Guild Wars 2

I am throwing an idea out there to see how much the community would like to have something like this, and that is a work shop that would introduce Artist outside of Anet to create Armor for the game and have the community vote on which they would like to see in game. What this would entail is that the Artist would have to be able to do not only the 2d but the 3d work for this to work. It will probably never work but it was an idea taken by Steam CS.go workshop since they have the community do art for there guns, and I understand that the armor idea would be more extreme since there would be more that would have to be put into it.

The pros of this would be more armors maybe, the cons it only would work if the community was up for it and could maintain it to make it grow. It would be one of those things that no other mmo has done.

That would be great.

Anet has stated that making armor is one of the hardest things they do. Consider that there are 3 armor classes and 5 races and male/female, which means 30 versions. Sounds like a lot of work for a “volunteer.”

And you think Anet would make its tools for such available to everyone? Doubtful.

Its just a shot in the dark, but yes to make armor for each weight, light, medium, and heavy would be something of a marathon for one person to do, on top of that you have the races. Then you put on top of that the bounds of which you would have the make the armor set something that would fit in the world is another thing.

This quote may answer your question about whether they’ll have outside people design armor.

Armor and emotes

Regina B

GimmeSylvari

Hi ! Will there ever be any official armor design contests? Like the guild emblem creation, but for a full armor set ?

Also, seeing that the animators do such a great job in GW2, why can’t we get more emotes ? (Could even be a gemstore thing, as long as it’s not a book thingie that we have to take everywhere, but something that unlocks new emote commands instead ?)

Armor is one of the most expensive things in the game to create. Armor is complicated and needs to be created with many considerations in mind, and these considerations may not be easily apparent or describable to fan armor designers. It isn’t a bad idea to run a contest like this, but it’s many orders more involved than other types of contests, which may be a better use of our limited development and marketing resources. We always have to weigh the pros and cons of any type of contest based on our marketing goals.

Resources and priority comes up with animation and emotes as well. Yes, we can technically create new emotes, but they need to be prioritized over other needs. Do new player emotes take priority over animation for creatures in (as an example) the next raid? If game directors believe that this is a good use of our limited resources, then then this would be prioritized and resources would be allocated accordingly. It would be awesome to have new player-character emotes, but we don’t have unlimited animators, and they may have other other priorities that supersede the desire for new emotes.

DeanBB.4268:

Anet has stated that making armor is one of the hardest things they do. Consider that there are 3 armor classes and 5 races and male/female, which means 30 versions. Sounds like a lot of work for a “volunteer.”

And you think Anet would make its tools for such available to everyone? Doubtful.

This is actually the biggest reason why Anet SHOULD do this. If it’s so hard and time-consuming for them, why not have the players do it and save them a ton of time. All they’d have to do is check the finished product.

Think of how many more armors we could get that didn’t clip with everything and represented various styles. And think all those happy Charr players with non-clipping tails.

videoboy.4162:

This is actually the biggest reason why Anet SHOULD do this. If it’s so hard and time-consuming for them, why not have the players do it and save them a ton of time. All they’d have to do is check the finished product.

It turns out that ANet’s also addressed this — it turns out that, at best, players doing concept art don’t save them much time; at worst, it costs them more time. (As a bad analogy, parents don’t always think it’s helpful to have their six year-old kids ‘help’ with painting the walls.)

I still think ANet should spend some of their advertising dollars on funding a few art contests, even if they can’t promise us we’ll see direct versions in the game. I think it would be useful for them to see the sort of stuff the community would like to see.

tl;dr volunteers might not reduce ANet’s workload, but I’d still like to see them make it easier for fans to have some influence over the general direction.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

videoboy.4162:

This is actually the biggest reason why Anet SHOULD do this. If it’s so hard and time-consuming for them, why not have the players do it and save them a ton of time. All they’d have to do is check the finished product.

It turns out that ANet’s also addressed this — it turns out that, at best, players doing concept art don’t save them much time; at worst, it costs them more time. (As a bad analogy, parents don’t always think it’s helpful to have their six year-old kids ‘help’ with painting the walls.)

I still think ANet should spend some of their advertising dollars on funding a few art contests, even if they can’t promise us we’ll see direct versions in the game. I think it would be useful for them to see the sort of stuff the community would like to see.

tl;dr volunteers might not reduce ANet’s workload, but I’d still like to see them make it easier for fans to have some influence over the general direction.

Oh, I misunderstood. I thought the players would actually MAKE the armor, not just design it. I figured if the skilled players made good armor, then ANet would just have to devote time to testing it, instead of more time to design and make it themselves.

videoboy.4162:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

videoboy.4162:

This is actually the biggest reason why Anet SHOULD do this. If it’s so hard and time-consuming for them, why not have the players do it and save them a ton of time. All they’d have to do is check the finished product.

It turns out that ANet’s also addressed this — it turns out that, at best, players doing concept art don’t save them much time; at worst, it costs them more time. (As a bad analogy, parents don’t always think it’s helpful to have their six year-old kids ‘help’ with painting the walls.)

