Hey guys. I know that many of you are disappointed over the current restrictions on appearance items. I just wanted to pop in and let you know that we're reading this feedback.
Keep in mind that the original intent of this feature was to allow people to customize their appearance to make up for having mismatched pieces of armor. So for example, if you're wearing crafted leggings, but a dropped breastplate with 2 different appearances, you can equip appearance items to even out your appearance. Our original goal with this feature was not to allow people to wear anything they wanted to.
Our first implementation only had one restriction, and that was your class had to be allowed to wear the item. This had the unfortunate side effect of letting certain classes have more appearance options. Cloth wearers could only wear cloth and plate wearers could wear anything they wanted to. A co-worker of mine refers to this as the relative 'shaft-factor'.
We are aware that in some cases, people wear armor lighter than their class would normally wear, like plate wearers wearing a chain piece, or leather wearers wearing a cloth piece. So we now allow you to wear heavier items in order to fix this problem. So a plate tank can appear to be in full plate even if they have a chain BP. A chain wearer can now look uniform even if they have a cloth or leather piece on.
I know a few people have suggested an option to enable/disable the appearance items, but this just isn't viable at the moment. The server is doing most of the work to determine what you should look like. The client doesn't have all of the information to make that determination, and this would require a pretty big change.
I'm sure everyone has different opinions on the best way for this feature to work, but I wanted to at least explain our thought processes because there is a lot of mixed information out there.
Please keep sending the feedback because we are listening.
Thanks!
Rothgar
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