Guild Wars 2

Awbee.8405:

Thobek.1730:

As for your question you really need to sit back and think about this one for yourself. Ask yourself who normally plays fantasy MMO type games? who plays PC games in general? what is the percentage of gay/lesbian people (i.e. its about 3.7% in the U.S) Then ask yourself that question again and see if you can work it out for yourself. It’s not that hard, the statistics are out there.

If you want to play a game with lore made for all the neckbeard dudebro’s out there, I encourage you to check out WoW and the Warlords of Draenor expansion. Ten or something Warlords, not a single woman among them. In general, there are only two major female lore characters that do anything at the moment, and they’re both “crazy, irrational and bordering on going evil”.

Leave the refreshing non-sexism in GW2 for those of us who are so sick of the usual sexism in video games.

Depicting women as inconsiderate and lesbian women as “lesbians first, people second” is not refreshing and it is not un-sexist. It is still misogynistic, just in a different way. Might I remind you that powerful women have been stereotyped as cruel and domineering for millennia, and it has always been part of a masculine society’s negative views of women? Adding more cruel, domineering powerful women to the mix is not helping!

I don’t want to play a game full of dudebros. I want to play a game like GW2 was before Living Story: with strong female characters working together with male characters, not acting as their protectors while simultaneously verbally abusing them. I am a woman, and I want to play a game with women in it, NOT heavily stereotyped pieces of cardboard who are somehow “not sexist” merely by existing in greater numbers than usual. There are PLENTY of female protagonists in the Soul Calibur games… with a robust jiggle-engine for all their scantily-clad bits! According to League of Angels’s advertising, it’s all ABOUT women! Is that empowering? Metroid: Other M is about a woman— a woman who starts freezing up in battles she’s done twice before because OMG EMOTIONS I’M A WOMAN I MUST CRY! Is that empowering? Why then does the presence of women in this story mean that this story is empowering either?

I’m sorry if this argument seems to have derailed the topic… but this issue is inseparably intertwined with the character of Scarlet herself and with the entire Living Story, because it has been forced into the story in a way that damages both its original cause and the characters it affects. Kasmeer and Marjory’s personalities have both been entirely subsumed to their relationship (which is unhealthy in ANY relationship, but disastrous in such a visible example when lesbian relationships are so rarely shown with any shred of finesse in games as it is). Braham has been assigned all the negative images that used to be associated with women (excessive emotionality, needing to be rescued, being needy and excessively attached), for no apparent reason aside from “time to turn the tables on men now, bwahahah!” Rox has become Braham’s big manly hero who saves him, but then has to ride off into the sunset, leaving him behind as he cries womanly tears— a simple reversal of roles, not an alteration of the roles! This is not helpful, and it is embarrassing to women like me who actually liked how they— and therefore how WE— were depicted in this game before the giant personality shift.

This is not an off-topic issue. It lies at the very heart of what has gone so very wrong with Living Story. The assumption that “if you don’t like this (horribly written and damaging) lesbian relationship, you are a MAN and a BIGOT!” (not to mention the disturbingly growing tendency to treat “man” and “bigot” as the same word) is damaging and NOT conducive to any sort of positive change— if you keep writing every critic off as a bigot, you’re never going to take any constructive criticism, and your writing will just continue to deteriorate until the Living Story becomes so much of a political cartoon it turns into an overblown parody of itself.

EDIT TO ADD: I really do hate having to emphasize my own femininity so much, given that what gender I am should not have anything to do with the merits of what I say, but I have found that people on the “Kasmory is obviously empowering because they exist” side of the debate tend to believe that men cannot have valid, informed opinions on women’s issues. So I must, in order to placate the suspicion that I might be a dumb clueless man who can’t understand enlightened things and likes ugh-ugh caveman save pretty woman stories, make a big deal about what bits I have.

Curtis Johnson.8456:

Narthexia.1836:

will there be individual mix and match pieces in future releases? Or will they all be complete sets?

We will continue to release mix and match armor skin pieces

Then what’s the point of Outfits? I thought you said you didn’t want to have to do armor for three different weight classes, and that’s why there are combat Outfits now. But you’re still going to release pieces of armor that work with all three weights? Why can’t you do that to the pieces of town clothing we already paid for instead of making more new meshes and asking for more money for them?

And I’m with everyone else: what guarantee do we have that if we buy armor now, it will stay useable as it is and won’t be changed with only a couple weeks’ notice? I understand you can’t give us technical information or whatever, but at least give us something to explain why you would completely change the function of a gem store item and continue to sell it after you knew you were changing it. (Sure, you yanked some of the individual Town Clothes pieces but lied about the reason.)

It’ll do you no good to release more stuff in the future if everyone’s afraid you’re gonna turn it into something different and not refund it.

Voice of ANet Speaking Through Curtis… We need you to at least tell us if you’re working on a plan or something. How about “we will have an intern translate one piece of town clothing to armor a week until they are all available as mix and match pieces” or something. That intern would become a folk hero. We would sing songs in his or her honor. (No seriously, I really probably would.) Or “we will bring back the town clothes tab in addition to the clothing tab until a better solution can be made.” Or even “we are working on a solution and trying to address your complaints.” Can you give us that? Can you say you hear our complaints? Do you have the clearance to do that? Can you tell us whether you have clearance to tell us whether you hear our complaints?

…Blink once for “We are not recording complaints at this time and are only here to answer questions,” blink twice for “we hear your complaints but can’t do anything about them at this time so all we can do is answer questions,” blink three times for “we hear your complaints and are working on a solution but can’t tell you what that solution is,” blink four times for “We hear your complaints but I can’t say what we are or are not doing about them”….

chemiclord.3978:

StriderShinryu.6923:

Second, it’s become obvious by this point that unless your complaint fits into something ANet already has planned, any actual complaints are likely akin to beating your head against a wall. More people doing so may look impressive but it’s not likely to bring the wall down any quicker, thus a lot of people probably see engaging in the discussion as a waste of time.

At this point, I agree. Arena.net has dug in their heels. They heard the complaints, and said, “No.”

Sometimes player pressure can get them to change their mind. But if there is something that Arena.net decides must change, the volume and frequency of fan complaints won’t sway them. For some reason, they decided this is one of things that must change, come hell or high water.

But you never know until you try.

They’ve said “no” in one response, but it’s the weekend now and I’m holding out hope for another once the work week starts, given how dissatisfied people were with the original “answer!”

A friend made a very good point to me yesterday, too, in that we can’t think of ANet as some inseparable entity. There are probably devs who thought changing town clothes like this was a really bad idea, and there is probably a lot of arguing going on right now. Any player response is more ammunition for the devs who didn’t favor changing Town Clothes to use to illustrate their “I told you so!” and subsequent attempts to fix all this.

Edit to clarify: I’m holding out hope for another response, not another “no”…

How will the treatment of armor skins such as the Mask of the Night skin and the Consortium shoulders skins work in the transfer to the Wardrobe? Will they automatically be added to the Wardrobe, or will they remain as skins so they can be used without having to use transmutation charges until we run out of however many of each skin we had? (I need to know whether to use my Mask of the Night skins on the characters I might put them on before the patch, or if all 5 of them will remain so I don’t have to use extra charges to use all 5 skins, for example.) Similarly, will the Town Clothes that are being turned into armor skins also be put directly into the Wardrobe, or would it be possible to allow stats to be selected for them like the Traveler’s stats were after those were altered, so we won’t have to spend a transmutation charge to apply stats to originally statless items that we’ve already bought?

…Basically, my question boils down to “will things be added to the Wardrobe automatically, or will they remain as they are until we decide to do something with them that puts them in there?”

Also, seconding DragonWhimsy’s question about transmutation charges; it doesn’t seem terribly fair for people using alts, or for new players, for that matter. Will charges be made more common so the effect on sub-80 characters will be balanced?

Kuess.1842:

So from april 15th Im supposed to run around with that INCREDIBLE UGLY wintersday hat instead of the cute earmuffs I bought with REAL money on my asura. The hat makes her bald…. I’m having tears in my eyes I spend my hard earned honest money to buy gems for these outfits.
And the witch outfit? I deleted the hat because it was ugly and I didnt have the space. I gave my char a different witch hat that looked much more awesome. Not possible anymore?

And no more colouring the town clothes? So we have to deal with the non personal colours your team picks out?

Removing restrictions you call it. Adding annoying new restrictions is what I and the entire rest of the community calls it. At least if I see the reactions.

ANET: I think this is the moment you can show the side where you listnen to your community and stop this before it goes life. You have two weeks left to tell your programmers to take out this rediculous move on towns clothing. YOUR COMMUNITY is asking. And if you don’t believe the over 1200 replies here. Give it a vote system. And realy listen to the community.

The Voice of ANet Speaking Through Curtis has noted that you will be able to hide the awful hat— you just won’t be able to wear any OTHER hat instead of it. Adorable Asura girls in froofy dresses and Quaggan hats? No longer! Yet because the “hide hat” button works, that’s supposed to be okay.

And you’ll be able to dye… some of the town clothes. The ones that are being made into tonics won’t be dyeable; the ones that are made into Outfits will have up to four dye channels each, and you’ll have to dye the whole thing together, like the Bloody Prince Thorn costume. And again, apparently that’s supposed to be an acceptable level of customization, even though I’m pretty sure with the way the dye channels work, my Belle costume will no longer be able to be a Belle costume…

Also, Faren’s incompetence is really kind of adorable rather than demeaning. First of all, it’s in-character. He’s a noble, after all, so while he’s probably quite accustomed to duels and such, running into the middle of messy battle by himself (without the player character to save his skin) is gonna end poorly, a feeling most of us can relate to— not many players would be able to make such a daring rescue in real life. But he still had the courage to try, which you can’t help but admire. So, he ends up both relatable and admirable. And he’s just the sort of guy who would wear a Speedo to the beach in Southsun Cove: he’s comfortable in his skin, proud of his sex appeal, and not afraid to show off a bit. While I’m not equipped, per se, to judge the briefs vs. boxers thing, there are enough skimpy female clothes in this game that putting probably the most appearance-conscious man in the game into skimpy clothes too is fair play in my eyes. :P (It seems to be a Human thing, I think, judging by their cultural armor… Perhaps Tyrian Humans are just exhibitionists?)

I think the Kiel vs. Evon thing isn’t so bad, either. Kiel may be domineering, but she is kinda a… soldier-policewoman?… from a town full of pirates. And Evon’s not exactly the nicest guy in the world. The conflict between the two of them works because they’re basically by-the-book versus exploit-the-fine-print, and each of those worldviews is demonstrated to have its flaws. Sometimes one of them will briefly step into the other’s territory, usually leading to something awesome. Kiel breaking out of her by-the-book mold at the end of the last Southsun event, when she destroyed the Consortium’s technically legal but morally questionable contracts, was a pretty great moment; and Evon’s assistance to Hero-Tron was not entirely self-serving, even if he did want to benefit from it by being noticed and rewarded for helping.

But there really is no reason for the Destiny’s Edge 2.0 gals to be so awful to Braham, or for Braham’s deterioration into an emotional mess. It’s interesting, actually, that in order to exalt women, McCoy apparently feels that she has to place men in the roles women once held— overly emotional, submissive, and in need of protection— rather than just doing away with the role entirely. Perhaps it’s just easier to write according to tropes, and if you disagree with the most commonly used tropes, it’s easier to reverse them than it is to come up with something new?

Perhaps what saves Faren, Kiel and Evon, in the end, is that they might be more “minor” characters according to the writers’ plans, so they aren’t forced into some sort of role as a mouthpiece or an exemplar of McCoy’s wish-fulfillment; whereas Marjory and Kasmeer and Rox and Braham are supposed to be major characters, so they get all this baggage foisted on them until you can’t see the personality under all the meta-intentions. Kiel doesn’t have to be a tool for breaking a role; she can just be a character, and so she ends up as a fairly dominance-seeking woman who’s still more complex than just “stomps men;” and Faren doesn’t have to symbolize anything but his own kitten ily charming self. Marjory and Kasmeer, on the other hand, are saddled with this quest to increase representation of women and homosexual people in games, and so the quest comes to define them; they end up as tools for making points with, rather than characters for telling stories with.

