Outfit System

SanderBuraas

After seeing this thread by @arcadiadark – and having thought about it before – I decided to create a more elaborate thread on the subject. We already have a lot of customization options, but we are missing one very basic feature; a wardrobe or outfit system. The basic idea is that items equipped in a cosmetic outfit slot will override the appearance of primary gear appearance when the player switches to that outfit.

The outfitting system in LotRO was my first experience with one. I was thrilled to be able to display low-leveled armour, when in reality, I wore high-leveled gear that did not look so good. Considering the insane amount of motif and material appearance we have, ESO would benefit greatly from an outfit system.

Once a character reaches level 6, any character on that account may then wear cosmetic items. Each character will be able to equip 2 separate outfits of your choosing and creation. You may purchase more Cosmetic Outfit Slots for the account for 495 Turbine Point per upgrade.

As you can see, you are able to customize every armour slot – and if you leave a slot open, your actual gear is shown. Who would be happy to have a wardrobe system? Crafters, as they would have their hands full with specific armour requests. Roleplayers would be able to easily switch between outfits, for example: formal attire, daily wear and work clothing. Not to mention every other player, as everyone loves customization.

A system like this would also provide a use for looted clothing. As of now, they are only obtainable for thieves, or if you purchase from a thief. Therefore, I would also suggest that merchants are introduced with the system – so law abiding citizens are able to aquire the clothes.



Here is a list of the Outfitters in LotRO. In ESO, merchants could be placed in the capital city of every faction, all having different clothing for sale.

Didaco

Just thinking of the idea makes me drool, but here are 3 words that will explain why this will never happen: crown store costumes.

MasterPerceval

^but crown store costumes are as flexible as a rake! Sometimes I want to have part of a costume and part of my actual armor showing, which is impossible. Also, it's sad to see how so many great motifs are amply used, motifs ZoS designers worked hard on to make beautiful. A system like this would make them relevant again!

SanderBuraas

Didaco wrote: »

Just thinking of the idea makes me drool, but here are 3 words that will explain why this will never happen: crown store costumes.

Crown store costumes look different than regular armour. People will continue to buy costumes if a wardrobe system is implemented.

Arundo

As in the other topic which is now active, yes please love this

Aurielle

Smepic wrote: »

Didaco wrote: »

Just thinking of the idea makes me drool, but here are 3 words that will explain why this will never happen: crown store costumes.

Crown store costumes look different than regular armour. People will continue to buy costumes if a wardrobe system is implemented.

Exactly. LOTRO has store-exclusive cosmetics as well, and I saw plenty of people buying and using them back when I still played that game.

I really miss LOTRO's cosmetic system... It was so easy to give your characters a unique look. The only thing it suffered from was limited dye customization (i.e. you could only apply one dye per armour/cosmetic piece, and a limited number of dyes at that). Combine LOTRO's cosmetics system with ESO's amazing dyes, and you could very well have the best cosmetic system of any MMO on the market.

Sigtric

Always thought if there was one thing LOTRO did right, it was their outfitting system. Would love to see something similar in ESO.

Aurielle

Sigtric wrote: »

Always thought if there was one thing LOTRO did right, it was their outfitting system.

Yeah, they knocked the ball out of the park with that one. The less said about some of Turbine's other decisions in the game (especially over the last four years or so), the better... I STILL shudder when I think about the essence gear/legendary item grinds, heh. The music system was great too. I didn't partake in the RP side of the game at all, but it was still fun to ride up to the Bree AH and find a band playing perfectly-synced up music outside the front door.

Anyway, again, I'd love to see a similar cosmetic system in ESO. If it's not possible to implement that sort of system here for whatever reason, simply being able to convert gear to known motifs would be a nice alternative as well. The tech already exists, as evidenced by the convert to Imperial option.

Recremen

I support the idea in general, but I am opposed to it requiring you to slot a piece of armor to get the effect. I believe that it should be a capacity obtained by learning motifs, and should let you switch looks for any armor slot for any armor weight and style you know. The only thing more frustrating than not having such a system is having to carry around 147 different styles of armor just to swap aesthetics. It would be much better if we could alter it either through the collections interface or at a station like the dye stations.

SanderBuraas

Aurielle wrote: »

Sigtric wrote: »

Always thought if there was one thing LOTRO did right, it was their outfitting system.

Yeah, they knocked the ball out of the park with that one. The less said about some of Turbine's other decisions in the game (especially over the last four years or so), the better... I STILL shudder when I think about the essence gear/legendary item grinds, heh. The music system was great too. I didn't partake in the RP side of the game at all, but it was still fun to ride up to the Bree AH and find a band playing perfectly-synced up music outside the front door.

Anyway, again, I'd love to see a similar cosmetic system in ESO. If it's not possible to implement that sort of system here for whatever reason, simply being able to convert gear to known motifs would be a nice alternative as well. The tech already exists, as evidenced by the convert to Imperial option.

The instruments in LotRO were great. You could download files that allowed you to play them in-game as well. I have many fond memories of the game, and I feel Zenimax should take inspiration from the good features.

Aurielle

Recremen wrote: »

I support the idea in general, but I am opposed to it requiring you to slot a piece of armor to get the effect. I believe that it should be a capacity obtained by learning motifs, and should let you switch looks for any armor slot for any armor weight and style you know. The only thing more frustrating than not having such a system is having to carry around 147 different styles of armor just to swap aesthetics. It would be much better if we could alter it either through the collections interface or at a station like the dye stations.

LOTRO semi-solved this issue by having a wardrobe feature: you basically put the pieces that you want to convert to cosmetic items in the wardrobe, which allows you to then delete the piece from your actual inventory. Then, whenever you want to use that cosmetic, you equip it from the wardrobe. The only issue with it was that there was a limited number of wardrobe slots (which you could increase using Turbine points, ofc [rolleyes]).

But yeah, a collections interface for motifs might be a cool option -- as long as it's account wide.

IrishGirlGamer

@Smepic: I agree with you and supported you with an agree.

But the fact is - in the last six months alone - there have been literally a dozen of these threads asking for some feature similar to this, each one a little different. I know I've started two recently, @UrQuan has been a regular contributor and others as well.

