Guild Wars 2

I understand that outfits were the chosen route in Guild Wars 1 microtransactions, however I’m very fond of the RPG part of MMORPG; customisation is a massive part of my RPG experience and it’s the same for folks I play with (wahey, anecdotal evidence!). The character creation on Guild Wars 2 is fantastic for its real customisation, yet real simplicity. Isn’t it evident that customisation is a huge part of the modern RPG experience? As a contemporary example: Black Desert Online (which I haven’t played, but some folks I know sure don’t shut up about it ) has been really revered for its customisation. Customisation is good. It seems to really sell an RPG. I know it’s what I look for in a game. I even get judgemental about other MMOs that don’t let you create names with spaces in them now. I love to name my toons, because they’re all little characters in my head and that’s how I love it.

I know there have been announcements in the past by the Anet team that they were from this point on going to only exclusively release outfits on the gemstore. I wasn’t pleased about that, but I accepted it; perhaps with the release of HoT we would see a small bounty of extra armour skins. Unfortunately, there weren’t a great deal of armour skins, and they were all far too edgy/particle-effect-y for my own personal preference.

This isn’t gripe about the content delivered with HoT however. This is a discussion about customisation vs costumisation instead!

I’m also not here to tell Anet how to run their game and their huuge team; I’ve heard some vague reasons about why they prefer outfits over armour skins (and I have to say I disagree with my perception of their attitude on the topic).

Instead, what do we prefer, and what do we want to see? More armour skins, or are we satisfied with the release of costumes?

Me, I’m a customisation-man. I want more armour skins. I’m still so chuffed with the Aetherblade armour skins (I have them all) and felt that was THE direction to take the gemstore armour items in. I love to customise; RPGs to me are a sandbox to make your own fun with. I’ve had the game since launch, pre-ordered at the earliest opportunity and aside from 6 months out a year ago, I’ve played this game most days of the week. What’s kept me going is me and my friends being able to make our own fun out of the game and having the custom tools to do that. None of us enjoy having our characters homogenised by outfits and now, after so long, we’re really running out of customisation options we -haven’t- explored and it’s getting stale.

How about yourselves? Customisation or costumisation?

Anet has said before that making armor sets/skins are the most expensive and difficult thing to make, so they just pump out outfits because they are easy.

Anet knows people want armor skins and not outfits, but it’s cheaper for them to do it this way.

Vephar.8475:

Anet has said before that making armor sets/skins are the most expensive and difficult thing to make, so they just pump out outfits because they are easy.

Anet knows people want armor skins and not outfits, but it’s cheaper for them to do it this way.

Absolutely, I understand that. I don’t agree with that ethic however. But, the only way we can challenge the folks who make decisions in the team is to stress the importance of what we’d like to see and open up some discussions on it.

If we assume this wasn’t an issue, and was resolved by having a better system or workflow in place (again, I know nothing about how they run their workflow, so I’m not here to pretend I know better), which would you prefer to see? Costumes or armour skins?

I just want to convert my town clothes to armor skins or, at a minimum, outfit pieces.

Players have stated a greater desire (judging by forum threads) almost weekly for 2 years or so as a pref for armour skins. Anet have said it was something like 10x the time or something (it’s in the Reddit thread for more detail) for armour skins. They recognise players would prefer more armour, but outfits are far, far quicker to make for them.

Doesn’t mean they don’t make the two in tandem, it is just that armour skins take a lot longer to appear, so it feels like they aren’t working on them. They also tend to release either as a batch or with content, which also counts for the delays. Outfits do not suffer from this, since they are gem store only. Armours are (now) in game reward only.

It’s quantity over quality with the outfits.
I’d rather have a few new armor skins get released sometimes, rather than a lot of crappy outfits being released all the time.
Quality>Quantity

Scerun.5834:

Vephar.8475:

Anet has said before that making armor sets/skins are the most expensive and difficult thing to make, so they just pump out outfits because they are easy.

Anet knows people want armor skins and not outfits, but it’s cheaper for them to do it this way.

Absolutely, I understand that. I don’t agree with that ethic however. But, the only way we can challenge the folks who make decisions in the team is to stress the importance of what we’d like to see and open up some discussions on it.