Donut.6914:

So has ANet just abandoned this topic? I would really like a response on refunds for all our outfits now. Very very shady if they never respond.

Donari.5237:

They did respond, they said please wait until after the patch and then refunds will be offered on anything that’s been turned into a tonic.

(snip)

To be fair, it is the weekend, and they’re probably either not at work or working frantic overtime to try to fix this mess so come Monday they can have something to show us. I don’t actually expect another answer until then; I do think they’ll at least have to provide a second answer of some sort, because enough discontent has been expressed by enough people with the first one. So…

While we continue to express our discontent to demonstrate to ANet that we do in fact care about this, let us also remember that it is the weekend and it’s reasonable to have to wait for a response until Monday. And that’s a reminder to myself as well, as I too have gotten a bit impatient…

Thobek.1730:

(snip snip)
As for your question you really need to sit back and think about this one for yourself. Ask yourself who normally plays fantasy MMO type games? who plays PC games in general? what is the percentage of gay/lesbian people (i.e. its about 3.7% in the U.S) Then ask yourself that question again and see if you can work it out for yourself. It’s not that hard, the statistics are out there.

Technically, the numbers of female and male gamers, at least, are a lot closer than most people would think. It’s just that female gamers tend to be fairly quiet about our gender, because the concept of “gamer grrls~” has become such a problem— and nobody can say whose fault it really is. (The girls who fit the stereotype? the guys who assume all girls are like that? the girls like me who keep complaining about them and thus unintentionally perpetuate the stereotype? These things are hard to untangle.)

There are also plenty of gay, lesbian, bi, transgender, all-sorts-of-gender-and-sexuality-types gamers out there who tend not to be loud about it. For everyone running around with an [LGBT] tag, there are plenty of gaymers who don’t feel like it’s really worth mentioning; and transgender or in-between-gender folks often just go with whatever people think they are, because you can play whatever gender you want when you’re sitting at a keyboard and not face-to-face (like my one male-but-rather-gender-wobbly friend who I could’ve sworn was female for the first few months that I knew him).

The whole point of that mini-wall-o’-text is that you really can’t know the gender and sexuality makeup of any given group of gamers, so it’s probably a good idea just not to make assumptions and to try to include all sorts— which is something the base of GW2, the non-Living-Story and non-update bits, do very well, and which Living Story does very poorly. You make good points, such as your point about Caithe and Faolain, and I’d hate to see the sense you’re making get drowned out by people getting irked at any assumptions you might make about the playerbase.

To bring this all back into context, then: ANet, when writing your characters, please consider both what you intend them to be like, and what you intend them to do; and then think about how they actually end up, and what they actually end up doing— and how they will be perceived by people who don’t have a direct window into your minds to see all the good intentions that pave your road to Orr.

cakesphere.5910:

(quotes snip)

To be fair, at least the 1-79 transmutation stones will be converted over, too, but I imagine there will be those who have used up their stones and will have to pay.

Mm, at a rate of 1 charge to every 3 stones, or 1 charge to 1 crystal. So if you have an alt that isn’t level 80 and was wearing town clothes that got armorified, it’ll now cost you the equivalent of a transmutation crystal, not even a transmutation stone, to make each piece equippable. UNLESS they allow for assigning stats to armorified town clothes without using charges the first time you do it, hint hint ANet, Traveler’s Town Clothes yes?

(edit to add new bits so I don’t double-post)

Pixelpumpkin.4608

(snip) Removing the dyes from the loot table is supposed to lessen the impact on the economy.

I think it’s a bit of a shame as I was always excited to randomly pick up a dye, but oh well, can’t argue with their case in this instance.

I don’t know; I think once the initial glut of dyes from the change taking place runs out, having dyes not drop as loot at all will cause the price to shoot way up. I think a more sensible option would be to have them drop as much rarer loot, and perhaps decouple them from Magic Find to ensure their rarity. Otherwise, not only will dyes shoot up in price way more than is really reasonable (think about new players who are only working on one character: sure, their other characters will someday be able to use the dyes too, but the barrier of entry will be much higher). Chef ingredients like onions, blueberries, etc. will also become super-expensive, as they’re ingredients for making dyes, and as the value of those dyes inflates, so will the value of their materials. This will make leveling Chef even more expensive when attempting to discover all the recipes that utilize those ingredients, because if other crafted items are any indication, the gold value of the crafted item will still be less than the combined gold cost of the materials— you won’t even be able to just craft appropriately-rated dyes and sell those for a profit, only at a loss.

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

I applaud the OP (and agree with most of what he said, especially the ‘Lieutenants are the lifeblood of an organisation’ section, which put into words what I’d been thinking myself). Applaud the devs who have taken notice too.

Thobek.1730:

I really don’t like how the characters have been developed. The obvious lesbian relationships being pushed in our faces again and again…

…Getting a bit sick of it. We need another style of writing to balance this feminist stuff.

Hrmm, I wonder why nobody ever says that kind of stuff when a game features a heavily pro-Male ratio, or “obvious hetero relationships”. You know… like the majority of other games.

As a woman with some pretty strong opinions on the representation of women in games myself… honestly, I have to agree with Thobek. Just because Angel McCoy is a woman writer who writes women does not make her good at writing women, and the characters she set up (who might well have changed hands a few times as the Living Story went on, if what was implied in the story of Hero-Tron’s development is true and there are different writers for each step even if the same characters are involved) became grating caricatures of themselves as the story went on.

It is no better to have a bunch of verbally abusive cardboard women sitting around taking jabs at an injured man than it is to have wallflower princesses being rescued by burly manly-man barbarians. It just reinforces the very same sexist principle either way: you are nice and pretty and helpless, or you are a powerful but entirely unlovable harpy; you cannot be both appealing and strong. And don’t even get me started on Scarlet: the ultimate woman on a pedestal, in many cases literally shouting down at the players from her place on high, separate and exalted— the only difference is that she’s exalted as a perfect villain and not as a perfect sex object.

Speaking of sex objects, Kasmeer and Marjory used to have at least some personality, but now they’re entirely eclipsed by their own sexualities. Compare them to Caithe, who is also largely defined by a lesbian relationship but whose character is enriched by that relationship as it provides conflict and a force that causes her character to grow and change.

It’s naive to think that simply writing about women is always going to be a good thing for women. The Taming of the Shrew is centered on a woman, and has plenty of female characters, but it’s hardly a huge victory for feminism! (Depending on your interpretation and staging of the final scene… but overall, definitely not something that advances women, hm?) In order for a story to have merit and not just be “feminist stuff,” it needs to be written so that it actually gets the point across, and doesn’t unintentionally communicate an entirely different and entirely counterproductive point— like “lesbians are lesbians first and people second, empowered women are mean, women belong on a pedestal”… and that’s JUST from the Battle for Lion’s Arch part of the story!

We need less “feminist stuff” and more women who are actually strong, both as characters and as people.

Hamfast.8719:

DarksunG.9537:

You guys didn’t read the info on Town Clothes did you? Some of them are turning into regular armor skins. gg.

Some. Only some. Lots of individual pieces are being lost as they’re being turned into one-piece “outfits”. It’s impacting a lot of people as you can tell since we’re averaging 6 pages of outrage each day so far over the last 4 days.

The point of that quote being, I believe, that some items that are now Town Clothes (a “surprising number,” according to The Voice of ANet Speaking Through Curtis) will start costing us money in the form of transmutation charges, because armor will cost charges to transmute— and since Town Clothes have no stats, we’ll probably have to transmute the skins onto existing armor, using charges which cost money, unless they have the brains to do something with them like the Traveler’s armor where you could select the armor’s new stats. (Given the current state of affairs, ANet being either incompetent or malicious— I’d like to assume the former, I fear I might believe the latter— I doubt they’d do something so helpful and so unprofitable.)

In other words, it’s yet another reason to be outraged: having to pay AGAIN to apply these skins we already paid for to armor if we want to use them at all.

Something just occurred to me: while The Voice of ANet Speaking Through Curtis can’t divulge technical information due to the nature of game development or whatever… telling us why they continued to sell town clothes with a misleading description for months after they knew they were going to change them ISN’T divulging technical information. It may be divulging embarrassing information, but we’re already kinda assuming the worst anyways. Better to reveal a certain level of disorganization between designers and marketers than to let us assume that you were trying to swindle us, hm?

I sincerely hope that come Monday, we at least get to learn that much. I’d like to know if I should bother buying those Scarlet gloves and shoulders before they go away so I can use them with this new Wardrobe system that otherwise would be so lovely, or if I have to be afraid that they’ll get turned into something completely different a few months down the line with almost no warning.

Curtis Johnson.8456:

We try not to allow too much ‘hoarder’ design where we just keep stacking more and more options on leaving lots of unsupported things hanging around.

That’s a quote from the Town Clothes thread. I’m not sure how wide a swath that blade’s supposed to cut, but it sure looked to me like that was ANet saying that they don’t like to leave “unsupported” (read: “we don’t want to do this any more”) features in the game, which I find pretty daft personally. It looks like they don’t want to do things involving Personality in the future, which makes it “unsupported” and puts it on the chopping block.

If that really is the case, it seems like this policy might come back to bite them, though, given that while I’ve seen people wishing the Personality thing were better used, I haven’t seen anyone who just outright said “yeah, completely getting rid of this is a good idea.”

I suppose we’ll see in April— although given the whole “getting rid of unsupported content” thing, I’m not terribly hopeful.

Palador.2170:

Twyll Blackleaf.9641:

Q: But you can fight naked, and you can do Costume Brawl naked. Obviously the naked mesh is the same either way. So how do those systems work then?
A: The armor mesh is still there, but without a texture, so it’s invisible.

Q: And what about all the ones getting turned into tonics? They made brand-new meshes for all of those too?
A: Those won’t be useable in combat.

First of all, I was under the assumption that the tonics COULD be used in combat. Have they at any point said otherwise?

Second of all, you can also do costume brawl in any type of outfit, INCLUDING Town Clothes (depending on the toy/weapon). You can also use skills, environmental weapons/bundles, conjured weapons, and kits in town clothes as well as armor. If these animations already call upon the mesh, then wouldn’t there already have to be something detecting which mesh the character is using?

He seemed to think they’d stated somewhere that they’d be non-combat tonics, although I’m not sure where.

The box of chocolates might be useable in armor, but all other toys for costume brawl are solely Town Clothes, aren’t they? The point about skills and such is a good one, though. Heck, some consumables that give you bundles work even with tonics. (I like to turn into a Young Karka and hold an Experimental Portal Gun because it turns super-tiny and looks like a sonic screwdriver.) If that’s the case, then I really don’t see why the few combat animations that are left— the weapon skills, class abilities, and a very few animations that happen when you’re affected by attacks like being frozen and such that aren’t also represented in Costume Brawl— can’t be made to work with the Town Clothes mesh as well. Perhaps they can, and each Outfit really is just based on the Town Clothes “fourth armor class” mesh? In that case, it would seem that ANet made them one slot instead of a paper doll solely to avoid having to bother with seams ever again in the future.

Augh, all this speculation! Facts, facts, my kingdom for some facts!

chemiclord.3978:

The problem is that I doubt Curtis CAN “confirm/deny” much, if any of that.

Development is this really weird place, where technical information is guarded like they are nuclear launch codes. I mean, you can go to any game developer and ask staff to get technical, and almost to a man, they won’t.

It’s not because they don’t think all their fans can’t understand. It’s because often they are forbidden by their contracts to discuss ANY technical details, or the reasoning behind them. And what little they ARE allowed to discuss has to go through a gauntlet of okays from a lot of suits.