Whatever system Zenimax chooses, I hope they do it soon and with the housing release next year.

One comment about costumes: in the beginning, a lot of ESO costumes were just redyed armor or clothing that was already in the game (the Imperial costumes were just in-game Imperial armor recolored). But Zenimax has stepped away from that model and is now offering "unique" items as costumes in the crown (e.g. items that are not available to craft).

I think costumes will still be viable for this reason. Nothing in @Smepic suggestion would impact these unique costume sales. I mean, really, there's always that player who wants to fight trolls in a wedding dress.

ArchMikem

I don't believe the general populace of this game deserves more freedom with how their characters get to look. We already have soldiers in Cyrodiil fighting in a Wedding Dress, and there have been numerous meetings held by The Klan in their dyed white Toxin Doctor costumes.

UrQuan

I'd be happy with a wardrobe system as described above. My own idea for how to do it was based more on doing a system that would both be customizable for players, and provide crown store sales for ZOS, while being relatively easy to implement from a development perspective:

UrQuan wrote: »

I've talked about this several times in other threads, and I've seen similar ideas from other people, but it recently occurred to me that I don't know if I've ever seen this concept spelled out in the Crown Store forum, so maybe the folks at ZOS who work on stuff for the Crown Store haven't seen this idea before.

So I'm going to talk about the thing I would most like to see in the Crown Store, how I would like it to work, and how it would be a good business decision for ZOS without particularly cutting into their sales of other items in the Crown Store. Warning: detailed post incoming!

Crown Store Costume Creation Tokens

The basic concept is a simple one. I'd like us to be able to buy tokens in the Crown Store which could be used in order to create our own custom costumes.

The way I would like to see this actually function is as follows:

1. You buy a token in the Crown Store.
2. You equip whatever you want to turn into a costume. This could be normal gear, it could be stolen clothes (perhaps stolen items should have to be laundered before they can be used to create a costume), or it could even be a disguise. Heck, maybe you could even have no gear and just use "the naked look" as your costume. Guild tabards should possibly be excluded from this process and never become part of a costume, in order to prevent possible trolling. Tabards aren't unique, though, and it's already possible for 2 guilds to have the exact same design, so maybe I'm over-thinking that.
3. You use the token to take a snapshot of what your character is wearing. This consumes the token, but has no effect on the gear or disguise you're wearing.
4. The snapshot is saved to your costumes in your collections with a default name based on your account name and a sequential number (so the first one I created would be Ur-Quan001, the second Ur-Quan002, etc).
5. You have the option to rename the costume in the same way that you can rename pets or mounts. This is purely for your own benefit as nobody else will ever see the costume name, and if it would take much development to get this to work with costumes, it's probably not worth bothering to add this extra level of customization.
6. You use the custom costume you created in exactly the same way you use any other costume from your collection.

So what's the market for this/what's the "need" it addresses?

As ESO progresses, more and more players are using more and more dropped sets, and less and less crafted gear. For the segment of the player base that cares about how their characters look (and I'd argue it's a large segment), this can cause a problem, as you may want your character to look a particular way and use gear of a particular motif, but you have to use pieces from one or more dropped set in order to get the most out of your build. You end up having to choose between looking good or being effective. This is even more apparent if you like the way lower level gear pieces look. If I've got a max-level character, and I happen to really like the way iron Orc heavy armour looks, for example, I'm out of luck unless I want to really badly handicap myself.

Anecdotally, I've spoken to a number of people who used to try to get all motifs, but have stopped bothering because they never end up being able to use a motif to get a cohesive look for their characters. I suspect this is actually quite common, and that fewer and fewer people are bothering with new motifs when they come out, while others (like myself) collect them for the sake of completeness, but rarely end up actually crafting anything in those styles because of the need to use dropped sets.

Costumes are a solution to this, but of course we're currently very limited in our options for costumes, and if you have a particular look in mind for a character, there's an excellent chance that none of the costumes available will satisfy you. By adding in costume creation tokens, players would no longer have to choose between how they want their characters to look, and whether they want their characters to be effective. This should also serve to revitalize crafting, as people will seek to craft gear (for themselves and maybe for others) in various different motifs purely to create costumes using it. In turn, this is likely to increase demand for motifs - both in-game and those purchased in the Crown Store.

OK, what are the possible pitfalls about this idea? Are they serious? Can they be minimized?

Well, of course there's always the argument that this would allow someone in PVP to appear to be in light armour (or maybe naked) when they're actually wearing full heavy, or whatever. So you won't really know what you're going up against. This could have been a valid concern a year or two ago, but frankly that ship has sailed. People can already wear costumes or disguises or polymorphs to keep enemy players from having any idea what kind of gear they're actually using. Some of the existing costumes and disguises also specifically look like particular types of gear, so it's not necessarily obvious that someone's wearing a costume or disguise today. People who would do this in an attempt to fool enemies in PVP are already doing it. This won't change that.

Won't this idea detract from sales of costumes in the Crown Store though? Maybe a bit, but for the most part there won't be overlap between Crown Store costumes and costumes that players could create for themselves. The majority of Crown Store costumes are original and cannot be replicated with the various motifs and gear that you can get in-game. Because of that, if someone sees a Crown Store costume that they like, they'll still have to buy it (at whatever price it's been given) if they want to use it. For the cases where an existing Crown Store costume actually can be replicated using various motifs available in-game, you could still sell those costumes in costume packs where it's cheaper to buy the pack than to use tokens to create them.

Will this allow people who aren't ESO+ subscribers to get around the limitations on non-subscribers dying costumes? Well, maybe kind of, because you could dye your gear however you want and then turn that gear into a costume. But again, kind of not, because if you later decided you wanted to change the colours of that costume you'd still be limited in the way that you are currently. And, of course, it still wouldn't give you a loophole that would allow you to dye a Crown Store costume like the Breton Hero one or whatever. And on top of that, even if you're kind of using this as a loophole to dye a costume, it's still costing you crowns, so it's not going to hit ZOS in the wallet anyway. And of course, maybe the costume creation token would work in a way that it doesn't copy the dye colours anyway, and only makes the costume out of the base items (see the next paragraph for a possible reason why it might work this way).

