Guild Wars 2

It is actually really simple: Unlocks and usability.

In GW1 I could buy a costume set, which was then unlocked for the entire account, allowing infinite free respawns. I could have my entire account in Halloween clothes for Halloween without having to pay extra or sacrifice precious storage space to store the outfits ’till next year. This elicited the “gotta catch them all” response for me, and thus I bought all the costumes, even the ones I never even used, just to have them available. In GW2 on the other had, I have to weigh each purchase on a (literal) gold scale; only buying items I really want and that I deem worthy of the storage space they consume (which is at a premium already). No more buying items just in case, or for a bit of temporary holiday fun. And to the surprise of no one, I have yet to buy a single costume item.

Usability is of course the fact that so many of the items are only allowed as town clothes. Now I understand that it became a bit silly in GW1 with people running around in DoA in top hats and evening gowns (even though the line is blurry to some of the actual armor sets… :P), but I would still like to use my sunglasses everywhere, not only in town. If at least there was a way to set it so that town clothes were automatically loaded when entering a town it would be immensely better. But as is one has to make a conscious choice to activate town clothes every single time entering a town. So people just don’t bother (surprise!). Then of course the question becomes, why buy it in the first place?

The same basic principle of not offering items in a format most convenient and enticing for the customer (another example is random dyes only, not even sorted on hue apart from green and orange) goes for a lot of the GW2 Gem Store items, but where ANet really lost the money on me was the costumes.

And… where does your information pre-release on the costumes come from? I understand your issues, but there is no real validity to your complaints until the 22nd rolls around if you’re specifically talking about Halloween costumes. Primarily because none of us know how they work.

Also, you can wear town clothes outside of town, they just revert if you take damage or go in to the water.

Erm… we got loads of costumes already. Pirate outfit, Cook’s outfit, Sunglasses etc. At least these are costumes to me. Non-stat things that you can wear just for fun. And they do not work as non-storage-hogging unlocks for the account, which was my complaint.

Also, being able to wear town clothes until the very second you take damage is hardly the same as being able to wear them all the time. But as as I said, this is not the main reason why they are not really convenient, and thus not as enticing as they could be.

I don’t mind Soulbound costumes. Its the 1 use only that discourages me from buying.

I would NEVER purchase a one use skin from the blt.
I would however purchase an account bound
Frankly if you buy an item from the trader it should be locked to your account for re-use and reclaiming.
Warhammer had account bound items like this, you could toss them and just reclaim anytime you wanted.

Absolutely!
I loved their system in guild wars and bought many costumes.
I would do that in gw2 too, if they were:
- reasonable priced (for me < 10€ per costume)
- account-bound ->unlocked for all characters on my account
- can be acquired unlimited times from a Costume maker and has no additional cost -> will not use storage
- can be displayed in fights

Well, exactly like it worked it gw: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Costumes

I am not sure what to do with these “armor skins”..
I am quite sad that they made it just usable for one of your characters (and in that case I think they are way too overpriced).

Costumes are indeed set-up pathetically in GW2. Especially the soulbound part annoys me. Feels like a total greedy sleezy trick that Anet is pulling. A ton of games have costumes that are unlocked for an entire account, and you can access a specific seperate wardrobe to wear the different skins. So you don’t waste precious storage space on it. I have a lot of games that I do no play anymore, where my wardrobe is still bulking from the amount of sets in there. I don’t own anything here, and not planning to until I can use said skins also in the open world while fighting. Towns clothes as it is implemented now was a terrible idea.

They are account bound. I just purchased, equipped and dyed the witch outfit and had no trouble equipping it on an alt afterwards.

Yeah, but afterwards.. for me it’s just not enough. ^^

what?

10chars

The OP is right – relying on limited bank space to store costumes is bad. I bought the Mad King’s outfit (account bound, fyi) and was considering the Witch’s costume. But, I then realized that I would have to store unused town clothes in my bank. I don’t mind buying bank expansions – I already have. But, I do mind needing bank space for town clothes. Also, since they don’t auto-display in towns and they auto-hide on damage, they’re a pain to manage.

I also would love to see account unlocked costumes like GW1, i have all GW1 costumes
I wount be buying a single GW2 costume, now or ever, as is.
But also nobody i know would buy them (in the UK) in the current state also.

I would be intrested to see if peoples views on this are affected by country.
Is a willingness to pay for them as a single use item rather then a reclaimable unlock an american thing?