Hmmmmm, point.

Okay Curtis… One blink for some of that was right, two blinks for none of that was right, three blinks for all of that was right, cough for we’ll give you back your town clothes…?

(continued from last post)

Q: So tell me, Curtis. How can they believe they’re capable of designing things that look good as a set when they CAN’T? It’s so hard to make a Charr look good, and none of their sets do. Aesthetic unity I can understand, but their aesthetics suck according to pretty much everyone who actually wears town clothes. The only possible thing they COULD value is “not having to deal with seams.”
A: Don’t call me— Whatever. In all fairness, that’s a pretty understandable thing to value.

Q: Maybe if they weren’t making a game in which appearance is so important to the players! Skins are the endgame in this game, for crying out loud! The entire Wardrobe is based on making customizing your appearance easier! Caring about seams is part of their JOB!
A: Yeah. And I think they realize that now. The thing is, this happened to be the one change they didn’t think to toss out there well in advance. But, I suspect that the end result of this whole ordeal will be that they’ll find a way to reintroduce a town clothes system.

Q: Well they need to LET US KNOW! I need to know whether to demand refunds or hold onto the hope that they’ll get their collective head out of their collective sphincter and make the stuff I paid for useable again!
A: They have two weeks to do so.

Q: And given how hard it is to extract any sort of information from them…
A: Think of it like this: If I were trying to solve a problem, would you expect me to tell you how it was coming until I’d solved it? :P

Q: I would expect you to tell me that you recognize there’s a problem and you’re working on it. We haven’t even gotten that. Right now all we’ve gotten is “We are sorry.”
A: We have gotten an answer. They’ve been talking about it.

Q: Even if they ARE working on the problem, what they SAID to us is, “There is not a problem.” So it is entirely possible that they talked about it and decided it is not a problem. (Editor’s note: This is me losing faith, largely because I was hungry and being hungry makes me grumpy.)
A: What they said is, “This will not turn out as bad as you think, but we don’t have as much leeway as you expect, either.” Largely for the technical reasons I outlined that might be the case. I’m pretty sure “you’d be surprised how many skins will be useable as armor” are weasel words for “we are frantically working to make the skins you apparently like useable as armor now after we didn’t realize we needed to.”

Q: I suppose if they’d given us a reason to believe ANY of what they said instead of using weasel words…
A: Ultimately, they have yet to mess up in a way that they haven’t made right in some way. Even with the awfulness of the Living Story’s plot, the combat of the last several updates was awesome. So, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Q: Whatever you say… Curtis. :P
A: Don’t call me… whatever.

So, maybe that helps explain things. Or maybe it just gives the GW2 forums a disturbingly intimate view into my love life, I dunno.

Anyway, obviously all of this is speculation, and speculation that I don’t even necessarily understand and might have paraphrased poorly, but it’s speculation that helped explain to at least one layperson (me) what other people’s speculation might actually mean. Hopefully it will also provide a nice, convenient platform for ANet to use as a basis for communication, even if only to be able to confirm/deny things.

Edited to add: He would like me to note that he is also a historian, which I didn’t figure was relevant to the argument, but as he puts it, “My craft is pretty much the art of asking, ‘Why the cats would somebody do that?’ and coming up with a sensible answer.” Which actually makes a lot of sense, and now I don’t have to suspect that he’s secretly the avatar of Curtis.

Edited again to add: Apparently he didn’t want me to note that in my post, as he thinks it makes him sound like a French-word-for-shower, and also was talking out of his donkey. (Wheee translating my normally vulgar speech with my beloved into euphemisms?) He was just noting it to me. But I’m keeping it anyways because I thought it was funny.

(continued from last post)

Q: So that means that because town clothes weren’t working as they originally intended, regardless of how they were actually being used, they decided to make the change to Outfits to fit the original intention?
A: Yes. I think ANet has an engineer’s perspective: This system is broken, so I will fix it. Why would somebody use something that is broken anyway?

Q: How the cats are you so good at translating— oh right, Engineering degree.
A: And game design nerd, thank you. I’ve read a lot about programming theory.

Q: I’m a nerd for game design too, though!
A: Yeah, but you’re into fluff, not programming :P

Q: Okay, point. All right then, He Who Knows the Mind of ANet… If Outfits STILL have to be made differently for each armor class, why did Curtis say that doing Outfits allows them to put armor in the store that DOESN’T have to be modified for each armor class? Or was he referring solely to the aesthetics?
A: Yup, aesthetics. This is the only way for them to be able to put out armor that doesn’t have to look like it’s Light, Medium, or Heavy, and also do it quickly. They can design an outfit, tweak it for each complete mesh without having to worry about seams, and ship it, then start work on the next. From THEIR perspective, it makes life easier for the art team and allows them to actually kick out more content. It also means that when designing a clothing item, they don’t have to think about how it would look with every other clothing item: it only has to look good with the rest of its outfit.

It’s pretty much ultimately the problem of any complex system: the more discrete objects you have to deal with, the harder it becomes to introduce new discrete objects. Outfits allow them to swap the paradigm around and eliminate the combinatorial complexity from the design equation.

Q: That DOES seem like what a confused engineer would think about how designers think. Really, though, the designer doesn’t have to make EVERYTHING compatible with EVERYTHING. You don’t go to the store and think that because they’re selling a navy blue shirt, it’s going to really well with the black pants they sell because everything they sell has to look good together! Besides, we’ve got plenty of single items that don’t match other things. Fuzzy bear hat and Charr town clothes?
A: Yes, but when was the last time they released something that wasn’t a complete set?

Q: But people never USE them as a set— Oh. OH. They didn’t KNOW that.
A: Even if they did, the fact is, combining things as a complete outfit and not worrying about how it goes with other things will allow them to pump out new stuff a lot faster. That, I suspect, is what Curtis meant by “you’ll be getting new outfits more often.”

Q: I should start calling you Curtis.
A: Please don’t.

(continued in next post)

Hm, just had a very interesting discussion with my boyfriend wherein he speculated about ANet’s reasons for this seemingly incredibly dumb decision, and made some pretty good points. He’s got some knowledge of programming and is a game design nerd but also a writer at heart, so he occupies a sort of middle ground where he might be capable of communicating what ANet cannot communicate, so Curtis, PLEASE pay attention to this and possibly DO A CONFIRM/DENY? for everyone’s peace of mind.

This is a paraphrase of a much longer and more involved conversation, but I hope it gets the gist across.

To start with, some very simplistic definitions: A skeleton is a series of lines that join together to determine points of articulation and movement. A mesh fits around a skeleton to provide the shape of what is moving. A texture goes on that mesh to give it color and pattern and such.

Q: So, why can’t town clothes be used in combat, anyway?
A: Because combat animations are based on armor class, and the mesh for each armor class is constructed differently.

Q: But your combat stance in both of them is identical, and the way you jump, run, and so on. And running and jumping animations and such are also identical no matter what armor class you wear, so they all must have the same skeleton. Why not just apply combat animations to the identical town clothes skeleton then?
A: Some systems in the game that affect animations probably reference the mesh itself, and not the skeleton; and they probably can’t go through and change all of those systems to interact with EITHER the character’s armor class mesh OR the town clothes mesh.

Q: But aren’t those systems already prepared to handle three different armor class meshes?
A: Yes, but right now, all they have to do is detect what armor class the character is. If a character could use two different meshes, they would also have to detect which mesh the character is using at the time. And we don’t know how many systems they would have to change.

Q: But you can fight naked, and you can do Costume Brawl naked. Obviously the naked mesh is the same either way. So how do those systems work then?
A: The armor mesh is still there, but without a texture, so it’s invisible.

Q: So what if you made the armor mesh invisible, and then put the town clothes mesh over the identical skeleton, so the systems have the armor mesh to interact with but the town clothes mesh is the visible one?
A: There might not be a way to code that now, after the fact, depending on how the game’s code is built. It could also lead to all sorts of bugs.

Q: And yet, they’ve already made Outfits that are the same for each armor class, and combat somehow works in them.
A: They probably made a different version of the Outfit for each armor class, which just looks pretty much identical. That’s probably why it’s easier to do for a whole Outfit and not for individual pieces, because they’re having to make completely new meshes each time, rather than using what they already have. And there are only about six complete outfits, so it’s something they had time to do.

Q: And what about all the ones getting turned into tonics? They made brand-new meshes for all of those too?
A: Those won’t be useable in combat.

Q: Oh man, that’s even worse than I thought. So people asked for combat town clothes, and now most of them are being taken away and not used in combat anyways. So why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they just leave town clothes, if they’re going to STILL have meshes that are specifically designated for being out-of-combat anyways?
A: Probably because it would be difficult to code the new Wardrobe system to hold two different armor weights per character. Right now it only has to display and use armor of one weight type per character.

Q: What if town clothes weren’t part of the Wardrobe, then? How about if they were collectibles, like the PvP bank, that became wearable after you withdrew them from the bank?
A: The new system doesn’t have a PvP bank any more, so it might not be able to support any kind of clothing bank. We don’t even know what they had to do to allow the engine to swap meshes; we don’t know if their new system will support that.

Q: There will still be out-of-combat tonics, though, and you can only swap traits out of combat, so obviously there will still be an “out of combat” tag. Why not have clothing items that you can use out of combat, still?
A: We don’t even know if town clothes were ever really intended to be an out-of-combat thing only, or if that was a stopgap measure.

Q: So you’re saying town clothes might have been initially conceived as being used in combat as well, but the way the code worked out they could only be used out-of-combat in order to work, and THAT’S what The Voice of ANet Speaking Through Curtis meant about town clothes not working as intended?
A: Basically.

(continued)

chemiclord.3978:

By the logic he presented ANY time an MMO changes its content, that is morally theft.

It’s absurd. It’s not theft, either legally or morally. What it IS is a silly overreaction from a bitter player.

I believe there’s a certain degree of reasonable expectation involved. When you play a class, there’s a reasonable expectation that that class’s features might be altered slightly for game balance. While my Thief build can no longer have a very useful trait because it was moved due to a balance patch, I was okay with that because it was a reasonable thing due to initiative regen being increased. When you pay a small amount of in-game money for an item, that item being altered (such as ember pets and ogre pets summoned through items being given a cooldown) is also reasonable. When the Flamekissed skin was changed, even that was relatively reasonable because they offered a refund for it, and because many players were asking for it to be changed, so while some people were negatively impacted, others were positively impacted (which also holds true for balance patches).

When you pay real money for an item that works a certain way, and the company changes the function of that item for no apparent reason (and refuses to state a reason), and it continues to sell those items even after revealing that they knew for months beforehand that their function would be drastically changed, and offers a refund only for a very small number of the affected items… that is not a reasonable thing. It is this behavior, continuing to sell items even after knowing that their function would be entirely altered, that is the root of people’s charges regarding morals: intentionally hiding already-decided-on changes to sell more things that you then refuse to refund when those changes are revealed.

It is especially unreasonable because it does not seem that there is any benefit to the change: it is quite possible to turn town clothes into outfits WITHOUT removing their mix-and-match capability, and we have been given no reason to believe otherwise. In a balance patch, every change has a distinct purpose. It may make you unhappy, but at least you can see the method in the madness. In this one, the purpose is entirely unclear and the “answer” we were promised did not reveal any purpose either: it mentioned “issues,” but not what they were (obviously we figured there must be “issues” but the question was what issues).

Hopefully that clears some of it up for you in a… less emotionally charged way. You may still disagree, but at least the difference between reasonable expectations (expecting something you paid for not to be changed abruptly and not refunded) and unreasonable expectations (expecting nothing to change ever) makes more sense?

I mean, I agree, but there’s been quite a bit of conversation around how the Personality thing doesn’t really accomplish that, I think?