What about development effort though? Obviously I'm not a ZOS dev, so I can't really speak to this with much authority, but in my opinion this is unlikely to require much development effort. The overall costume system already exists, so the only thing that would need to be added is a kind of "snapshot" tool that looks at the IDs of the items that are equipped and assigns them to a new costume generated for your account. It's possible that it may be more complicated to do this if it takes into account dye colours that you may have applied to those items, but if that's the case maybe you just wouldn't be able to have any dyes that you used translate to your costume. When it comes to turning disguises into costumes using tokens, there may be some additional work that needs to be done on the disguises themselves so that a disguise turned into a costume can have dyes applied to it. I doubt that this work would be extensive, though.

Any other considerations?

Well, there's pricing of course. I would expect these to be priced comparably to most (non-limited time) costumes, so probably in the neighborhood of 400-700 crowns. A price on the lower end of the scale would probably be a better business decision, as a lower price would probably lead to more people buying them on a whim whenever they have an idea for a costume that they might like to use, even if they would only end up using it a small portion of the time. A price on the higher end of the scale would likely lead to people thinking long and hard about their costume idea and whether they would actually use it often enough to justify the cost of the token. I would expect that a lower price per token would overall lead to more crowns being spent on tokens, but that's the kind of thing that marketing experts would have to figure out.

To ZOS: please do this I know I'd spend a ton of crowns on tokens like this, and I'm sure loads of other people would too.

Didaco

Smepic wrote: »

Didaco wrote: »

Just thinking of the idea makes me drool, but here are 3 words that will explain why this will never happen: crown store costumes.

Crown store costumes look different than regular armour. People will continue to buy costumes if a wardrobe system is implemented.

I'm surely speaking just for myself here, but if I ever happen to have such a feature available I'd never look back at the costumes in the CS ever again since I only wear those to cover the ugliness of dropped pieces.

Again all IMHO, ZOS is well aware of the hit that such a feature would bring to the CS, and I find them too damned fond to that bloody store:
look at the choice they made with hairstyles and accessories: instead of making them an in game currency feature, they put it behind a maze of real money walls, separating an already existant feature (character editor) into several single priced features... If they ever add such a feature, I guess it'd be priced hard (and I admit I'd probably still buy it) to round up the gains.

Recremen

Aurielle wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

I support the idea in general, but I am opposed to it requiring you to slot a piece of armor to get the effect. I believe that it should be a capacity obtained by learning motifs, and should let you switch looks for any armor slot for any armor weight and style you know. The only thing more frustrating than not having such a system is having to carry around 147 different styles of armor just to swap aesthetics. It would be much better if we could alter it either through the collections interface or at a station like the dye stations.

LOTRO semi-solved this issue by having a wardrobe feature: you basically put the pieces that you want to convert to cosmetic items in the wardrobe, which allows you to then delete the piece from your actual inventory. Then, whenever you want to use that cosmetic, you equip it from the wardrobe. The only issue with it was that there was a limited number of wardrobe slots (which you could increase using Turbine points, ofc [rolleyes]).

But yeah, a collections interface for motifs might be a cool option -- as long as it's account wide.

Okay that's actually pretty great. The thing is, since this is so obviously a customization/cosmetic thing, I don't at all mind there being a tie-in to the Crown Store in some way. Indeed, I would kind of expect there to be at least SOME tie-in to the Crown Store, like through motif sales or increased "wardrobe" slots, as you described. The only I DON'T want from it is a per-use cost, like needing to spend a style material every time you want to change looks. That would be atrocious and entirely against the direction the cosmetic items have been going.

Rohamad_Ali

A lot of MMOs have custom appearance tabs and they are a welcome edition in all of them . I would love to see these added here . Some of the lowest level armors have the best look .

Recremen

UrQuan wrote: »

I'd be happy with a wardrobe system as described above. My own idea for how to do it was based more on doing a system that would both be customizable for players, and provide crown store sales for ZOS, while being relatively easy to implement from a development perspective:

UrQuan wrote: »

I've talked about this several times in other threads, and I've seen similar ideas from other people, but it recently occurred to me that I don't know if I've ever seen this concept spelled out in the Crown Store forum, so maybe the folks at ZOS who work on stuff for the Crown Store haven't seen this idea before.

So I'm going to talk about the thing I would most like to see in the Crown Store, how I would like it to work, and how it would be a good business decision for ZOS without particularly cutting into their sales of other items in the Crown Store. Warning: detailed post incoming!

Crown Store Costume Creation Tokens

The basic concept is a simple one. I'd like us to be able to buy tokens in the Crown Store which could be used in order to create our own custom costumes.

The way I would like to see this actually function is as follows:

1. You buy a token in the Crown Store.
2. You equip whatever you want to turn into a costume. This could be normal gear, it could be stolen clothes (perhaps stolen items should have to be laundered before they can be used to create a costume), or it could even be a disguise. Heck, maybe you could even have no gear and just use "the naked look" as your costume. Guild tabards should possibly be excluded from this process and never become part of a costume, in order to prevent possible trolling. Tabards aren't unique, though, and it's already possible for 2 guilds to have the exact same design, so maybe I'm over-thinking that.
3. You use the token to take a snapshot of what your character is wearing. This consumes the token, but has no effect on the gear or disguise you're wearing.
4. The snapshot is saved to your costumes in your collections with a default name based on your account name and a sequential number (so the first one I created would be Ur-Quan001, the second Ur-Quan002, etc).
5. You have the option to rename the costume in the same way that you can rename pets or mounts. This is purely for your own benefit as nobody else will ever see the costume name, and if it would take much development to get this to work with costumes, it's probably not worth bothering to add this extra level of customization.
6. You use the custom costume you created in exactly the same way you use any other costume from your collection.

So what's the market for this/what's the "need" it addresses?