Funny, just had this conversation with hubby last night in deciding how to best spend time/resources for the holiday. I agree that costumes are not worth the investment with current functionality.

The biggest issue to me is use. There is no wardobe page. Costume doesn’t let you use your real stats when out in the world. Thus, the name; Town Clothes. I understand this is working as intended. I understand that transmutation is very powerful, and I transmute much of my armor/weapons (on all 5 characters, so I spend a lot on transmutation stones).

But if I can’t use the costumes anywhere but in towns, then there is little incentive for me to use them. I don’t want to transmute holiday costumes; I just want to display them. For me to invest in a costume, I would outrun a centaur as a witch and mine candy corn in it!

stpetemermaid.5947:

I don’t mind so much that they are soulbound. I have seen it done both ways; soulbound and account bound. Of course, prefer account bound.
I don’t mind so much having to store them, although space is an issue, and I would only get the costumes I really really wanted.

For like the fifth time in this thread, they are account bound.

I wish there was a locker for the costumes. I love both halloween costumes but won’t purchase because it’s pretty expensive for one character to use and sadly… not worth it to me as “social” clothing only.

Maybe if they had an option to “poof, change into my town clothes when not in combat” automatically or something, but I’m not going to switch outfits constantly just to enjoy what I bought.

Adding a town clothes collection tab would be excellent.

Thank you, Awesome.6120. I have edited my post.

The only complaint I have is that Town Clothes are only used in, well towns. In Guild Wars 1 there was a costume slot, and you could equip those, and use those outside towns. You could do dungeons, missios and whatnot in those costumes.

But in Guild Wars 2, there is no reason to use the Town Clothes at all, except for brawling.

I think the transmutation stones was a huge step back from Original Guild Wars which had costume slots, with Guild Wars 2 being even more heavy based on costumes and looks.

But that is, of course, ArenaNet needs to make money somehow. But still, they could earn money by making what they do best, costumes. Their costumes looks awesome, fun and creative, but it’s sad that they can’t be used like in Original Guild Wars, and that there are no costume slots.

And of course, I miss the Costume Makers, I really dislike that they have to take bag or bank space, the costumes you buy now.

I think that was more than ‘’the only complaint I have.’’

Also one other thing that may or may not be intended: If you dye the town clothes on one character and transfer them to another the dye choices are retained even if the second character doesn’t have those dyes unlocked.

You can use the armour skins as many times as you want, you just need to get more transmutation stones.

However, I do agree that:

• Level 80 transmutation stones should be reliably obtainable in-game – at least enough to transmute one full set for one character once (ex., include them in the map completion reward for the 3 Orr zones).

• It’s annoying to not be able to transfer the armour skins to other characters.

• Several items are overpriced. I would sooner buy three hats for 75 gems each than one hat for 200 gems.

• The current town clothes system is very primitive. There is no way to automatically change into town clothes when you enter a town (having that, and enabling it by default, would immediately double Arena Net’s town outfit sales), there is no way to mix town clothes and armour, and taking even a little bit of falling damage while in town pops you back into your non-town-clothes. You can’t even assign a key to “equip down clothes”.

• Some of the town clothes items (ex., aviator helmet) should really be armour skins (it’s a leather helmet, perfect for engineers, why not let me wear it with the rest of my leather armour…?).

How to fix the issues of town clothes and costumes. Some have already mentioned the solution.

1. Create a section in the Collectibles section of the bank for each costume where it is automatically placed upon purchase. Just like mini pets are placed. This way, they do not use up bank or inventory space and are easily accessible by all characters on the players account.

2. Add a game option to allow a player to toggle whether they want to ‘show town clothes when in a city’. This way. When a player enters any of the 6 cities, their town clothes automatically appear for all to see.

3. Don’t make town clothes disappear when engaged in combat when in a city. Or, change the system, so you revert back to town clothes once the combat has ended.

If these functions were added to the game, then town clothes would be much more viable, both to show off to other players, but more importantly, much more viable to purchase, as we wouldn’t need to manually swap or keep them in our bags at all time, wasting valuable bag space.

Oh got confused (most likely I got corrected somewhere in the thread?)