Honestly, if there’s a tradeoff between a greater quantity of writing being done (more choices, such as with Personality) and greater quality of writing being done… At least when it comes to new content, I’d say quality should win out there because at the moment, it isn’t winning at all. The writing done for NPCs across the world that was done before release is mostly very high-quality, and likewise the early stages of Personal Story (originally mistyped that as Living Story, oops) (basically everything before Claw Island, although it sort of deteriorates up to that point before hitting bottom). But the Living Story stuff has been pretty atrocious, and if it takes a more focused and less wide-angled approach to make it, well, NOT so atrocious, I can see the rationale behind no longer using Personality.

While I was looking at the screenshots of the new Equipment/Wardrobe UI, I noticed that while the class emblem was still there, the Personality indicator next to it wasn’t.

Does this mean that Personality is being taken out of the game? It certainly seems like something that had potential that was never really used, and perhaps meeting that potential just took up too many resources that were better spent somewhere else. Or perhaps there’s still some question over whether it will remain or be taken out, so it wasn’t included in the UI?

I did like being able to Charm people, and a lot of the threats from Ferocity were pretty amusing, so I’d be a bit sad to see the system go away entirely, but I’d… kind of understand why, given that ANet’s policy now is apparently not to leave “loose ends” lying around if they’ve decided not to pursue a feature further.

Carighan.6758:

Twyll Blackleaf.9641:

If it is truly a technical issue, then being “open” about it would mean telling us what the issue is. I’m especially interested to know what could possibly prevent mixing town clothes that are designed to be mixed with other town clothes with the town clothes they’re meant to be mixed with!

Though my understanding of clothing in 3D engines is limited (never done work on animated stuff), Bonefield seems to have guessed correctly here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Feedback-Questions-Town-clothes-Costumes-Combat/page/14#post3817507

That still seems to be related to mixing armors of different types, though, which it’s already been established the new Outfits system won’t do. The question here is why it’s not possible to mix town clothes with other town clothes under this system: what could possibly make it impossible to create a custom Outfit out of just town clothes. It’s possible to wear combinations of town clothes and use different toys to Costume Brawl, which have a variety of animations; do combat animations really distort characters’ bodies so incredibly much that meshes that work just fine with each other for walking, running, jumping, dodging, punching, falling over, flailing, flying on broomsticks, and emoting every possible emote somehow don’t work with each other for combat? I can’t think of a single combat animation that is more complicated than what you can do in Costume Brawl, and town clothes can already do that. The excuse regarding town clothes that take up more than one slot doesn’t make any sense either, because if they can already cover more than one slot, then why do you have to force them to be all one piece so you can have clothes that cover more than one slot!?

And what happens if there is a problem? A bit of clipping? A bit of a hole in your character’s midriff for a brief moment while she executes a particularly twisty move that isn’t covered by what’s already possible in Costume Brawl? There are plenty of examples being given of clipping and even empty holes in skins that already happen with existing armor.

The Voice of ANet Speaking Through Curtis has talked about issues that are “not just clipping” but very conveniently neglected to mention what they are. That smacks of an excuse. While we were in the “speculation” phase of this discussion, “technical limitations” was a valid theory because we couldn’t know specifically what they were; but even if they really exist, ANet knows exactly what they are but refuses to explain and thus prove that they do exist, which throws doubt over the whole darned thing.

Carighan.6758:

SpyderArachnid.5619:

So basically the whole “we are taking your concerns and feedback into consideration” was a bunch of nonsense. Glad to see that hasn’t changed. Just the usual typical PR spin meaning “we are not changing anything regardless of what you have to say”.

Considering how open he sounds about it, consider that it might actually be a technical issue. It might not be fixable without a full engine re-write.

Unfortunately, there really wasn’t much openness in that “answer,” just vague, hollow reassurances and arguments that occasionally conflict with themselves. If it is truly a technical issue, then being “open” about it would mean telling us what the issue is. I’m especially interested to know what could possibly prevent mixing town clothes that are designed to be mixed with other town clothes with the town clothes they’re meant to be mixed with!

I was perfectly willing to give ANet the benefit of the doubt when I thought the answer they’d promised would be an actual answer. They’ve used their free try, though, and I doubt many people would be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt now.

3 continued this is the last part I swear

I think cohesiveness might have been another casualty of time crunches, although it certainly improved as the Living Story went on. Gone are the days of an achievement reading “help Rox track the dragon” that has nothing to do with talking to or assisting Rox in any way, that just involves looking at a footprint and not even having to tell her about it, and Rox’s presence there at all being a surprise unless you’ve looked at the achievements tab. I’m certainly grateful for that. But as mentioned above with character development issues, longer periods between Living Story installments would also allow for greater cohesiveness not just within each installment, but between the installments, allowing more time for communication and collaboration.

It would be much better to have well-written, well-acted, well-planned, cohesive Living Story updates that come once a month, than for it to continue at the average level of quality throughout the last Living Story at a rate of an update per week. (As a side note, it would be especially nice if you’d give us a timer for Living Story achievements resembling the Daily and Monthly achievement timers; it was sometimes hard to figure out whether certain achievements would last for a month or two weeks with some of the updates. In fact, greater communication regarding what’s staying and what’s not staying during any given transition between LS installments (Heirlooms, hmmm?) would be greatly appreciated.)

Finally, longer Living Story periods would reduce the issues with items that you can only get during that period being hard to get for a lot of people who have real lives (unlike me, as I can sit here writing about them on their behalf). In fact, it would be ideal not to have things like that at all; I can understand certain items being incredibly rare or difficult to get, and the process of constructing Legendaries is a good example of that; but account-bound items that are no longer obtainable, ever? It seems unfair, and I’m saying this as someone who actually has almost every account-bound Living Story item. When people ask how to get an awesome Sclerite Karka Shell like mine, it depresses me to have to tell them that they can’t. This might be a tad off-topic, but I do think a way to obtain previous Living Story items through great effort and skill— perhaps very high-level Fractals that depict the events? people seem to want higher-level Fractals anyway— would be a very good thing to have.

Of course, giving yourselves more time to work on things isn’t just limited to Living Story. A certain aspect of a certain upcoming patch was pretty obviously rushed so hard it threw up from all the g-forces (cough cough town clothes what the ever-loving Alchemy cough cough). You don’t have to do absolutely everything all at once. Allowing yourself more time to do things right the first time will prevent you having to waste ridiculous amounts of time fixing things that weren’t done right, like Watchknight scaling, Scarlet holo fight cinematics not playing… and other aspects of the game. (cough. cough. COUGH.)

Those are my, er, three cents that ended up being more like four or five. If you make it through this wall of text without your eyeballs drying up and falling out… I hope it helps?

All done now. Sorry for taking up most of a page. You asked for feedback, and you received! It’s still… technically three things. Ish.

Sorry ANet, but you needed that wall o’ text.

corollary to 2 continued (my ears, this is even longer than I thought)

Despite all this, an NPC explicitly states that the Pact chose not to intervene in Lion’s Arch, not that they were so desperately stretched thin that they couldn’t, or that they were prevented from doing so some other way. However, such a potentially (well, not even potentially any more) devastating oversight can still be explained: the Pact is led by a man who has no military experience and whose expertise lies solely in Orr. THAT explains it all perfectly. The heads of the Orders, because they are people who act like people, cannot agree on how to defend Lion’s Arch until it’s too late. Trahearne, their leader, does not see the inherent danger to the Pact in Scarlet’s actions because he is so intently focused on Orr, and without his Player-Character-advisor there to advise him, fails to ensure that they cooperate; and so the Pact is unable to organize the deployment of their megalasers, which could have turned the tide of the fight much earlier by taking Scarlet’s ships right out of the sky, or to use any of their other resources.

However, during the fight, the Orders did contribute individually, and very effectively: the Vigil organized a temporary Lion’s Arch in their own headquarters with military efficiency; Whispers operatives within Lion’s Arch saved countless citizens who couldn’t make it all the way to the exits; and the Priory ran med tents (were the med tends Priory-based?) and one would assume they were able to handle the massive project of organizing and returning lost belongings and heirlooms due to their experience cataloguing research and dig sites.

All this combines to make many of the Orders’ members come to one conclusion: “Why do we even need the Pact, anyway?” This creates fertile ground for story-driving conflicts as the heads of the Orders have to decide whether they’re pro- or anti-Pact, those within each Order who disagree with their leader’s position start to back candidates for their replacement, and Destiny’s Edge 2.0— or even better, Destiny’s Edge 3.0 (Hero-Tron, Canach, Lord Faren, and Evon Gnashblade: the Second Chances Dream Team. You know you love it.)— has to try to fix the mess as best they can, with the aid of the player of course, as the threat of a new dragon awaking looms. It also creates the potential to make Trahearne a far more sympathetic character if you play it right, as he realizes what a horrible mistake he’s made and starts to doubt his abilities as a leader, letting us see the person side of him that’s not just “Oh he’s being humble, how virtuous!” but actually flawed.

I suggest reading some John Wyndham and other writers of apocalyptic fiction in the same vein to get some ideas on how to write leaders trying to react to catastrophes, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, and how ordinary people react to the same catastrophes. (The Kraken Wakes is a particularly relevant one when it comes to large organizations failing to protect citizens from attacks by monstrous forces they’ve never seen before, like Scarlet’s armies and I’m sure like the new dragon’s minions will be.) It’s certainly more fun that studying history, although that’s probably a good idea too if you want characters who act like people. Of course, you have to have the time to study how people react to things in order to write them realistically, which brings me to my next suggestion.

3.) Give yourselves time to create high-quality, properly completed content, and give us time to experience it.

There really isn’t any reason for the Living Story to update every two weeks. Past Living Story updates were very obviously rushed, unfinished, incredibly bugged, and just generally suffering from not enough time being put into their creation. The bugs combined with the short durations often meant that we had very little time to experience the content after the bugs were ironed out. How many days’ worth of Legendary Watchknight fights were there after they had finally been debugged and adjusted? Not enough. And if you happen to get sick, or go on vacation, or go do disaster relief work and vaccinate babies in an area with no running water, let alone Internet access… it’s easy to miss a large chunk of a two-week time period, or miss it entirely.

2 continued

Given what has been said in certain news and blog posts, such as the one about Job-o-Tron’s progression into Hobo-Tron and Ho-Ho-Tron and onward, I suspect that some of this issue is caused by the frequent passing of writing responsibilities from person to person during the course of the Living Story. I theorize that Hero-Tron evolved in a good way as he was passed from writer to writer, because there was no pressure on the writer taking him on next to keep him incredibly consistent with his previous incarnation— in fact, transformation was much of what defined him. Characters such as Marjory and Kasmeer, on the other hand, got certain aspects of their personalities exaggerated because the second writer wanted to keep them consistent and didn’t want to step on the first writer’s toes. Successive writers couldn’t make them into dynamic characters by changing them at all because of this desire for consistency, and even tended to overcompensate by stressing aspects the first writer had assigned them— so Marjory got more snide until she was no longer charmingly snarky but just plain mean, and her Noir schtick was ridiculously inconsistent from update to update; Kasmeer got sillier until she was almost embarrassingly grating; their personalities were eventually subsumed almost entirely to the fact that they are OMG LESBIANS!!! (never mind that Caithe had already been there, done that, and it was part of how her character grew and changed rather than a thing that made her character fade— in other words, like any sexuality, it is part of who she is, not what defines her); and by the end of the Living Story, Rox and Braham could only talk about one issue between them and each of them only had one goal.

Of course, this is just a guess; I don’t know how y’all work. But it seems like it might help to have certain writers take on certain characters for the entire duration, or perhaps very close collaboration when one writer succeeds another so there’s no actual “handing off” but instead a gradual shift.

Corollary of 2.) Depict the inevitable disintegration or at least drastic restructuring of the Pact.

