furnace. That is just my personal opinion though. Regardless, like many other players, I like to switch up my looks up every now and then. Dyes have helped this a bit but I feel like color changing is not enough. In a game that weighs so heavily upon end-game fashion why do they not have costume slots? I think transmutation stones are a bad concept and arenanet should make a change to how changing your character’s look goes.
ArenaNet could be making WAY more money from the gem store if they offered costumes that were worth buying, because at the moment they aren’t AT ALL! The village clothing slots have not been used by me and by many for the one reason being that you cannot fight while wearing them. Not many people are going to buy aviation goggles, equip them, stand in Lion’s Arch and go “d#%!…. that is some fine aviation.” Instead of doing this GW2 has transmutation stones which I despise. Want to grind for another set of dungeon gear but don’t want to lose your current dungeon sets look? You’re going to have to waste time or money putting together another exotic set from crafting or buying off the trading post. Why do this? You can’t possibly tell me that they are making so much money off of the transmutation stones that they could not go with a costume tab idea, and in all honesty I don’t think they are making that much off of the gem store period. I have yet to see ANY people in gem store clothing. Of course there are some I am sure, but from other free to play game experience it is not nearly what it could or should be. I believe it would meliorate their financial gain from the gem store to create more costumes and allow people to fight while wearing them via a costume slot tab. If they made the village clothing tab a “costume tab” that would display the skins of whatever item was in each slot but not give the player any of the statistics I think the community would be a lot happier. This would make it so players could even wear a dungeon set just for looks without having to waste those hard earned tokens to turn that lovely set of gears into skins on another item. A long term problem I see is that people may have so many gear sets they may lose track of what set has what skin because I believe a transmuted item does not display the name of the skin that has been transmuted onto it. There may be people that disagree with this option for one reason or another but I truely believe this is the best way to go about skins, and I don’t find the argument that arenanet would lose money from the loss of transmutation stones alone since most people buying gems are doing so with silver because there is a high lack of impulse items to buy off of the gem store.
I’d like to see if other people like this idea, and with enough support it may be able to be implimented in the game and we can say goodbye transmutation stones.
(edited by Moderator)