I still think ANet should spend some of their advertising dollars on funding a few art contests, even if they can’t promise us we’ll see direct versions in the game. I think it would be useful for them to see the sort of stuff the community would like to see.

tl;dr volunteers might not reduce ANet’s workload, but I’d still like to see them make it easier for fans to have some influence over the general direction.

Oh, I misunderstood. I thought the players would actually MAKE the armor, not just design it. I figured if the skilled players made good armor, then ANet would just have to devote time to testing it, instead of more time to design and make it themselves.

I don’t see how the players can actually make the armor, unless they have access to all the tools that ANet has and a similar test environment. Anything short of that is going to mean that ANet employees are going to have to go through each asset individually, even before QA takes a look. At that point, they aren’t “volunteers,” but unpaid employees, which aren’t free (they are obviously ‘cheaper’ since they don’t get benefits or salary, but they still have to be trained and supervised).

I’m sure that there are artists out there as skilled (or perhaps more skilled) than some of the ANet artists. That doesn’t mean it’s faster to have them do any prep work.

Opening a mod scene is never bad for games and players, IMO. It could not be so good for developers, though…

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

videoboy.4162:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

videoboy.4162:

This is actually the biggest reason why Anet SHOULD do this. If it’s so hard and time-consuming for them, why not have the players do it and save them a ton of time. All they’d have to do is check the finished product.

It turns out that ANet’s also addressed this — it turns out that, at best, players doing concept art don’t save them much time; at worst, it costs them more time. (As a bad analogy, parents don’t always think it’s helpful to have their six year-old kids ‘help’ with painting the walls.)

I still think ANet should spend some of their advertising dollars on funding a few art contests, even if they can’t promise us we’ll see direct versions in the game. I think it would be useful for them to see the sort of stuff the community would like to see.

tl;dr volunteers might not reduce ANet’s workload, but I’d still like to see them make it easier for fans to have some influence over the general direction.

Oh, I misunderstood. I thought the players would actually MAKE the armor, not just design it. I figured if the skilled players made good armor, then ANet would just have to devote time to testing it, instead of more time to design and make it themselves.

I don’t see how the players can actually make the armor, unless they have access to all the tools that ANet has and a similar test environment. Anything short of that is going to mean that ANet employees are going to have to go through each asset individually, even before QA takes a look. At that point, they aren’t “volunteers,” but unpaid employees, which aren’t free (they are obviously ‘cheaper’ since they don’t get benefits or salary, but they still have to be trained and supervised).

I’m sure that there are artists out there as skilled (or perhaps more skilled) than some of the ANet artists. That doesn’t mean it’s faster to have them do any prep work.

I told you that I misunderstood what was stated. I thought the workshop would be a program kit that allowed players to actually make the armor and submit it to Anet for review/approval.

I figured it would be faster, because the amount of players capable of using/learning to use that type of program would far surpass the amount of actual employees that are assigned to do that type of work for the game.
Compensation could be done in so many ways. It could be as simple as a line of text giving credit to the designer or a set amount of gems per accepted Armor Set. It could also be used as a way for Anet to scout new talent for their official team.
Doing this would also allow Anet to go back to having In-Game and Gem Store armors to increase their profits. Many of the people that complained about Gem Store armor, were complaining because most of the armor was only available in the Gem Store. This way, we’d be getting a pretty steady stream of both, while helping their bottom line.

Flatly, I don’t think it’s possible to do it in a way that would make sense for Anet. The process is more complicated than some people give it credit for. Beyond basic modeling and texturing, there are dye channels, weight painting, and whatever else needs to be done to get it into the engine. They don’t have tools to let players do that all that themselves or test it, and I don’t think it would be practical to write those tools. That’s just to get the tools out there, aside form managing such a program.

Besides the technical question, I have mixed feelings about this more generally. It’s cool for a game to have an “anything goes” modding scene where people can create whatever and use it if they want, or to do a design contest, but that’s different to me than farming out work to volunteers. “See your content in game!” is a pretty cool reward, but it also walks a fine line between celebrating players and using them. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I don’t love it.

Like Fleshie said early on in the thread via dev response, having a community designed armour is very unlikely.

Asking for fan-designed weapons, however…

In GW1 there were two Design a Weapon competitions (https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Design-a-Weapon_ and https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Design-a-Weapon_)

But this event was not about reducing workload for devs, from what I can see. In fact, it probably required a lot more dev time than it would take for them to design a weapon themselves.

You also have to think about A-net’s business model. I would think that by adding very few “exclsuive”-feeling armours in-game since launch, it sort of nudges players towards the gem-store’s selection of armours and aesthetic items. Sure, you could just put the player-made armours in the gem-store but I’d bet that people would be annoyed that non-employees are earning A-net money. I can’t think of a way to put them in-game without causing more problems or requiring more work/dev time…

And other than that I totally agree with what Redenaz said- summarises my thoughts on the matter nicely.

Anet could release the models like overwatch did for the community and then people could start making armours for fun.