I meant “armor skins” I don’t buy armor skins because they are 1 use only, after that its trans stones, which is fine for your “final” look but for gemshop armor skins… would prefer something akin to GW1 system so I can switch around without the cumbersome system of trans stones (again only for gem shop skins for regular armor the trans stones are fine)

I’m fine with how costumes are… got 2 already… would be awesome if Anet make a collectible tab for costumes… I already have max bank tabs and have no space for more stuff.. had to destroy part of my towns clothes = / so stopped at two costumes.

So my suggestions Mr. Smalling: if possible consider

1. – Armor skins to work like HoM rewards or better yet just as a “layer” over regular armor that could be turn on/off… would buy those skins in a heartbeat, pretty sure many will.

2.- And consider a costumes collectible tab! it will probably spark a “collect them all” fever that will improve sales and will not punish those who buy them with $$$ and lose inventory space.

Thanks!

It’s the Transmutation Stones that are the problem: they’re single-use and only paid-for (or otherwise extremely scarce).

If switching out skins for weapons and armors was done in the same way the Dye system works – oh look at that, we did figure out this permanent-ownership system for Dyes already, compared to how its implemented in other games, didn’t we? – then there would be no problem with selling skins. Instead of selling Transmutation Stones, that is.

Personally… I know I’m compulsory buying up tons and tons of dyes to experiment with (if you offered Celestial dye on Gem Store, I’d buy it!), because I know they’re my property: they don’t go away. Likewise with bank or inventory expansion: it stays once you get it. On the other hand, I’ve hunted down a total of one armor skin set, and then realized I can’t even equip it without forking over 10$ or tons of game-time, so that’s the end of that adventure for now. It’s not even such a high cost, but just to re-skin your character once? That’s no good.

Making the armor looks as permanent as dyes would handily solve that issue. Of course, you want to earn money from all those Transmutation Stones, but it’s just an unpleasant, heavy-handed approach to monetization in that sense. How about having unlockable “Cosmetic” armor slots (for gems) instead?

I am not interested in buying the GW2 costumes for a simple reason – they look silly. I’m not interested in “cute” or “funny” items like rabbit ears, sunglasses, boxing gloves; even the witch outfit is trying to be funny. I don’t care for this kind of thing.

In GW1, I bought all the “serious” outfits – most of the costumes of the Gods, the Shining Blade outfit, and so on. I would love to be able to give my characters better looking town clothes that were actually suited to characters in the world – a noble city outfit for my human noble, something other than a half naked piece of clothing for my female sylvari, and so on.

With store skins, only one use and only one character is a complete and utter waste of money. I’d feel rather stupid if I’d waste my money like that.

When I buy digital in a game I look for usefulness and/or fair price. First thing I did with gems was to get full bank storage. I’m not getting character storage because that isn’t refunded if a char is deleted. Don’t think that’s fair.

Don’t buy dyes since they’re purely cosmetic and therefore a waste of real hard-earned money.

Don’t buy mini pets because they serve no useful purpose. Mounts on the other hand…

Also, the introduction of gambling by way of black lion chests is going too far. That’s a cheap way to add revenue as the house always wins. Not only that but the keys are expensive. Makes me wonder what kind of (gullible) consumer Anet is aiming for.

I absolutely agree. I own every single costume in GW1 – I bought them all on the first day. In GW2 I haven’t bothered to buy a single one despite being able to do it for free this time. Why? Because I am not paying a large sum of money for a soul bound item which can’t be deleted and can’t be used on multiple characters. In 250 years Tyria went backwards when it comes to costume design. No repeatable permanent storage and having to purchase them on each character – I can easily say no to these costumes even if they are limited time only for this Halloween.

I also find it amusing you got a costume bundle in GW1 but no such thing appears to be in GW2. The gem store is really bad at offering value for money.

What really annoys me is the fact that they SHOULD work just like the HoM items. You go to someone, pick up a copy of the item you bought, and apply it to whatever you want.

Also, ANet, honestly. STOP. WITH. TOWN. CLOTHING. Let us wear these in combat. It’ll make the game about 10% more fun.

Remember that there are 2 different things in GW2.

COSTUMES = Towns clothes (boxer, pirate, mad king, etc)
ARMOR SKINS = Regular armor skins (Krytan, Primeval and Profane skins)

COSTUMES are multi use, account bound you only buy them once, and all your toons can equip/unequip them any time they want.

ARMOR SKINS can only be applied once, after that you need trans stones and fine trans stones to keep using them on different armor pieces.

