Guild Wars 2

Can we get an option or make it a feature where if we dye our glider, the same backpack gets that color as well.
I’m really having an issue with the Shining Blade Backpack since it doesn’t fit any of my characters (color-wise) but it’s a very cool back backpack.

From what they’ve said previously, dying backpacks won’t be an option.

Tidgepot.3285:

Substance E.

[Citation Needed]
Back items also take damage like armor and thus are not the same thing as accessories or weapons. They never got dye channels likely for the same reason that we only had the guild backpack at launch, it was never finished.
Backpacks will remain un-dyable so Anet can sell black and white wing sets. Plain and simple.

If you need citation, then look no further. I’m the dev who concepted this glider! Granted, I’m an artist so I couldn’t give you the full technical rundown like Josh Petrie, but I do handle our engine daily.

Whether or not the equipment takes damage or not has no bearing on how the engine separates items. The engine sees armor as what is called a composite, it sees things attached to your characters like weapons and backpieces as items, and it sees gliders as a sort of middleground item/effect. Our file structure separates gliders as items, but because of how they pop into view, layer, and more easily allow for dyes it makes sense to basically treat them as effects. Now I’m not positive on this, but I’m going to hazard a guess that if we decided to make gliders as items, we’d have to retroactively alter the system in a way that would allow for weapons/backpieces to be dyed.

On its face doing this sounds like a great idea, since this is what fans want. As a fellow player I’d like this as well, but unfortunately our systems were not designed with this in mind. Not only would we have to go back and code each item so it can have dye channels/sufficient UI and prepare for the veritable bugfest that would ensue from altering a system that has years of work built on top of it, but we’d also have to retexture these items. Why? Our dye system is balanced around a red base color which has an impact on how every other color will appear when a channel shifts to it. Anyone who has played with dodging/burning in photoshop will know that red has some strange properties when it comes to shifts in values. Many dyes would have blown out/dull/oddly saturated textures as a result.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s SO much more to the process that I don’t have a firm grasp on.

The devs here are gamers and we love what we do. We want fans to get excited about what we make because we’re fans, too. However, we have players clamoring for every fix/feature under the sun so we have to do a ton of prioritizing. Game development is never plain and simple.

Edit: Thanks Aikawa! I designed it but Chelsea M. modeled it. She’s a rockstar!

I do understand the problem… But I got so frustraited when I bought the Pact glider set ( I think it was) when I previewed the glider and could colour it but then the backpack was uncolourable… I do not mind the yellow blue theme but I had to change the colour scheme of my character instead of changing the colour of my backpack. Also the initial colours of the glider do not match the colour of the backpack, I was lucky for I have almost all colours but I feel sorry for those who don’t.

High priority or not, I do hope they atleast make backpacks dyeable in the future.

I’d love to be able to dye the glass on the Magister’s Pack a different colour.

The green glass is nice, but often doesn’t fit the armour colour scheme so I either have to hide it or dye the armour to match it…