The last few Living Story updates provide a very strong basis for why characters who act like people would begin to seriously question the usefulness of the Pact and particularly the abilities of its leadership. The Pact had a number of reasons to want to protect Lion’s Arch.

1: It was made abundantly clear before the attack on Lion’s Arch that Scarlet was attempting to tamper with ley lines. If dragons consume magic, as is conclusively proven during the course of the Living Story and thus common knowledge to the Pact, then anything that affects the ley lines should be very troubling to the Pact because it could have unforeseen and drastic effects even on the dragons that are currently awake (the fact that it actually woke up another dragon notwithstanding). I don’t expect the Pact to have been able to predict Scarlet’s intentions, but I do expect an organization with the express purpose of fighting dragons to be concerned that whatever Scarlet’s goal might be, in the process her actions could have serious effects on the dragons.

2: Even without taking dragons into consideration, Lion’s Arch is the major trade hub of the currently known Tyrian world, so its destruction would mean severe disruption of the Pact’s supply lines in its operations around Tyria, drastically decreasing the Pact’s efficiency and effectiveness and even causing problems like rampant illness due to undernourished soldiers and scarce medical supplies.

3. A dragon has already attacked Lion’s Arch and Claw Island, and was rebuffed because Claw Island was held long enough and Lion’s Arch didn’t fall. If Lion’s Arch were to fall, that would create a serious vulnerability on the Tyrian coastline, allowing any other dragon, or even just the unled hordes of Risen, easy access to the Tyrian mainland and an angle of attack on all three Order headquarters.

4. The headquarters of every Order in the Pact are close to Lion’s Arch, and especially easily accessible when the attacker has airships for crying out loud! Given that Scarlet’s motives were bizarrely unclear to people who you think would know better given that they live in a land full of Dragons, the Pact should have been seriously concerned that her plans might have included an assault on any, or all three, of the Order headquarters.

1 continued

I had the same problem with Trahearne. Unless you play a certain step of the Sylvari Personal Story in which you meet him, you have almost no clue who he is until suddenly your best buddy in your Order is dead, and now you’re expected to develop a bond with this new guy instantly! He seems to know everyone, but you’ve never heard about him before! Sure, he was off in Orr, but the transition from “far away and never heard of” to “he is in charge and replacing your buddy who died” is far too abrupt. While the fact that it’s wartime and you have to act quickly certainly applies during the Battle of Claw Island, the reason doesn’t seem to be that there’s a time crunch within the game, but that there was a time crunch during development and there just wasn’t time to create content introducing the player to Trahearne. The sense of urgency is also greatly diminished by the fact that the story steps are so many character levels apart, so it feels all the more abrupt. Interstitial chapters, perhaps involving interacting with Trahearne more immediately after Claw Island but before the next story step, and maybe an interstitial chapter involving getting to meet him beforehand, would create a chance to turn him into more than a piece of cardboard who got thrust into a leadership role and develop his actual character through those all-important but seemingly insignificant little conversations and small-scale interactions. (Of course, this thread is about Living Story, but Trahearne’s part in Personal Story can still illustrate what problems there are that need to be changed.)

2.) Study people, and make the people you create act like people.

This seems to be a far bigger problem for Living Story than it does for other parts of the game, perhaps because of the time crunches you put yourselves under with the relatively rapid pace of the updates (an issue I’ll elaborate on later). For example, Tybalt is a person. He has goals, fears, quirks, flaws, redeeming and endearing qualities. Scarlet, on the other hand, is a caricature of a person. Her qualities are so exaggerated— so VERY smart that she sped through every Asuran college! So VERY charismatic that she managed to join the incredibly racist Inquest and didn’t end up dissected, then persuaded a bunch of xenophobic or at best xeno-suspicious groups to work together! So VERY powerful that a threat from her could put any of her minions in line! And even though we’ve never heard of her before, everyone immediately cares about her and declares her brilliant. People do not use the words Mary Sue (warning, link is to TV Tropes and may be highly addictive and result in compulsive link-clicking and lost hours) to describe her lightly: she is set up as too impossibly brilliant at everything she does, faces absolutely no consequences for her actions (if a Sylvari tries to coerce the Inquest, she will not come out of that without a few scars— heck, if she’d had scars and injuries and traumas from every single group of crazy violent villains she’d tried to take control over, then I might have believed she’d actually done it and even had some respect for her getting through adversity like that), and has literally no flaws (besides being evil and trying to wake up a dragon, but she gets to wash her hands of that one because it wasn’t really her! She was losing a fight for her own mind!). Trahearne is less obnoxiously Gary Stu-ish but still has some troubling symptoms: everyone knows him, he’s given a position of great power soon after you meet him, and he’s basically treated as The Chosen One.

When characters don’t start out as cartoons, they have a disturbing tendency to gain and lose aspects of their character, or more frequently to have their defining features and their goals and desires exaggerated over time, a process called Flanderization (warning, another TV tropes link, use at your circadian rhythm’s own risk), until they begin to get cartoony themselves.

My suggestions ended up being… really long. I have a verbosity problem, but given how much help the Living Story needs, I figured I needed to be as explicit and detailed as possible. If it’s too long, feel free to disregard it or delete it or (best option:) let me know and I’ll try to cut it down so it will actually be read. Here we go!

Since we were asked for feedback, I’ll give my three cents. All of these essentially fall under the umbrella of “show, don’t tell.” That’s not even a suggestion; it’s a necessity, a basic law of writing and especially of game design because of the interactive and visual elements. If you can interact and you can see things, then sitting around not being able to interact and just being told things (and sometimes even being told things that aren’t what you see, as in that Cogs-awful intro to the Tower of Nightmares where Marjory talked like she was reading aloud from a badly-written book and described things in a way that didn’t match up with what was happening on the screen) is simply agonizing.

It should go without saying, then, that providing information that really is integral to the game’s story anywhere that is not within the game is a bad idea. The truly supplemental short stories that illuminate and enhance the game, such as the origin story of Mr. Sparkles, are great. The Scarlet-related short stories, which were a sorry attempt to try to make Scarlet into an actual character and not a cartoonish mess, failed because when something that is depicted (intentionally or unintentionally) and something that is told to us conflict, we believe what we see, not what we read. Scarlet was portrayed with no personality to speak of, so believing that she could even have a backstory was a challenge, much less matching the short stories with the grating caricature of a villain we saw on-screen.

1.) Introduce characters by placing them in the world before they become part of the story.

I’ve said several times on the forums that I really like ANet’s small-scale writing, at least that which is separate from the Personal and Living Stories; I love talking to minor NPCs all over Tyria, or just hanging around them and listening to their conversations, because their writing is generally very good. Not only are they funny, but these tiny interactions flesh out the world, giving you a better sense of different races’ cultures, what life is like in Tyria, what’s going on locally and in the rest of the world, and so on. It’s a form of storytelling that works very well in video games, because it’s brief, it’s interactive (either because you’re talking to the NPC yourself or you’ve placed yourself in the area where the conversation happens, and are able to leave whenever you want), and it’s demonstrative rather than simply descriptive: rather than just outright saying “Asura are highly competitive and protective of their ideas,” you have a couple different conversations between Asura in Rata Sum in which one reacts with hostility or caginess to a simple greeting from another.

That’s why I was baffled by the fact that although Scarlet trained with the Hylek, worked with the (very racist) Inquest (which is an impressive feat in and of itself, given that she is NOT AN ASURA, and you’d think somebody would mention that), blazed through Dynamics (my character’s college) in a year… I’d never heard of her until suddenly she was there at the Queen’s Jubilee! I can understand most Asura keeping mum about a Sylvari exceeding their own race’s students at their own colleges out of sheer embarrassment, but certainly at least somebody would mention her, if only in passing. Her past was detailed only in short stories that were not even integrated with the game at all until nearly the end of her arc, and we never had any places or people to associate with her backstory; it was like she existed entirely separate from the world until she just showed up as the most amazingest perfectest Scary Sue villain of all time who everybody knows about of course! Then, when we did finally get some NPCs to flesh out her story through in-game dialogue (instead of “supplemental” material that was far more than supplemental), they spoke about her 1) as if everyone either already knew everything about her or knew nothing about her at all, and 2) with an out-of-character reverence (very few Asura would call a Sylvari “brilliant” without adding a qualifier— “for a Sylvari, of course,” or “she was Asura-trained, after all”) that smacked very uncomfortably of Mary Sue-dom.

Combination NC.9813:

Curtis Johnson.8456:

Yes, we do have to give up some of our current closet space and clothing to fit the new wardrobe in. Again, apologies for that.

It is quite rude to barge into someone else’s closet unasked to destroy their clothes.

Precisely! Although it’s more like barging into the closet, attaching random bits of fabric they brought with them to some of your shirts to turn them into “outfits,” and grouping up your other clothes and supergluing them together; so you still have your clothes, but you can’t use them like you used to. And then getting confused, because you still have your clothes! Sure, now they’ve got extra bits stuck all over them and some of them are glued together, but you still have them, right? …Right…?

And before anyone pulls the “they made the clothes so they can take them away” excuse: If I buy clothes from a store and then employees of that store take them away from me a few months later, though I thought I’d be able to, y’know, keep them, that is not an okay thing. If they had said at checkout, “You’re not actually buying these clothes; you’re renting them for a few months, and we’re going to change them after that,” I might not be so mad, although I’d still be a bit ticked when their reasons for changing them turn out to be either secret or completely unreasonable.

Conncept.7638:

Guys if you think his points on the technical reasons are contradictory its because you have no idea how modeling and animation works. Quit being know-it-alls and learn about the issues before just assuming they’er giving excuses.

(snip)

The thing is, at this point we’re not even asking to be able to mix different armor weights. A few people mentioned it early in the thread back when we were being all hopeful, but it’s more of a pipe dream than anything; an addition to the argument, not the foundation of it. Simply retaining the ability to mix town clothes with other town clothes is what we want; and since we already can mix town clothes with town clothes, doesn’t that make it far more feasible to be able to continue to do so? Isn’t it more work to do something like turning a T-shirt into a tonic that also has to include pants and shoes and such, when that T-shirt could just be used the way it’s already used instead?

The problem is that the “answer” provided talked about how difficult it is to mix armor weights, but as it is town clothes and armor won’t mix anyways, so that’s entirely moot.

The only possible argument for single-slot Outfits is that if ANet wants to make things that are only compatible with themselves in future, such as a chicken suit or something as previously mentioned, it would have to take up every slot. Well, some town clothes already eclipse more than one slot; what’s to keep them from making any future single-slot Outfits just eclipse every other slot the same way the Witch’s Outfit eclipses pants?

chemiclord.3978:

In my experience, I have generally found when a developer digs in their heels like this in spite of a very vocal protest, it’s not because they want to.

My completely non-snarky guess at what happened;
(snip)
- The new model is quicker to produce and costs less in terms of resources, hopefully giving Arena.net a better return on investment and trying to appeal to those who ignored town clothes because they were deemed pointless. They know they’re kittening off the group that liked the old way… but they really can’t do anything for it.

The problem, though, if it’s a monetary issue… why on Earth would they go to the trouble of adding pants and shoes and whatnot to vests that have become tonics, or making any of the other extensive changes they’ll have to make to get this single-slot Outfit thing to work? Or, they could even keep the paper doll and turn it into Outfits rather than Town Clothes, keep up the pretense that they’ll release multi-slot Outfits in the future, and then just make sets of things that go in one slot and eclipse the other slots (like the Witch outfit eclipsing pants, mentioned above) so they don’t have to worry about seams and can make things faster and cheaper.

Sure, that would be a kitten move, but if their motivation is monetary, it would also be a much smarter one; and it would also not tick people off nearly so much because it would be just a reduction in the customization of future items, not a reduction in the customization of future items and past items. Honestly, I’d rather they be a little less honest if that’s the case: keep the old town clothes mix-and-matchable, then just start pumping out non-mixable sets that override them, but at least we get to keep what we had!