Costumes in GW1 served both in battle and in town. The “funny” outfits in GW2 are meant for lighthearted fun in town. Armor skins are meant for battle.

Both costumes and armor skins would be much better working like HOM skins and being able to reclaim them as many times as wanted
…….but also…………..if you lose/destroy your original town cloths, you cant get them back eather……..surely that needs a fix too

The account bound argument doesn’t realy work because you still need to keep your costume somewhere and goto effort to move it between chars but more importantly, if you lose it you cant get it back. If i lose costume on gw1 i just went and picked up another, knowing that i didn’t have to worry about losing what i had payed for

I like that they have added skills to costumes but i would still have to agree that id rather be able to wear costumes in combat like gw1 too………or at least have a key to quick swap/have auto swap out of combat option

I was a bit confused on what town clothes were at first. But when i saw that some of them had abilities and then that you can “brawl” with other people, it got kinda awesome in it’s own way.

However what i really don’t like, and i can see that we have transmutation stones, is the appearance of the character system. Its always transmuting time after time after time. transmutation stones aren’t hard to get, but they DO make things unnecessarily complicated. Not to mention, i know a few people that screwed up their transmutations and got either the wrong look, or the wrong stats.
My suggestion would be to have what other million games have, the armor tab and the appearance tab. Having to equip all 1-6 costume pieces one at a time is a bit stupid considering the age we live in. In games like Rift you can set 5 difference sets of appearance and swap them with a click of a button.

I also do agree with the idea of costumes being available for the whole account, it just makes much more sense considering it comes from GW1. And as someone who likes to spend money quite often on GW2, it would probably make me invest more to buy multiple costumes instead of just 1 per event, per character.

ShadowInTheVoid also has a good idea of these working like HoM skins. I strongly believe that ArenaNet should, and i hope they do, look into suggestions from this thread.

x2 on this whole thread. The whole “one use only” and no dedicated npc/bank slot for these things really rubs me the wrong way.

I really think the solution with the guy from the HOM could work.

ShadowInTheVoid.9183:

The account bound argument doesn’t realy work because you still need to keep your costume somewhere and goto effort to move it between chars but more importantly, if you lose it you cant get it back.

Yeah that is why I made the suggestion (a few posts up) to make a collectible tab for all costumes.

+1 for more gem store armors. Since armors are worn in combat, and the majority of the game happens to be combat, I’m more likely to purchase armor skins than town skins because it’s what I’ll be using most of the time. The gem store GW1 armor skins were a wonderful addition.

+1 for option to enable automatic toggle between armor & town clothes depending on whether or not you’re in combat. I personally would prefer more armor skins, but perhaps if town clothes would automatically appear in between fights (when I’m out of combat) people would get more use out of them and therefore be more likely to purchase them.

+1 for a better interface for dealing with gem store skins. A dedicated bank like the one for mini pets would be ideal, but it would also be an improvement to do something similar to what you did with the HoM rewards. Why? I’ve seen a few guildmates buy things and then misclick during transmutation…or accidentally delete when juggling town clothes outfits…forcing them to repurchase the same skin they already paid for.

I agree, I’m not buying town clothes for a couple of reasons.
I would have to drag them from one character to another all the time if I want to wear them. I can’t see them unless I toggle them on and when I’m in a town (in which I hardly spend any time) and there is no specific ‘wardrobe’ for it.

The current armor skins don’t really tickle my fancy, however even if they did I’d be hesistant to buy them. If I buy such an item I’d like to use it account wide, over all my characters. What if I stop playing that particulair character? Or I find another armor skin I like better for that char? Wasted money then…
If it were something that I could just grab when I feel like it though (with or without the use of transmutation stones) I’d be a lot more likely to buy one or more.

I was about to create pretty much exactly the same topic !

I owned all the costumes in GW1, the mini-missions, etc. Sometimes even on multiple accounts. But I still haven’t bought a single in-game item in GW2 ; the only things I got so far are account related (character slots, and bank tabs)

Consumables ? No thanks, where are the account unlocks ?

The fact they can’t be used in pve combat makes them worthless, a cosmetic based game with a bad cosmetic system meh…

I completely agree with the OP. I bought every single one of the costumes in Guild Wars 1 and I have bought NONE of the costumes in Guild Wars 2. Unless ANet changes to the Guild Wars 1 system or better, I won’t be buying any as they aren’t worth it to me. 1) too restrictive in use. 2) they take up valuable inventory. I never even use the town clothes the chars came with. I’m not in town that much and I completely forget about them. For a person who loved to run around wearing different costumes, changing when I wanted, this is a sign of poor design. Whoever came up with this system doesn’t really know that much about Guild Wars 1 and what motivates people.