As ESO progresses, more and more players are using more and more dropped sets, and less and less crafted gear. For the segment of the player base that cares about how their characters look (and I'd argue it's a large segment), this can cause a problem, as you may want your character to look a particular way and use gear of a particular motif, but you have to use pieces from one or more dropped set in order to get the most out of your build. You end up having to choose between looking good or being effective. This is even more apparent if you like the way lower level gear pieces look. If I've got a max-level character, and I happen to really like the way iron Orc heavy armour looks, for example, I'm out of luck unless I want to really badly handicap myself.

Anecdotally, I've spoken to a number of people who used to try to get all motifs, but have stopped bothering because they never end up being able to use a motif to get a cohesive look for their characters. I suspect this is actually quite common, and that fewer and fewer people are bothering with new motifs when they come out, while others (like myself) collect them for the sake of completeness, but rarely end up actually crafting anything in those styles because of the need to use dropped sets.

Costumes are a solution to this, but of course we're currently very limited in our options for costumes, and if you have a particular look in mind for a character, there's an excellent chance that none of the costumes available will satisfy you. By adding in costume creation tokens, players would no longer have to choose between how they want their characters to look, and whether they want their characters to be effective. This should also serve to revitalize crafting, as people will seek to craft gear (for themselves and maybe for others) in various different motifs purely to create costumes using it. In turn, this is likely to increase demand for motifs - both in-game and those purchased in the Crown Store.

OK, what are the possible pitfalls about this idea? Are they serious? Can they be minimized?

Well, of course there's always the argument that this would allow someone in PVP to appear to be in light armour (or maybe naked) when they're actually wearing full heavy, or whatever. So you won't really know what you're going up against. This could have been a valid concern a year or two ago, but frankly that ship has sailed. People can already wear costumes or disguises or polymorphs to keep enemy players from having any idea what kind of gear they're actually using. Some of the existing costumes and disguises also specifically look like particular types of gear, so it's not necessarily obvious that someone's wearing a costume or disguise today. People who would do this in an attempt to fool enemies in PVP are already doing it. This won't change that.

Won't this idea detract from sales of costumes in the Crown Store though? Maybe a bit, but for the most part there won't be overlap between Crown Store costumes and costumes that players could create for themselves. The majority of Crown Store costumes are original and cannot be replicated with the various motifs and gear that you can get in-game. Because of that, if someone sees a Crown Store costume that they like, they'll still have to buy it (at whatever price it's been given) if they want to use it. For the cases where an existing Crown Store costume actually can be replicated using various motifs available in-game, you could still sell those costumes in costume packs where it's cheaper to buy the pack than to use tokens to create them.

Will this allow people who aren't ESO+ subscribers to get around the limitations on non-subscribers dying costumes? Well, maybe kind of, because you could dye your gear however you want and then turn that gear into a costume. But again, kind of not, because if you later decided you wanted to change the colours of that costume you'd still be limited in the way that you are currently. And, of course, it still wouldn't give you a loophole that would allow you to dye a Crown Store costume like the Breton Hero one or whatever. And on top of that, even if you're kind of using this as a loophole to dye a costume, it's still costing you crowns, so it's not going to hit ZOS in the wallet anyway. And of course, maybe the costume creation token would work in a way that it doesn't copy the dye colours anyway, and only makes the costume out of the base items (see the next paragraph for a possible reason why it might work this way).

What about development effort though? Obviously I'm not a ZOS dev, so I can't really speak to this with much authority, but in my opinion this is unlikely to require much development effort. The overall costume system already exists, so the only thing that would need to be added is a kind of "snapshot" tool that looks at the IDs of the items that are equipped and assigns them to a new costume generated for your account. It's possible that it may be more complicated to do this if it takes into account dye colours that you may have applied to those items, but if that's the case maybe you just wouldn't be able to have any dyes that you used translate to your costume. When it comes to turning disguises into costumes using tokens, there may be some additional work that needs to be done on the disguises themselves so that a disguise turned into a costume can have dyes applied to it. I doubt that this work would be extensive, though.

Any other considerations?

Well, there's pricing of course. I would expect these to be priced comparably to most (non-limited time) costumes, so probably in the neighborhood of 400-700 crowns. A price on the lower end of the scale would probably be a better business decision, as a lower price would probably lead to more people buying them on a whim whenever they have an idea for a costume that they might like to use, even if they would only end up using it a small portion of the time. A price on the higher end of the scale would likely lead to people thinking long and hard about their costume idea and whether they would actually use it often enough to justify the cost of the token. I would expect that a lower price per token would overall lead to more crowns being spent on tokens, but that's the kind of thing that marketing experts would have to figure out.

To ZOS: please do this I know I'd spend a ton of crowns on tokens like this, and I'm sure loads of other people would too.

It's super obvious to all of us that we need some kind of system like this, but the particular solution outlined above seems extraordinarily inelegant.

First, you'd have problems with runaway data storage needs, as every individual costume would need its own data structure and there's the possibility to make a nearly identical costume with only one item changed. So the per-player storage load could end up being ridiculous.

Second, there's the issue of how to dye the costumes. In this system, you'd be using the same costume dyeing system as exists now, which means that if you need to shuffle the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors around per-piece to make the look work, you're quite out of luck. For example, on a Khajiit Medium chestpiece the primary color is the main leather color, the secondary color is the metal trim, and the tertiary color is the cloth padding on the sides. If you want to match that well with a Nord Medium belt, however, you need to set the tertiary color to be the same as the secondary color on the Khajiit chestpiece, so that the metal parts/trim all match. Not possible in this system!

I think a better system would involve something closer to what is available for the other cosmetics in the Collections UI. You buy one big expensive bundle of hair/beard/adornment/etc. and then can freely change between them on the fly. In this same way, whatever solution they end up using for armor restyling/wardrobe/costuming/whatever we call it should have a large up-front cost, but then be free to change around dynamically and at the finest grain. That way there's no potential for data duplication. You want the look of Imperial Heavy shoulders? Click it. Same as you'd click the Patriarch Beard if you wanted to wear that today. You don't need to build a face look and save it, you just click on the marking, adornment, beard, and hair you want to go with. Much more elegant from a data standpoint, probably easier for the user, and certainly frees you up for much more customization!