Instead, they’re wasting time and money AND making people unhappy. I just don’t see how that could be possible except as a result of incompetence and/or miscommunication. (Which is totally understandable when you consider that this is a long-term project being worked on by many people— yeah, miscommunication and screw-ups are probably going to happen.) If I had to hazard a guess regarding the cause of their obstinacy? Human nature: it’s hard to admit you’ve made a mistake, it’s easy to get defensive and dig in your heels instead, and it’s just plain difficult to work together with other people to fix something that’s gone horribly wrong when they’re all getting embarrassed and defensive too— even if the fix seems easy to people who aren’t stuck inside the emotional boiler with you, trying to get people to calm down enough to implement it without losing their heads.

No matter what the motivation and what the explanation, there’s a better way to go about it than this. I just hope they decide to listen and do the thing that’s both easier AND less likely to make people angry. I continue to hold out hope that they will come around before I have to decide whether or not to hold on to my tonicified and outfitized town clothes in the hopes that they’ll fix them eventually, once the psychological defense mechanisms wear off.

chemiclord.3978:

Since we’re playing on that “highly logical” extreme.

McDonalds would probably kick you out of the store long before two years to eat the burger you paid for. Just sayin’…

This feature film has been modified in proportion and duration to fit on your TV.

Rabbi Rick.3194:

Curtis Johnson.8456:

As always we ask you to try out the new system of customization (snip)

One does not need to try out the new customization to know that

1. Outfits as ALL OR NOTHING is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE.
2. Individual clothing pieces that were purchased to mix with other individual clothing pieces that are turned into tonics that can only be used one at a time and produce an Anet decided choice of complete outfits that are not even dyable is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE.

(snip)

Dear ANet:

Using Rabbi Rick’s highly logical statement as a starting point, I have decided to dramatize this conversation, to illustrate and inform, and perhaps to get it through your collective skull that has been so thickened by the pressures of trying to organize things while being multiple people.

Picture ordering a burger at McDonald’s, or some other establishment that exchanges burgers for money if you prefer. You order a hamburger. It comes with lettuce and onions, but you forgot to say you didn’t want lettuce and onions— oh well! No need to mention it, since it’s easy to fix. You take off the lettuce and onions, and sit down to enjoy your burger.

You are halfway through your burger when an employee comes up, takes your burger, and hands you another one. It doesn’t just have lettuce and onions on it— all the toppings, including lettuce and onions, are taped on with duct tape covered in a pattern of little Ronald McDonalds. “But I didn’t want—” you start, but the employee cuts you off.

“Sorry, but we’ve got a new policy now. You have to eat the whole thing now, or none of it. It’s too inefficient to keep customizing burgers. Now we can make more burgers, faster! Also, you can take the burger wherever you want, and the toppings won’t fall off!”

“Why couldn’t I just keep eating the burger that I already had?” you wonder aloud.

A guy waiting at the counter sneers, “Well if you liked being able to customize your burger so much, why didn’t you tell them that before they changed it?”

“I didn’t know they would change it!” you retort indignantly, then turn back to the employee. “So, now I’m telling you: I liked the burger I already had. Why can’t I keep it?”

“Well,” the employee responds, “if you found a problem with it, due to our new policy, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything about your old burger, because we don’t want to keep fixing old burgers.”

“But I didn’t have a problem with my old burger…”

A guy sitting at the next table over pipes up. “My friends and I wanted to be able to take our burgers anywhere without the toppings falling off. Now we can! We don’t care if we can’t choose the toppings!”

“Isn’t that a pretty bad way to make a burger portable though?” you wonder. “Surely there’s got to be a better way. Maybe put it in a removable wrapper or something…”

Ignoring you, the employee continues, “We don’t support old burgers. But now, if you find a problem with your new burger, we can fix that!” He doesn’t seem to get that your problem is with the entirety of the new-burger situation.

“But I don’t like lettuce and onions!” you retort. “I want my old burger back, or to be able to take the lettuce and onions off this one! Or at least the duct tape…”

“Sorry, it can’t be helped. We apologize,” says the employee.

A guy just coming out of the bathroom says, “Well I don’t even eat burgers. Just ask for your money back if you don’t like it.”

You decide this is less ideal than having the burger you liked back, but at least it’s something. “I don’t want an apology; I want you to fix this, or I want my money back!”

“You’re eligible for a refund if your cheeseburger was replaced!” the employee says cheerfully. “Oh, it’s a hamburger? You don’t get a refund for that. Only cheeseburgers.”

“But… but that’s ridiculous!” you retort.

A guy in a booth across the room yells, “Well, why don’t you just ask for a refund then?”

“He just said I can’t get one!” you answer, wondering how this could have gone so wrong so quickly.

Another guy a couple tables down adds, “I think it’s a good thing, if it lets them make more burgers more quickly! I just hope I don’t have to have pickles on mine.”

“But you do have to have pickles!” you cry, exasperated. “He just said that! All I want is the burger I had, the one that I paid for! Why did you even sell it to me if you knew your burger-making policy was about to change!?”

“What are you so upset about?” the employee asks, scoffing at you as he starts duct-taping your old burger together. “You should try it before you say you don’t like it!”

Alfador.7649:

(snip)

Town clothes always existed as a way to step outside of the armor weight system, and now it’s going away because it…. steps outside the armor weight system? What?

(snip)

Even more confusingly, in Curtis’ post it seemed like the Voice of ANet Speaking Through Curtis (sorry dude, I’m trying to tear your post apart without tearing you apart, hope you understand) was trying to say that town clothes were intended to be a way to step outside of the armor system.

I’m going to make a stab in the dark as to the thought processes involved here:
- Town clothes should be a way to step outside the armor system.
- Town clothes are functioning as intended.
(later)
- We can’t figure out how to make town clothes that don’t look like Light/Medium armor, or Light/Medium armor that doesn’t look like town clothes.
- We don’t really know how people use town clothes anyways. Do they even use them?
- Therefore, we should get rid of town clothes.
(later)
- Hm, we need a way to step outside the armor system.
- We should make a thing called Outfits that you can wear instead of your armor!
- This will be a fun thing that will allow for greater flexibility and customization!
- We don’t want it to take up too much space or be too difficult… Let’s make it just one slot.
- Look at our pretty UI and how the Outfit slot doesn’t get in the way of the awesome new Wardrobe! This is a great idea!
(later)
- What are we going to do with all the town clothes people bought, now that we’re getting rid of town clothes? They might be mad…
- We don’t really know how people use town clothes anyways. Let’s try to figure it out…
- People use town clothes outside combat.
- People use tonics outside combat.
- We should turn town clothes into tonics!
(later)
- Hey, look, some of these town clothes are complete outfits, just like Outfits are!
- We should make those ones into Outfits!
(later)
- Outfits are a way to step outside the armor system.
- Outfits are functioning as intended.
(later)
- Wonderful customers, look what we made!
- Outfits will increase your options for customization and creativity!
- What do you mean they won’t?
- Of course they will! Stop making things up!
- We apologize lol!
(later)
- The players are mad. They want us to explain why we’re getting rid of town clothes.
- We should explain things to them so they are no longer mad.
- Why did we get rid of town clothes again?
- Okay everyone stop talking at once.
- Alright I think we’ve got a list of reasons now.
- Curtis, go tell the players our list of reasons.
(later)
- What do you mean, some of our reasons conflict with each other?
- No they don’t! Stop making things up!
- We apologize lol!

I can only assume that this entire debacle is due to long stretches of time elapsing between various steps of decision-making, and the fact that ANet is an organization made of people, and people are forgetful and get themselves confused, but they get even MORE confused when they have more people to be confused with.

chemiclord.3978:

You might as well lock and trash this thread, A.net.

Because all you’re going to hear from this point on is blind, seething rage.

I object, good sir! (assuming sir because “lord”)

My rage may be seething, but it is certainly not blind!

In fact, I rather wish I did not see what I do see. I’d rather go back to having blind, happy calm rather than alert, seething rage. I don’t want to have to start figuratively jumping at every noise and checking every shadow because some highly discouraging things were implied by game creators I really want to trust.

I really hope I’m seeing things that aren’t there and inferring inferences that weren’t implied. I really really hope that’s the case. But I don’t know if I can be optimistic about it at this point.

shogei.8015:

Personally, I am happy to shelve my medium armor trench coats for a more uniform system that allows greater mix and match potential. What I don’t want is to say goodbye to my Gogo bunny.

If this patch goes through as planned… Given that you can’t stack endless tonics…

RIP, Gogo bunny :C

Lamont.5973:

As I think about this more, here is what really really worries me.

New armor looks were already almost gem store exclusive. The only new ingame armor we have seen since launch is ascended.

Now, instead of having to make 6 pieces of armor for 3 classes and 5 races each time they come up with a new look, all they need to do is design a single look across all three classes and only two (or maybe 3) separate pieces (body, head and gloves [assuming gloves can be hidden like the helm]).

In other words, I think this has nothing to do with “benefits” to the player and is really the first step in avoiding new armor looks. They will simply make new outfits and call it good.

I doubt we will see anymore new armors or armor skins from this point forward other than maybe helms or gloves.

(oops, I see Twyll beat me to it while I was typing)

this does NOT look good for the future of this game.

I really, really hate to be so skeptical— I have been trying so hard to be optimistic about all this and say “Anet will listen to us!” and “we’ll get answers!”— but I am very much afraid you might be right. If the point of Outfits is to make it easier to make armor sets available to ALL armor classes, you’d think mixing and matching would be even more desirable for that feature— unless you want to reduce the time you spend on it so you can make more money for less effort. I hate having to type that! I don’t want to believe a thing like that! But what other explanation is there, if everything in that post by Curtis was true?

I believe this thread may now need to start including not just pictures of people mixing and matching town clothes, but people mixing and matching gem store armors (if they have them. I was planning on buying a gem store armor to use just the skirt for a character in the future… but I guess I won’t be doing that now!).

Edit to add: I’m sure current gem store armors will remain in separate pieces, at least, because it won’t take any— Cogs forbid!— extra work to have them remain that way… I just don’t want to buy that skin now until I see that this Outfit thing really won’t be used in the way we’re now afraid it will be.

PurebladeProductions.4875:

(snip)
Since both my shirt and my gloves have been confirmed to become endless tonics, the best I can hope for is that my Endless Tonic of the Dragon Emblem Shirt outfit and Endless Tonic of wearing a pair of Boxing Gloves will not overwrite each other, and my Sunglasses armor skin will still be displayed while under effects of the tonic(s).

It’s been confirmed earlier in the thread that endless tonics will still be only one-at-a-time, and I’m pretty sure it would be even harder to make multiple tonics compatible with one another than it would be to make things remain compatible that already are compatible with one another.

PurebladeProductions.4875:

I’ll be looking forward to what new things we’ll get, hopefully good things

Given that the new things are implied to be more outfits, not just in place of town clothes but in place of gem store armor sets that come out in sets of three different weights, I sincerely doubt they will be good things. They will be things that are easier and faster to make, perhaps… but not good things.

videoboy.4162:

Curtis Johnson.8456:

Snipped

So, if I’m understanding you correctly, we’re losing the functionality of certain pieces of Town Clothing but, in doing so, we’re gaining a system that will allow you to provide us with even more variety, in a shorter amount of time?

That sounds like a good trade to me.

If your definition of “variety” is “more outfits, but the only way they can be customized is by dye color.” There’s only a single “outfit” slot, not a proper paper doll, so any outfit they create in the future will not be mix-and-match. It has been confirmed that they only way to change an Outfit is to dye it and to hide or show the hat.

There was also a rather troubling remark in there about how they didn’t like having to design an armor set for each different armor weight when they brought out new ones in the gem store. That means that new armor sets are also likely to be Outfits, since the stated purpose of Outfits is to provide a way to use an armor set without it being dependent on which armor weight you use, which means they won’t have mixable parts either. This might speed up the rate at which they can make new armors, but it also means that every single one of them will be uncustomizable because they will have to fit into only a single slot.