The Halloween Witch and Mad King costumes are the only costumes done right ATM. I debated for a while then purchased the Witch outfit with real money.

It was a blast to be able to summon a Cauldron to incite a brawl ANYWHERE. I was afraid I could only use it in big cities but apparently it works even out in the wilderness as long as you are not in combat.

Switching to it was a pain until I assigned a hotkey to it in options. Then now I can hit one key and start riding my broom. Or summon a cauldron.

If other town costumes have variations of this level of functionality I would buy them.

NinjaKnight.1340:

If other town costumes have variations of this level of functionality I would buy them.

They added brawl abilities to the pirate outfit and I believe the chef outfit as well.

I think town clothes should simply be “unlocked” similar to the dye system, instead of being actual pieces of equipment that take up inventory space. And account bound instead of soulbound, of course.

Oh, I would love to spend my money for that! O.o

Anet, please give us a reason to buy them (all). You’ve done it very well with the system in guild wars. In my opinion the money will rain on you, if you upgrade (or downgrade ^^) to your last system from guild wars (or comparable to that)!

Don’t think anyone mentioned this yet, there is one ‘skin collector’ NPC in the game. Anet could reuse his template and give us the same thing as GW1 for items we purchased from the BLTP.

When you fill out parts of the Hall of Monuments in GW1 there is an NPC in the old HoM that will give you infinite skins for the items you earned in GW1. So I can delete these or forget to transmute them on my new stuff and I haven’t lost it, just gotta use the blue HoM transporter orb and get new ones. It’s a beautiful system and should be implemented for the BLTP items.

I bought quite a few of the costumes in GW1 – would be nice if the HoM guy had those too – but I find it difficult to spend money or gold on costumes that require storage space that no matter how many slots you buy will always be in decline due to the nature of MMO’s. The more uptime for the game, the more costumes and costume parts get designed, the smaller my storage would get until the amount of costumes becomes so great that I have to start deleting them for the new stuff.

Pokemon syndrome with a limited storage = sad OCD.

I would buy the hell out of some of that stuff if there was a way to infinitely respawn them so I could switch it up once in a while without having to store them in the really limited storage.

Another hint from me for Anet:
- Dont put pressure on players to buy stuff by creating situations where players feel tricked, just let it go, loosen it a bit and you’ll see, the money comes from all alone.

edit: ps. Ya I know, the Managers again. They want to see money/facts/numbers – but dont let yourself buy for that game. How do I know? Well life will always deny u stuff which u want most. The reward comes when u let go.

Town Cloths really need to have an NPC to prevent accidental deletion of a real money item.

They should as said also be able to be worn over/instead of armor. Just add check boxes to the town cloths window slots. If a box is checked it’s slot overwrites your armor’s appearance for that slot. If it’s not checked then it’s not shown until the town cloth toggle is used.

Do that and many people will buy the town clothing in droves. I too, like the OP bought most every outfit in GW1. Won’t touch them in GW2 with the current user-unfriendly implementation.

I would also like to add that Town Clothes would be better off having a passive swiftness buff to them. The main reason I don’t wear them isn’t because I don’t think they look cool, but that moving around town is a lot faster and enjoyable with your combat armor and weapon skills. Sure I could go get a swiftness buff from one of the npcs, but that only lasts for 5 minutes.

@ awesome
I meant brawl abilities on decent new outfits. All the old outfits are really boring. Who wants to spend so much on a cooks outfit?

But brawl needs some kind of improved incentive to brawl. I put a cauldron out and noone seems interested anymore now the novelty has worn off.

There needs to be a greater incentive than an achievement that is buried. Even some tiny low value prize would make a huge difference.

I thought it was the weapons that had the brawl abilities not the clothes. Like how the regular weapons work.

@plague
Nope, thats what i thought at first. Wasted 30 mins doing absolutely nothing but running around like an idiot in LA. The Pow Bams were coming from other players!

When you switch to a brawl enabled outfit say witch, or drink a tonic you get a whole different skill bar. 2 of which are attack skills. The bought outfits have more abilities but only 2 are attack.