Jamini

Recremen wrote: »

The only I DON'T want from it is a per-use cost, like needing to spend a style material every time you want to change looks. That would be atrocious and entirely against the direction the cosmetic items have been going.

Style materials, with a handful of exceptions, are hilariously abundant. I'm not sure it would even be an issue.

UrQuan

Recremen wrote: »

UrQuan wrote: »

I'd be happy with a wardrobe system as described above. My own idea for how to do it was based more on doing a system that would both be customizable for players, and provide crown store sales for ZOS, while being relatively easy to implement from a development perspective:

UrQuan wrote: »

I've talked about this several times in other threads, and I've seen similar ideas from other people, but it recently occurred to me that I don't know if I've ever seen this concept spelled out in the Crown Store forum, so maybe the folks at ZOS who work on stuff for the Crown Store haven't seen this idea before.

So I'm going to talk about the thing I would most like to see in the Crown Store, how I would like it to work, and how it would be a good business decision for ZOS without particularly cutting into their sales of other items in the Crown Store. Warning: detailed post incoming!

Crown Store Costume Creation Tokens

The basic concept is a simple one. I'd like us to be able to buy tokens in the Crown Store which could be used in order to create our own custom costumes.

The way I would like to see this actually function is as follows:

1. You buy a token in the Crown Store.
2. You equip whatever you want to turn into a costume. This could be normal gear, it could be stolen clothes (perhaps stolen items should have to be laundered before they can be used to create a costume), or it could even be a disguise. Heck, maybe you could even have no gear and just use "the naked look" as your costume. Guild tabards should possibly be excluded from this process and never become part of a costume, in order to prevent possible trolling. Tabards aren't unique, though, and it's already possible for 2 guilds to have the exact same design, so maybe I'm over-thinking that.
3. You use the token to take a snapshot of what your character is wearing. This consumes the token, but has no effect on the gear or disguise you're wearing.
4. The snapshot is saved to your costumes in your collections with a default name based on your account name and a sequential number (so the first one I created would be Ur-Quan001, the second Ur-Quan002, etc).
5. You have the option to rename the costume in the same way that you can rename pets or mounts. This is purely for your own benefit as nobody else will ever see the costume name, and if it would take much development to get this to work with costumes, it's probably not worth bothering to add this extra level of customization.
6. You use the custom costume you created in exactly the same way you use any other costume from your collection.

So what's the market for this/what's the "need" it addresses?

As ESO progresses, more and more players are using more and more dropped sets, and less and less crafted gear. For the segment of the player base that cares about how their characters look (and I'd argue it's a large segment), this can cause a problem, as you may want your character to look a particular way and use gear of a particular motif, but you have to use pieces from one or more dropped set in order to get the most out of your build. You end up having to choose between looking good or being effective. This is even more apparent if you like the way lower level gear pieces look. If I've got a max-level character, and I happen to really like the way iron Orc heavy armour looks, for example, I'm out of luck unless I want to really badly handicap myself.

Anecdotally, I've spoken to a number of people who used to try to get all motifs, but have stopped bothering because they never end up being able to use a motif to get a cohesive look for their characters. I suspect this is actually quite common, and that fewer and fewer people are bothering with new motifs when they come out, while others (like myself) collect them for the sake of completeness, but rarely end up actually crafting anything in those styles because of the need to use dropped sets.

Costumes are a solution to this, but of course we're currently very limited in our options for costumes, and if you have a particular look in mind for a character, there's an excellent chance that none of the costumes available will satisfy you. By adding in costume creation tokens, players would no longer have to choose between how they want their characters to look, and whether they want their characters to be effective. This should also serve to revitalize crafting, as people will seek to craft gear (for themselves and maybe for others) in various different motifs purely to create costumes using it. In turn, this is likely to increase demand for motifs - both in-game and those purchased in the Crown Store.

OK, what are the possible pitfalls about this idea? Are they serious? Can they be minimized?

Well, of course there's always the argument that this would allow someone in PVP to appear to be in light armour (or maybe naked) when they're actually wearing full heavy, or whatever. So you won't really know what you're going up against. This could have been a valid concern a year or two ago, but frankly that ship has sailed. People can already wear costumes or disguises or polymorphs to keep enemy players from having any idea what kind of gear they're actually using. Some of the existing costumes and disguises also specifically look like particular types of gear, so it's not necessarily obvious that someone's wearing a costume or disguise today. People who would do this in an attempt to fool enemies in PVP are already doing it. This won't change that.

Won't this idea detract from sales of costumes in the Crown Store though? Maybe a bit, but for the most part there won't be overlap between Crown Store costumes and costumes that players could create for themselves. The majority of Crown Store costumes are original and cannot be replicated with the various motifs and gear that you can get in-game. Because of that, if someone sees a Crown Store costume that they like, they'll still have to buy it (at whatever price it's been given) if they want to use it. For the cases where an existing Crown Store costume actually can be replicated using various motifs available in-game, you could still sell those costumes in costume packs where it's cheaper to buy the pack than to use tokens to create them.

Will this allow people who aren't ESO+ subscribers to get around the limitations on non-subscribers dying costumes? Well, maybe kind of, because you could dye your gear however you want and then turn that gear into a costume. But again, kind of not, because if you later decided you wanted to change the colours of that costume you'd still be limited in the way that you are currently. And, of course, it still wouldn't give you a loophole that would allow you to dye a Crown Store costume like the Breton Hero one or whatever. And on top of that, even if you're kind of using this as a loophole to dye a costume, it's still costing you crowns, so it's not going to hit ZOS in the wallet anyway. And of course, maybe the costume creation token would work in a way that it doesn't copy the dye colours anyway, and only makes the costume out of the base items (see the next paragraph for a possible reason why it might work this way).

What about development effort though? Obviously I'm not a ZOS dev, so I can't really speak to this with much authority, but in my opinion this is unlikely to require much development effort. The overall costume system already exists, so the only thing that would need to be added is a kind of "snapshot" tool that looks at the IDs of the items that are equipped and assigns them to a new costume generated for your account. It's possible that it may be more complicated to do this if it takes into account dye colours that you may have applied to those items, but if that's the case maybe you just wouldn't be able to have any dyes that you used translate to your costume. When it comes to turning disguises into costumes using tokens, there may be some additional work that needs to be done on the disguises themselves so that a disguise turned into a costume can have dyes applied to it. I doubt that this work would be extensive, though.