In other words, it really doesn’t look like a good trade at all unless they have some sort of Fount of Infinite Variety, because it will take a lot of variety in future to make up for taking away the ability to mix and match town clothes AND future gem store armors.

Part 2:

Curtis Johnson.8456:

In addition to armor skins that are easier and cheaper to collect across characters and the account dye system we do believe the options across a players whole account are much more attractive now.

Yes, the wardrobe in general is going to be lovely, but this thread isn’t about that. It’s about something being taken away that really looks like it didn’t need to be taken away in order for the wardrobe to function, and we still don’t have any answers as to why it apparently does have to be taken away in order for the other changes to work.

Curtis Johnson.8456:

You’ll see more outfits coming out this summer and additions to the game more often usable by your characters.

I think it’s been fairly well-established that very few people use entire outfits. Why would more entire outfits make us happy? This answer also seems to assume that your clothing designers will suddenly become capable of designing entire outfits for Charr that do not look ridiculous. There is no evidence to support the idea that they have this capability, given that players of Charr have to pick and choose pieces of armor and town clothing very carefully to make them look decent in their eyes. I’m not saying I could do any better, but I am saying that dressing a Charr is not easy, and allowing some individual choice in the matter is probably safer than assuming that you’ll be capable of doing a very difficult task.

Curtis Johnson.8456:

We try not to allow too much ‘hoarder’ design where we just keep stacking more and more options on leaving lots of unsupported things hanging around.

The town clothes paper doll has never broken before, to my knowledge. I sincerely doubt leaving it in the game would necessitate any further support beyond un-removing the ability to use it. That would even leave the designers with the freedom to create new outfits that aren’t all in one piece if they ever decide they want to! (And what designer DOESN’T appreciate a bit of creative freedom here and there? I can’t imagine they’re all satisfied with this unnecessary change either.)

Curtis Johnson.8456:

I think many people will be surprised by how many pieces have become armor compatible.

Wait, hold on. I thought you were saying that there were problems mixing town clothes and armor. Now you’re saying a lot of them are going to be compatible? How is it easier to make them compatible with armor, which they weren’t designed to be compatible with, and not each other, which they are designed to be compatible with?

Curtis Johnson.8456:

We hope the benefits to the outfit system and wardrobe in terms of future support and additions will be clear

They are not.

Perhaps this answer was formulated before the people involved read the suggestions regarding being able to construct one’s own outfits using town clothes with other town clothes and not with armor pieces, since it is apparent that you will not be making town clothes compatible with armor, but only with itself as a full outfit or tonic. (Except for some items that you refuse to specify, so we have no idea how many or if you’re underestimating our threshold for surprise. I have to admit you’re doing a brilliant job of lowering my expectations, though.)

Right now, it seems like you’re saying that because some single items of town clothing can’t mix with the various weights of armor, you’re going to stop allowing any town clothes to be mixed with each other. In other words, your reasoning for being unable to do something we would like you to do is that you can’t do something that we didn’t really expect you to be able to do in the first place.

Your answer has described why you’d like town clothes to be useable in combat, and why you’d like some of them but not others to be useable with armor…? But there is not a single thing in there that describes why town clothes can no longer be used with other town clothes. Is there really truly no way at all to be able to cobble together your own “Outfit”? And if there’s something in the way of that, what IS it!? Otherwise, there is no logical reason not to give Outfits their own paper doll like town clothes have now.

(Looks like this is going to have to be a two-part post. But I’m sorry, this “answer” raises more questions than it answers.)

Curtis, thank you for the answer, and I’m sorry you have to be the mouthpiece for the decisions of a group and take all the flak for it. (Please read every “you” in the following post as a plural you or a y’all or something, because this is meant for everyone who came up with the words you posted, not for you personally.) But it still doesn’t make sense to me.

Curtis Johnson.8456:

We do understand and sincerely apologize that there are creative combinations of town clothes that will not exist anymore. Many have asked why remove town clothes as a concept. It boils down to we believe better armor skinning and the outfit system is something we can add more options to more often and will produce a better supported RP game for everyone with more variety in the future. In short, a healthier game.

This is a reduction in variety, though. Every single “outfit,” including new outfits you make, will look the same with only dye changes and hat/no hat as the options, and the tonics will look entirely identical! How does combining everything into one piece make for more variety unless your clothing designers suddenly become clothes-making dynamos and put out dozens of outfits? (And I hope you don’t expect to charge the same price for a single uncustomizeable “outfit” as you did for a set of town clothes!) Is it really entirely impossible to implement mix-and-match outfits that consist only of town clothes, since they will continue to be separate from armor anyways? This is the exact opposite of “more options”!

Curtis Johnson.8456:

To expand more on what I mean by better support, It helps if you think of town clothes as a 4th weight class of armor. Clothing was meant to offer visual options that break the class roles, however we were never completely happy with the way it was isolated from the rest of the game and still felt largely the same. Many pieces could have easily been mistaken for light or medium armor. In many ways it was more akin to building an alt character because town-clothes and armor were so separated. Additionally, every time we added something to town-clothes, it didn’t really help someone building their light, medium, or heavy look. And there was no way to add combat gear fairly without creating 3 versions on the back end (light, medium, and heavy). As a customization platform and sustainable expansion design it left a lot to be desired.

So town clothing was meant to act as a separate class of armor… but because it didn’t help people build looks in the OTHER three classes of armor, you decided it wasn’t working? Doesn’t the fact that people could wear it no matter what armor class they had mean it was working? If town clothes could be mistaken for light or medium armor, then how does giving them to Heavy armor wearers in combat but only as entire outfits without even the ability to change your hat fix that? I still do not understand the logic here. Also, there are plenty of people who buy sets of combat armor and then split those sets across different characters— so am I to interpret the desire to create armor sets that don’t have 3 different weights to mean that you want new armor sets to be “outfits” too, and ALSO unsplittable!?

Curtis Johnson.8456:

When we started looking at bringing more of the clothing back into armor with mix and match styles there are some fundamental incompatible things between weight classes. (part of how we set up every armor to allow many dye channels and styles per piece).. There really is no way at this point over six years since we started development to make absolutely everything work together. So we needed something new to continue to grow in the future.

As you are going to implement them, town clothes will still not mix with armor. We won’t be able to mix armor with town clothes, but why are you taking away the ability to mix town clothes with town clothes? You still haven’t answered the question!

Curtis Johnson.8456:

Outfits give us a way to create highly stylized looks that aren’t constrained to armor slots or weight class.

Yes, we have been enjoying doing that ourselves. Thank you.

Substance E.4852:

Didn’t do jack squat for Crit damage changes and the watchwork pick still gives out sprockets.

Adjusting the balance of power between classes is something that one generally expects out of an MMO; changing the function of items you’ve already bought and paid for is not something one expects. So, zerker builds get nerfed a bit and people who like other builds don’t have to be told they should go zerker or go home; and the pick continues to function in the way that it was advertised when people bought it, with the added effect that people who don’t have the pick and don’t have sprocket generators are able to buy sprockets on the TP for cheaper than if the picks stopped making sprockets. (Play enough games of Settlers of Catan and you’ll understand why, even if another player is profiting off the fact that she’s the only one who produces ore, you don’t put the Thief on that hex and stop her ability to produce that ore because then nobody’s able to steal ore from her or trade for it with her, the ore in play runs out, and the game grinds to a halt. Unless the game grinding to a halt amuses you somehow.)

Trickle-down sprockenomics aside, the point of my first statement is that when somebody buys something on the TP, there is a reasonable expectation that it will continue to function the way it does. If ANet undermines that, they will damage the faith that the playerbase— and pay-erbase— has in their ability to provide what they sold, and they will lose money. It’s also a thing that nobody really benefits from: you can reason that people who don’t focus on crit damage benefit from crit damage nerfs, and that people who want to buy sprockets with in-game money benefit from Watchwork picks producing sprockets, but the people who want to use town clothes in combat don’t benefit from the change because it makes the thing they wanted to use far less useful.

It is for these reasons that I believe ANet will fix this issue.

…Please don’t prove me wrong, guys. Please?

Yumeijin.5439:

And what about the majority of players who don’t use Town Clothes? You’re willing to delay a feature they want so Anet can fix the Town Clothes issue and release the whole package later, rather than allow those people to have their feature while a potential fix gets added to Town Clothes later?

I don’t think anyone’s asking to delay the entire wardrobe system (although a few posts can be read that way; it’s likely that that’s not what they meant to imply given that this thread is focusing just on the town clothes/costumes/tonics issue), just the part that messes with Town Clothes. Numerous suggestions for temporary fixes that could very reasonably be achieved within a few weeks have been made, even, so combat-ready town clothes could be achieved without completely negating their appeal. (Although ANet’s lack of response a day after promising us a response is giving me a bit of doubt regarding the “in a few weeks” thing….)

Are there that many people who are really super-desperate to use town clothes in combat… but only as either uncustomizeable tonics or an entire outfit? I think it’s reasonable to assume that the people clamoring for combat-ready town clothes weren’t expecting the ability to customize them to be almost entirely taken away in the process. If someone said “I want to be able to fight in my Wintersday coat and earmuffs,” giving him the ability to fight in his Wintersday coat OR earmuffs isn’t exactly giving him the feature he wanted! And he had no reason to expect for an ability that he already had to be taken away, so why would he mention it in his initial request?

Titan Cronus.9216:

Djinn.9245:

Titan Cronus.9216:

GW has always had a general ethos of realism in the game. Like for example, you can’t make your characters look like manga or cartoon characters because they want to keep a particular sence of realism or you can’t make your characters super big or small. In my opinion, letting people be "able to “costume” while adventuring" is a step in the wrong direction. One of the things that specific and unique to GW2 is the Town Clothes system. It should be celebrated and expanded apon, not removed.

Realism? Like weapons that shoot unicorns? Or like wearing a stuffed quaggan backpack into combat?

Lol, It’s not lost on me the irony of my statment but the game is set in a fictional reality.

One of the main aims of any piece of fiction is to make the reality in which it’s set seem believable. So far, in my opinion, GW has done a cracking job but I feel that this does not complaiment the game.

I feel like the way the way the world of GW2 establishes believability is through its vibrant small-scale writing and design (conversations between NPCs that both amuse the listener and flesh out the world, little interactions like NPCs saluting you for killing Scarlet, more readable books and letters than the freaking Elder Scrolls MMO has) and the way that each player race has a culture that is distinct, interesting, and unique (as shown in the early parts of the Personal Story, before everything falls apart because the scale of the story starts to exceed the area where ANet really excels) and many NPC races do as well (especially the Skritt and the Quaggans, although what I’ve seen of the Grawl— albeit not terribly much— tends to disappoint).

The aesthetics of the equipment are decidedly NOT an area wherein ANet establishes realism, largely because of the presence of so many high varied cultures. You can have a glowy pixellated Super Adventure Box weapon skin designed by an Asura; an intricate, delicately detailed, and definitely non-glowy Krytan weapon skin designed by a Human; a set of industrial-looking armor designed by Dredge; and a bow that shoots unicorns designed by a really bored genie. You can already run around with dragon wings, holographic dragon wings, or tentacles sprouting from your back. Light armor, particularly female Light armor, and even some Heavy armor defies any possible Earthly logic; the only possible explanation is that the materials used in making armor are suffused with magic, and the process of constructing armor is more a magical than mundane one, so the scraps of fabric that barely cover a female Human in T3 Light armor provide arcane rather than physical protection (rather in the same way that in Dungeons and Dragons, a magical set of leather armor can provide more protection than a mundane set of metal armor).

