Guild Wars 2

This is a business and like any good business you care about your bottom line, right? However, you don’t want to spend x amount of man hours designing new gem store items.

So why not open it up to the community? I suggest anet implement a community based design section so that players can design different armor skins and then the developers can approve / disapprove the skins. The designer gets maybe 5% of whatever is made off of the purchases for greater incentive.

I also suggest that the gem store have an online component where you can log into guildwars2.com and browse skins / gem store items and make the purchases here so that they will be sent via in game mail to your mailbox.

Just a thought.

I don’t see that ever happening or working.

works pretty well for valve… they make hand over fist with this model, and doing this in an mmo would be pretty innovative

If this means I can get Charr armor that’s actually made for Charr, I’m all for it. }]:3

It won’t work because the creator of the models and textures owns the copyright. When other companies do it they have to use extensive NDAs and other forms of contacts in order to ensure that they legally own everything that you create and that you don’t say anything about it until they officially release it.

ANet just doesn’t have the presence for this kind of thing.

SniffyCube.6107:

works pretty well for valve… they make hand over fist with this model, and doing this in an mmo would be pretty innovative

This worked for Valve because Valve games had an extensive pre-existing modding community. They’d already released an sdk, there existed tools to put cosmetic skins in game client-side (and this had been allowed for ages), so the community was already thriving and Valve needed only set up a way to profit on it.

Anet can’t do this- they don’t have much, if anything, in the way of a modding community because client-side modding is against the TOS. Releasing the tools needed to add things to the game would make the game vulnerable to cosmetic-based exploits (primarily wallhacking) and thus they can’t create such a community off of which to profit.

It would be awesome and I’d support it, sadly though I don’t think Anet would approve of it :-(

I’d personally want the old t3 cultural light flamekissed armor back (it could make a comeback as an upgrade to t3 human cultural armor, rather than allowing all races to wear it). Now THAT would be a start.

Landmark/EQNext is crowd sourcing like this. IMO, this is the only way a theme park is going to be able to satisfy the voracious content appetite of the MMORPG player base. A traditional design studio just can’t produce enough fresh content for a community that lives in its game hours every day.