Any other considerations?

Well, there's pricing of course. I would expect these to be priced comparably to most (non-limited time) costumes, so probably in the neighborhood of 400-700 crowns. A price on the lower end of the scale would probably be a better business decision, as a lower price would probably lead to more people buying them on a whim whenever they have an idea for a costume that they might like to use, even if they would only end up using it a small portion of the time. A price on the higher end of the scale would likely lead to people thinking long and hard about their costume idea and whether they would actually use it often enough to justify the cost of the token. I would expect that a lower price per token would overall lead to more crowns being spent on tokens, but that's the kind of thing that marketing experts would have to figure out.

To ZOS: please do this I know I'd spend a ton of crowns on tokens like this, and I'm sure loads of other people would too.

It's super obvious to all of us that we need some kind of system like this, but the particular solution outlined above seems extraordinarily inelegant.

First, you'd have problems with runaway data storage needs, as every individual costume would need its own data structure and there's the possibility to make a nearly identical costume with only one item changed. So the per-player storage load could end up being ridiculous.

That's simply not true. All that you do is you have the costume have 7 attributes (8 if you include the option to turn disguises or tabards into a part of the costume). Each attribute is an equipment slot (feet, hands, chest, etc). When you use the token it looks at what is equipped in each of those slots, and assigns those item IDs to the costume's 7 (or 8) attributes. The data storage needs for the costume are then no greater than the data storage needs for inventory - from a data standpoint the costume is effectively no different from a container that has been opened but not had the items removed from it.

Recremen wrote: »

Second, there's the issue of how to dye the costumes. In this system, you'd be using the same costume dyeing system as exists now, which means that if you need to shuffle the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors around per-piece to make the look work, you're quite out of luck. For example, on a Khajiit Medium chestpiece the primary color is the main leather color, the secondary color is the metal trim, and the tertiary color is the cloth padding on the sides. If you want to match that well with a Nord Medium belt, however, you need to set the tertiary color to be the same as the secondary color on the Khajiit chestpiece, so that the metal parts/trim all match. Not possible in this system!

Not necessarily. Because the costume would simply be using the item codes for everything that had been equipped, the dyeing system could be exactly the same as the dyeing system for equipment.

AshTal

I wish this could be done. Make the outfit I want to wear not have to wear because I need the gear with the best stats.

SanderBuraas

AshTal wrote: »

I wish this could be done. Make the outfit I want to wear not have to wear because I need the gear with the best stats.

Yeah, and it is the same concept as with costumes – just with motifs.

Nyghthowler

ZoS is now introducing the Appearance Slot ability!


Coming to gambling boxes soon!!!

Recremen

Jamini wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

The only I DON'T want from it is a per-use cost, like needing to spend a style material every time you want to change looks. That would be atrocious and entirely against the direction the cosmetic items have been going.

Style materials, with a handful of exceptions, are hilariously abundant. I'm not sure it would even be an issue.

If people were to try out the system as much as they try out the dyes, you could easily blow through dozens just trying to get a single look right, never mind multiple. It would be a huge step backward compared with the rest of the cosmetic systems. It would be better than nothing, of course, but why have all these fun toys and no ability to play with them? Besides, using a style material doesn't let you change the level or weight appearance, so you'd need a whole separate system to accommodate that. It's better to go with something that gets it all done in one cohesive system that is of a similar design to the existing cosmetics.

Recremen

UrQuan wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

UrQuan wrote: »

I'd be happy with a wardrobe system as described above. My own idea for how to do it was based more on doing a system that would both be customizable for players, and provide crown store sales for ZOS, while being relatively easy to implement from a development perspective:

UrQuan wrote: »

I've talked about this several times in other threads, and I've seen similar ideas from other people, but it recently occurred to me that I don't know if I've ever seen this concept spelled out in the Crown Store forum, so maybe the folks at ZOS who work on stuff for the Crown Store haven't seen this idea before.

So I'm going to talk about the thing I would most like to see in the Crown Store, how I would like it to work, and how it would be a good business decision for ZOS without particularly cutting into their sales of other items in the Crown Store. Warning: detailed post incoming!

Crown Store Costume Creation Tokens

The basic concept is a simple one. I'd like us to be able to buy tokens in the Crown Store which could be used in order to create our own custom costumes.

The way I would like to see this actually function is as follows:

1. You buy a token in the Crown Store.
2. You equip whatever you want to turn into a costume. This could be normal gear, it could be stolen clothes (perhaps stolen items should have to be laundered before they can be used to create a costume), or it could even be a disguise. Heck, maybe you could even have no gear and just use "the naked look" as your costume. Guild tabards should possibly be excluded from this process and never become part of a costume, in order to prevent possible trolling. Tabards aren't unique, though, and it's already possible for 2 guilds to have the exact same design, so maybe I'm over-thinking that.
3. You use the token to take a snapshot of what your character is wearing. This consumes the token, but has no effect on the gear or disguise you're wearing.
4. The snapshot is saved to your costumes in your collections with a default name based on your account name and a sequential number (so the first one I created would be Ur-Quan001, the second Ur-Quan002, etc).
5. You have the option to rename the costume in the same way that you can rename pets or mounts. This is purely for your own benefit as nobody else will ever see the costume name, and if it would take much development to get this to work with costumes, it's probably not worth bothering to add this extra level of customization.
6. You use the custom costume you created in exactly the same way you use any other costume from your collection.

So what's the market for this/what's the "need" it addresses?

As ESO progresses, more and more players are using more and more dropped sets, and less and less crafted gear. For the segment of the player base that cares about how their characters look (and I'd argue it's a large segment), this can cause a problem, as you may want your character to look a particular way and use gear of a particular motif, but you have to use pieces from one or more dropped set in order to get the most out of your build. You end up having to choose between looking good or being effective. This is even more apparent if you like the way lower level gear pieces look. If I've got a max-level character, and I happen to really like the way iron Orc heavy armour looks, for example, I'm out of luck unless I want to really badly handicap myself.