That same argument could be applied to Town Clothes, many of which actually provide more physical protection than some in-game armors. “Introducing Riding Pants, now made using the same magitechnical process that makes your long flowing skirt fireproof and bulletproof!”

Of course, whether in-universe logic allows for combat versions of Town Clothes isn’t really the issue here; it’s the very poor implementation that’s worrying us.

Max Lexandre.6279:

NoxInfernus.2361:

Don’t mistake silence for compliance, acceptance, or apathy.
I was once told that if one person takes the time to write a complaint = 100 people who are of the same mindset but don’t for a variety of reasons.

I agree that most people feel even if they hate what is going to happen, there is no point into post on the forums about it, as there is no chance to their feedback do any impact on ArenaNet’s decision.

I know that personally I’m speaking on behalf of at least three friends who feel very strongly on the issue but either 1) don’t think feedback will change anything (please prove me wrong, ANet) or 2) just don’t have time to post things in the forum. Also, the official forum is hardly the only place where people talk about GW2. I know many people prefer reddit, though I haven’t been over there to check opinions on the matter because when I go to reddit I have a tendency to get stuck… (It’s almost as bad as TV Tropes.)

Spanex.1950:

Since some light has been shed upon the mix&match issues, I can understand the changes being made.

Actually, very little light has been shed upon the issues by the devs themselves. Curtis has told us that there are “more than just clipping problems” but hasn’t elaborated (probably because he wasn’t authorized to— apparently they’ve been having a bit of a powwow over at ANet to figure out how to respond to this whole thing, and it’s understandable that nobody can really say much in the meantime to prevent misleading information from getting out and getting us confused). Most of the light shed has been informed guesses by people familiar with meshes, skins, and other aspects of 3D art and animation, but it’s still just speculation.

I hold out hope that today (once they’re done with their morning coffee— I’m remembering the time difference this time!… darned East Coast), ANet as a group will at least decide to tell us what exactly the technical limitations are that caused them to make these illogical-seeming choices, so maybe we can try to brainstorm solutions. After all, there have been collaborative development projects before, yes? Why not collaborative fixes?

nGumball.1283:

You can start a company and compete in the market with GW2. You seem to know more about games than Anet and Blizzard.

You seem to have a grasp of sarcasm. You should build, fund, and manage a comedy club because obviously you know everything about everything to do with comedy. :P

Seriously though, adding an opinion on a single aspect of game design that happens to be involved in the issue at hand is something that contributes to the discussion. Making sarcastic remarks is something that does not. Weren’t we politely requested to be civil earlier?

To get back to the topic at hand, it seems like we’re not going to get much of anywhere until at least tomorrow, because a consensus on what answers to give us was apparently not reached today, and there isn’t really any work day left (although Curtis has been valiantly trying to answer questions about the changes we desperately hope will not be implemented, in the meantime). It will be much easier to try to brainstorm solutions once we know what exactly the problems are that necessitated tonicization, but in the meantime we can certainly try to figure things out as best we can and just hope the issue will be clarified soon.

(Nudge nudge wink wink ANet. I’m telling you exactly how to make people happy: by telling us what the problem is. Because curiosity killed the Skritt and it’s kinda killing us right now. Be as technical as you want because there are apparently at least a couple of us who understand 3-D models and animation who can translate for Music/English majors like me if they need to.)

Curtis Johnson.8456:

Bonefield has a pretty good understanding here of why some mix and match is not easy at all. Some armor and clothing combinations are fundamentally not mixable, (for more than just clipping reasons)

Would it be possible, then, to give us the option to just use our town clothes outside of combat and not mix them with armor, like we used to be able to choose between PvP skins and PvE skins when buying a skin off the gem store? “You can have this item as a group of different pieces of town clothes, or an all-in-one outfit that you can use in combat” sort of a thing? That would still be better than… tonicization!

EDIT: These are a much better idea:

Jabberwock.9014:

Can you explain why you don’t just disallow mixing armor and townclothes then? … Just make it so that if you are overriding armor with townclothes, you have to override ALL slots.

Silent Avenger.6928:

I still do not see why you can’t keep the town clothes slots then just count those slots as a single “outfit”? They wouldn’t be mixing with anything else other than town clothes then so where would the problem be if you did this? …

I’ll also throw my lot in with the “willing to wait” crowd. I would totally be okay with waiting for combat-ready town clothes.

Perhaps it would be possible to implement the change in combat-armor skins while keeping town clothes as they are until the town clothes can be properly fiddled with to become combat clothes in earnest? I think it would be rather cruel to make people wait longer for the armor wardrobe, which many people (including myself) have been waiting for for a very long time and are quite excited about, simply because the patch also attempts to change town clothes. I’ve been complaining a lot here because this is the town clothes thread, but I’m pretty thrilled with the non-town-clothes parts of the patch!

Keeping the alternate paper doll and keeping the town clothes non-combat-ready isn’t something that would take weeks to implement, right? (It sounds like it would involve less work, as the town clothes paper doll already exists and can therefore just be kept as an option until town clothes are made wardrobe-able— unless in my ignorance of coding I’m underestimating the amount of work it takes to add a Town Clothes button back into the Hero menu and get the automatic switching and stuff working.) And then there would be plenty of time after the wardrobe patch goes live to fix up town clothes so they can be integrated with it later, and decisions can be made about whether to keep the second paper doll and other such questions, removing some of the stress that comes with a time crunch.

And if people complain about the combat town clothes part of the patch being delayed, you are TOTALLY allowed to have them blame me and the other folks who expressed a willingness to wait. You can even quote me by name and say “Blame Twyll Blackleaf!” I doubt very many people who would want to fight in town clothes would rather not be able to customize them, anyways.

goldenwing.8473:

So what about wizard’s hats, the Mad King witches hat, and the GW2 Baseball Logo Hats?

Those individual hats will turn into combat armor skins I believe, so while the benefit is that we’d be able to wear them in combat, the drawback is that we would no longer be able to use them in conjunction with any of the other town clothes. It also means that since the GW2 shirt would become a tonic, you’d no longer be able to wear a GW2 shirt and a GW2 hat at the same time. (Even if the GW2 logo hat becomes a tonic and the GW2 logo shirt becomes a tonic, you can only have one endless tonic active at a time, so you still won’t be able to wear them together; but you could wear them individually in combat.) It’s… not an ideal thing, as this thread shows!

Conncept.7638:

That’s not as big a problem as one would think. There are several existing armor pieces that take up the slots for both the head and shoulders, chest and shoulders, or chest and hands, it would be no different having a chest item covering the chest and legs. And even if they didn’t wish to do it that way, they are two seperate meshes and can be seperated with some work.

EDIT: Wait, I forgot, there already IS one. The Cof Light chest armor takes up both the chest and leg slots.

There are a couple of Medium armors that make shoulders disappear, such as the Shaman Reward Breastplate; so there are examples of armor eclipsing other armor in other armor weights as well. I could have sworn there was something funky going on with the Medium Vigil armor as well, but it seems to have been changed now?

Gerolux.5978:

some town clothes do not “fit” the style of classes. Plus there are some who play large norn and enjoy the cooking outfit and would lose out on it because the town clothes became light armors.

I mentioned this earlier in the thread but it’s entirely possible that you might have missed it (given that the thing is 13 pages long now): Under the changes as described, female Warriors will be able to run around fighting in poofy dresses, Charr will be able to charge into battle in the Mad King outfit with giant pumpkins on their heads, and combat spectacles will become a thing (although combat monocles already are, come to think of it). The problem is that there will no longer be any flexibility in those outfits, so those poofy-dressed female Warriors will have to wear either really dumb-looking hats or no hat at all; the Mad-King-ified Charr won’t have the option to use the something more intimidating-looking than a giant pumpkin on their heads; and you won’t be able to pair your combat spectacles with your fancy vest to be dapper as cats, because the vest will be a tonic.

So, the end result of this is more homogeneity, not less, making it harder to tell people apart— because clothes that get turned into “outfits” will only be differentiated by dye color; and clothes that get turned into tonics won’t even be dyeable, so everyone who wears them will be wearing exactly the same thing in exactly the same colors!

Wasbunny.6531:

CC Danicia.1394:

Yes, thank you. Please keep it civil to not only our staff, but to each other, while you are giving us your feedback. We are compiling it all together and we should have more answers on a variety of topics regarding Wardrobe when we do.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Thanks Danicia

This is pretty encouraging, and keep in mind it’s now 9:30am in Seattle so everyone’s just now finishing their morning latte and sorting through a bazzilion posts & threads.

Be vocal everyone but also be patient.

I do hope nothing I said came across as unnecessarily combative. I’ll admit to being frustrated, and to forgetting about the time difference. (Eventually I will make it out of the East Coast. Eventually.)

At least this thread proves that the good folks at ANet will never suffer from George Lucas Disease! (characterized by the presence of ideas with potential but a severe lack of constructive criticism, leading to deadly symptoms such as the Star Wars prequels)

I only criticize because I care though <3 I am not going to give up on this game because it is, at its heart, a very good game. I like the fundamental philosophy of the game design encouraging cooperation and a deeply social experience even when not communicating verbally or even necessarily being conscious of socializing, I like the fluff (the Asura have such a fascinating psychology; the Charr are a great example of a race filling the “brutal monstrous humanoid” niche while still maintaining cultural sophistication and intriguing personalities; and even as the Sylvari veer dangerously into Mary Sue territory thanks to the combined efforts of Trahearne and Scarlet, as a race they are still essentially elves made interesting again, which is difficult to do after decades of elves being done to death), and I like that the devs do listen to us (the afklasers being one of my favorite examples of that).

I think the quantity of criticism you guys are receiving shows that people really do want to stay with the game instead of just quitting in a huff— someone who doesn’t value your game would just quit instead of begging for a feature they like to remain! I hope that at least makes y’all feel better despite pages upon pages of people moaning, because in the end we’re only moaning because we’re dedicated enough to your creation to moan about it, if that makes any sense.

That said… please let me keep my froofy dress and Quaggan hat combo…? <3

Malevil.2104:

Town clothes ? Seriously i even forgot that something like that existed … Ask for refund and move on guys.

The thing is, they’re not even refunding most of what they’ve changed. They’re only refunding the retired town clothes, ones that went out of the gem store 3 months ago that are being turned into tonics. It may not matter to you, but lots of people spent actual money on sets of town clothes that they now will not be able to use in the way they thought they would be able to use them, and they will not get a refund on them unless ANet changes the refund policy they’ve already stated.

If you’d forgotten town clothes existed entirely, then you probably don’t buy town clothes, so you don’t represent part of the huge chunk of money ANet stands to lose should this poorly-thought-out change be implemented.

Gwen.7619:

I do like the look of the wardrobe system but a tonic for a full costume! Really!

I guess Its down to not allowing mix combinations of town clothes to be used for any class weight in combat, Having say 3 different classes running at you wearing the same clothes might panic a few players while they stumble selecting the 3 to know what classes they are, If the 3 were to jump and run around each other then you have no idea to who is who till they attack, sounds like fun

The thing is, they’re actually making it harder to tell those 3 players apart, because they’ll be able to use their town clothes in combat— but only as identical sets (possibly with different colors depending on whether the outfit in question is turned into a set-outfit or a tonic-outfit). So, instead of having at least some visual differentiation between different characters using the same costume-tonic, there will be no visual differentiation.

A female heavy-armor character will still be able to fight in a floofy dress; she’ll just have to fight in the floofy dress with a dumb hat or no hat and no option to replace that dumb hat with a different hat.

Come on ANet, I know you do have the ability to listen to player input and put it into practice. (The afklasers added during the Scarlet holo fight amused me greatly and made me very happy with you guys, even if they did occasionally hit me while I was fighting blue-Scarlet.) The lack of responses lately makes me hope you are working on a way to fix this right now. I’m not threatening to leave or anything because I know you can listen to us and fix this, so please don’t make my optimism look foolish.