Guild Wars 2

As the title says, why not?

Now, I know I’ll get the argument “if you see a guardian in light armour you might get confused in WvW and PvP” and whilst that is true, how is that different to having a guadian/warrior/necro etc wearing the pirate outfit? Normally pirate themed outfits were reserved for medium weight classes and now anyone can have that look.

Just saying, there seems to be less of a point in having the different weight classes now and being able to mix-and-match would be nice (especially for trying to avoid armour-clipping cough charr cough)

Well, you sort of mentioned the answer yourself.
I think the main problem of this (regardless of PvP and WvW) is the clipping. Now, with three armor classes, every item needs to be able to match around a third of the existing items.
If we remove the weight restrictions there suddenly will be two thirds more of possible clipping issues.
If I recall correctly this is one of the reasons ArenaNet doesn’t allow the former Town Clothes to be worn individualy: because there would be massive clipping problems with a lot of the existing items if they did.

I still agree with the idea of no weight restrictions leading to more diversity and individuality but I don’t think the effort needed to get this right would be justified right now, there are much more urgent issues at the moment.

Ravenfield.9863:

If I recall correctly this is one of the reasons ArenaNet doesn’t allow the former Town Clothes to be worn individualy: because there would be massive clipping problems with a lot of the existing items if they did.

Yep! Town clothes primarily follow light armor “cuts” I believe, so they wouldn’t mesh with medium and heavy. OP I don’t know if you were playing early on in the game but you used to be able to preview all armor classes together. The clipping was horrendous, there was simply no way you could mix armor classes without rendering the look of the armor useless.

To get the best appearance results every piece of town clothing would have to be remodeled to match the seams of each armor weight class, otherwise you’ll get annoying bugs like invisible body parts or flickering skin (from having two skin textures overlapping), so it’s understandable why they didn’t want to do that.

What I don’t understand, however, is why they couldn’t just keep the old town clothes system and recode it to simply change the appearance without disabling combat. That would achieve the same functionality of the Outfits system without destroying mix-n-match.

Ravenfield.9863:

If I recall correctly this is one of the reasons ArenaNet doesn’t allow the former Town Clothes to be worn individualy: because there would be massive clipping problems with a lot of the existing items if they did.

Coming from the same people who have ‘modelled’ all Charr amour.
Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?