Anecdotally, I've spoken to a number of people who used to try to get all motifs, but have stopped bothering because they never end up being able to use a motif to get a cohesive look for their characters. I suspect this is actually quite common, and that fewer and fewer people are bothering with new motifs when they come out, while others (like myself) collect them for the sake of completeness, but rarely end up actually crafting anything in those styles because of the need to use dropped sets.

Costumes are a solution to this, but of course we're currently very limited in our options for costumes, and if you have a particular look in mind for a character, there's an excellent chance that none of the costumes available will satisfy you. By adding in costume creation tokens, players would no longer have to choose between how they want their characters to look, and whether they want their characters to be effective. This should also serve to revitalize crafting, as people will seek to craft gear (for themselves and maybe for others) in various different motifs purely to create costumes using it. In turn, this is likely to increase demand for motifs - both in-game and those purchased in the Crown Store.

OK, what are the possible pitfalls about this idea? Are they serious? Can they be minimized?

Well, of course there's always the argument that this would allow someone in PVP to appear to be in light armour (or maybe naked) when they're actually wearing full heavy, or whatever. So you won't really know what you're going up against. This could have been a valid concern a year or two ago, but frankly that ship has sailed. People can already wear costumes or disguises or polymorphs to keep enemy players from having any idea what kind of gear they're actually using. Some of the existing costumes and disguises also specifically look like particular types of gear, so it's not necessarily obvious that someone's wearing a costume or disguise today. People who would do this in an attempt to fool enemies in PVP are already doing it. This won't change that.

Won't this idea detract from sales of costumes in the Crown Store though? Maybe a bit, but for the most part there won't be overlap between Crown Store costumes and costumes that players could create for themselves. The majority of Crown Store costumes are original and cannot be replicated with the various motifs and gear that you can get in-game. Because of that, if someone sees a Crown Store costume that they like, they'll still have to buy it (at whatever price it's been given) if they want to use it. For the cases where an existing Crown Store costume actually can be replicated using various motifs available in-game, you could still sell those costumes in costume packs where it's cheaper to buy the pack than to use tokens to create them.

Will this allow people who aren't ESO+ subscribers to get around the limitations on non-subscribers dying costumes? Well, maybe kind of, because you could dye your gear however you want and then turn that gear into a costume. But again, kind of not, because if you later decided you wanted to change the colours of that costume you'd still be limited in the way that you are currently. And, of course, it still wouldn't give you a loophole that would allow you to dye a Crown Store costume like the Breton Hero one or whatever. And on top of that, even if you're kind of using this as a loophole to dye a costume, it's still costing you crowns, so it's not going to hit ZOS in the wallet anyway. And of course, maybe the costume creation token would work in a way that it doesn't copy the dye colours anyway, and only makes the costume out of the base items (see the next paragraph for a possible reason why it might work this way).

What about development effort though? Obviously I'm not a ZOS dev, so I can't really speak to this with much authority, but in my opinion this is unlikely to require much development effort. The overall costume system already exists, so the only thing that would need to be added is a kind of "snapshot" tool that looks at the IDs of the items that are equipped and assigns them to a new costume generated for your account. It's possible that it may be more complicated to do this if it takes into account dye colours that you may have applied to those items, but if that's the case maybe you just wouldn't be able to have any dyes that you used translate to your costume. When it comes to turning disguises into costumes using tokens, there may be some additional work that needs to be done on the disguises themselves so that a disguise turned into a costume can have dyes applied to it. I doubt that this work would be extensive, though.

Any other considerations?

Well, there's pricing of course. I would expect these to be priced comparably to most (non-limited time) costumes, so probably in the neighborhood of 400-700 crowns. A price on the lower end of the scale would probably be a better business decision, as a lower price would probably lead to more people buying them on a whim whenever they have an idea for a costume that they might like to use, even if they would only end up using it a small portion of the time. A price on the higher end of the scale would likely lead to people thinking long and hard about their costume idea and whether they would actually use it often enough to justify the cost of the token. I would expect that a lower price per token would overall lead to more crowns being spent on tokens, but that's the kind of thing that marketing experts would have to figure out.

To ZOS: please do this I know I'd spend a ton of crowns on tokens like this, and I'm sure loads of other people would too.

It's super obvious to all of us that we need some kind of system like this, but the particular solution outlined above seems extraordinarily inelegant.

First, you'd have problems with runaway data storage needs, as every individual costume would need its own data structure and there's the possibility to make a nearly identical costume with only one item changed. So the per-player storage load could end up being ridiculous.

That's simply not true. All that you do is you have the costume have 7 attributes (8 if you include the option to turn disguises or tabards into a part of the costume). Each attribute is an equipment slot (feet, hands, chest, etc). When you use the token it looks at what is equipped in each of those slots, and assigns those item IDs to the costume's 7 (or 8) attributes. The data storage needs for the costume are then no greater than the data storage needs for inventory - from a data standpoint the costume is effectively no different from a container that has been opened but not had the items removed from it.

Recremen wrote: »

Second, there's the issue of how to dye the costumes. In this system, you'd be using the same costume dyeing system as exists now, which means that if you need to shuffle the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors around per-piece to make the look work, you're quite out of luck. For example, on a Khajiit Medium chestpiece the primary color is the main leather color, the secondary color is the metal trim, and the tertiary color is the cloth padding on the sides. If you want to match that well with a Nord Medium belt, however, you need to set the tertiary color to be the same as the secondary color on the Khajiit chestpiece, so that the metal parts/trim all match. Not possible in this system!

Not necessarily. Because the costume would simply be using the item codes for everything that had been equipped, the dyeing system could be exactly the same as the dyeing system for equipment.

But you have to save that variable per costume, so either you need to cap the number of costumes you can create in this way, or you need to reserve space for all possible combinations of armor items. And you need to do that per character. Sure, there's ostensibly an upper limit on how much someone is willing to spend on these theoretical "costume tokens", but at that point you're already admitting that the devs would assign some high, but arbitrary, cap on the number of costumes you can create.