If we assume this wasn’t an issue, and was resolved by having a better system or workflow in place (again, I know nothing about how they run their workflow, so I’m not here to pretend I know better), which would you prefer to see? Costumes or armour skins?

It’s not about workflow, it’s about the sheer amount of work involved. Outfits are all or nothing, they require one set of animations per race, whereas full armor sets have a minimum of 18 pieces, which have to work with every other piece, too.

We can assume that any company can produce 5-15 outfits with the same amount of work it would take to produce a single set of customizable armor.

I have yet to buy any of the gem shop armor sets, because I usually don’t like them enough to buy a full set. I have, however, bought a couple of outfits.

I’m all for “customization over costumization” (great phrase, by the way; really illustrates the difference to the consumer). The problem is: it’s simply more expensive than any of us think.

PS one of the reasons ANet is able to deliver more weapon than armor sets is they decided long ago to make weapons un-dyeable. That makes it affordable to offer 16 new skins as often as every month or three.

I agree with you there Vephar. Fewer, higher quality pieces suits me way better than lots of stuff I won’t but. I’ll also admit to entirely refusing to buy the ones that I -do- think look cool. I haven’t bought ALL the armour skins out there, but I’ve bought most of them, and usually because I just wanted one, single piece from the entire set.

And Anchoku, that would be such a great idea! I was always very disappointed by the way they handled the town clothes, turning them into tonics.

Ramdulf, I’ve heard of the mighty Reddit thread which has received huge respect from the community in many regards. I’m not a Redditer and missed when this was posted, and don’t know where to find it (can’t see it on the GW2 reddit page). Got a link for it? Is there any specific answer to this problem the player base are having with their approach?

@Illconceived

I hadn’t really considered the huge scale of armour dying, but, aren’t the outfits also dyeable? I figured there will be more workload with creating armour skins over outfits, and I’m the liberal sort who thinks both are fine – it’s not either/or for me. It just feels as though armour skins are getting entirely forgotten about. The expansion didn’t do much to remedy the situation, which is what I was bargaining on. I also don’t think that, necessarily, every armour piece has to be work with every other armour piece. There are plenty from the vanilla game that you simply can’t mix due to clipping. I’m alright with that, though. Is part of the territory of such customisation in my eyes!

But I suppose that’s where you and I differ: I have genuinely paid £8 or £9 for an armour set just to use one part of it. I’m even thinking about buying Guild Wars 1 so I can get one single heritage piece. I’m an unabashed, mindless consumer! Though, at those prices, I only pay with cash irregularly and prefer to use gold to buy the rest. Some of these microtransactions aren’t very micro

Scerun.5834:

@Illconceived

I hadn’t really considered the huge scale of armour dying, but, aren’t the outfits also dyeable? I figured there will be more workload with creating armour skins over outfits, and I’m the liberal sort who thinks both are fine – it’s not either/or for me. It just feels as though armour skins are getting entirely forgotten about. The expansion didn’t do much to remedy the situation, which is what I was bargaining on. I also don’t think that, necessarily, every armour piece has to be work with every other armour piece.

Outfits have 4 dye channels (and pretty simplistic ones at that). A full set of armor has at least 15 and often 30, often pretty involved in terms of textures and how those affect what we see.

I don’t really know how that affects animation work, but I do know that they have said that they deliberately left weapons without dye channels, to drastically reduce their work load. I would think that weapons would be less work total to dye than a full armor set, so dye channels must have a bigger impact than we think on total effort to create new skins of any sort.

So in terms of creation, it is a sort of either|or dilemma for ANet — they can’t produce as many skins as we would like.

Something else to consider, is that we DO get armor skins still. Just not in the gemstore where they’re a single swipe away. They’re ingame where you put forward the work to acquire it (remember the carapace/lumi sets?). Mind you, HoT only had 2 sets I’m aware of, leyline/leystone and the bladed set.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Something else to consider, is that we DO get armor skins still. Just not in the gemstore where they’re a single swipe away. They’re ingame where you put forward the work to acquire it (remember the carapace/lumi sets?). Mind you, HoT only had 2 sets I’m aware of, leyline/leystone and the bladed set.

Guild armor, and of course the Revenant’s armor.