As to the second point: if the costume override is using the underlying data already, on a per-piece basis, then why not use the same system style that's already available in the collections tab? Why have this extra "create costume" step? Just let folks choose what look they want for their armor/weapons on a per-slot basis, same as they do with their hair, beard, adornment, etc. If it's because you think you need to bargain with ZOS about how to monetize it, don't worry about it. They could also monetize a per-slot system the same way they do all the rest of the cosmetics: one big purchase, and then free swapouts forever. I just don't see the appeal of moving away from that method and into something much more clunky.

UrQuan

Recremen wrote: »

UrQuan wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

UrQuan wrote: »

I'd be happy with a wardrobe system as described above. My own idea for how to do it was based more on doing a system that would both be customizable for players, and provide crown store sales for ZOS, while being relatively easy to implement from a development perspective:

UrQuan wrote: »

I've talked about this several times in other threads, and I've seen similar ideas from other people, but it recently occurred to me that I don't know if I've ever seen this concept spelled out in the Crown Store forum, so maybe the folks at ZOS who work on stuff for the Crown Store haven't seen this idea before.

So I'm going to talk about the thing I would most like to see in the Crown Store, how I would like it to work, and how it would be a good business decision for ZOS without particularly cutting into their sales of other items in the Crown Store. Warning: detailed post incoming!

Crown Store Costume Creation Tokens

The basic concept is a simple one. I'd like us to be able to buy tokens in the Crown Store which could be used in order to create our own custom costumes.

The way I would like to see this actually function is as follows:

1. You buy a token in the Crown Store.
2. You equip whatever you want to turn into a costume. This could be normal gear, it could be stolen clothes (perhaps stolen items should have to be laundered before they can be used to create a costume), or it could even be a disguise. Heck, maybe you could even have no gear and just use "the naked look" as your costume. Guild tabards should possibly be excluded from this process and never become part of a costume, in order to prevent possible trolling. Tabards aren't unique, though, and it's already possible for 2 guilds to have the exact same design, so maybe I'm over-thinking that.
3. You use the token to take a snapshot of what your character is wearing. This consumes the token, but has no effect on the gear or disguise you're wearing.
4. The snapshot is saved to your costumes in your collections with a default name based on your account name and a sequential number (so the first one I created would be Ur-Quan001, the second Ur-Quan002, etc).
5. You have the option to rename the costume in the same way that you can rename pets or mounts. This is purely for your own benefit as nobody else will ever see the costume name, and if it would take much development to get this to work with costumes, it's probably not worth bothering to add this extra level of customization.
6. You use the custom costume you created in exactly the same way you use any other costume from your collection.

So what's the market for this/what's the "need" it addresses?

As ESO progresses, more and more players are using more and more dropped sets, and less and less crafted gear. For the segment of the player base that cares about how their characters look (and I'd argue it's a large segment), this can cause a problem, as you may want your character to look a particular way and use gear of a particular motif, but you have to use pieces from one or more dropped set in order to get the most out of your build. You end up having to choose between looking good or being effective. This is even more apparent if you like the way lower level gear pieces look. If I've got a max-level character, and I happen to really like the way iron Orc heavy armour looks, for example, I'm out of luck unless I want to really badly handicap myself.

Anecdotally, I've spoken to a number of people who used to try to get all motifs, but have stopped bothering because they never end up being able to use a motif to get a cohesive look for their characters. I suspect this is actually quite common, and that fewer and fewer people are bothering with new motifs when they come out, while others (like myself) collect them for the sake of completeness, but rarely end up actually crafting anything in those styles because of the need to use dropped sets.

Costumes are a solution to this, but of course we're currently very limited in our options for costumes, and if you have a particular look in mind for a character, there's an excellent chance that none of the costumes available will satisfy you. By adding in costume creation tokens, players would no longer have to choose between how they want their characters to look, and whether they want their characters to be effective. This should also serve to revitalize crafting, as people will seek to craft gear (for themselves and maybe for others) in various different motifs purely to create costumes using it. In turn, this is likely to increase demand for motifs - both in-game and those purchased in the Crown Store.

OK, what are the possible pitfalls about this idea? Are they serious? Can they be minimized?

Well, of course there's always the argument that this would allow someone in PVP to appear to be in light armour (or maybe naked) when they're actually wearing full heavy, or whatever. So you won't really know what you're going up against. This could have been a valid concern a year or two ago, but frankly that ship has sailed. People can already wear costumes or disguises or polymorphs to keep enemy players from having any idea what kind of gear they're actually using. Some of the existing costumes and disguises also specifically look like particular types of gear, so it's not necessarily obvious that someone's wearing a costume or disguise today. People who would do this in an attempt to fool enemies in PVP are already doing it. This won't change that.

Won't this idea detract from sales of costumes in the Crown Store though? Maybe a bit, but for the most part there won't be overlap between Crown Store costumes and costumes that players could create for themselves. The majority of Crown Store costumes are original and cannot be replicated with the various motifs and gear that you can get in-game. Because of that, if someone sees a Crown Store costume that they like, they'll still have to buy it (at whatever price it's been given) if they want to use it. For the cases where an existing Crown Store costume actually can be replicated using various motifs available in-game, you could still sell those costumes in costume packs where it's cheaper to buy the pack than to use tokens to create them.

Will this allow people who aren't ESO+ subscribers to get around the limitations on non-subscribers dying costumes? Well, maybe kind of, because you could dye your gear however you want and then turn that gear into a costume. But again, kind of not, because if you later decided you wanted to change the colours of that costume you'd still be limited in the way that you are currently. And, of course, it still wouldn't give you a loophole that would allow you to dye a Crown Store costume like the Breton Hero one or whatever. And on top of that, even if you're kind of using this as a loophole to dye a costume, it's still costing you crowns, so it's not going to hit ZOS in the wallet anyway. And of course, maybe the costume creation token would work in a way that it doesn't copy the dye colours anyway, and only makes the costume out of the base items (see the next paragraph for a possible reason why it might work this way).

What about development effort though? Obviously I'm not a ZOS dev, so I can't really speak to this with much authority, but in my opinion this is unlikely to require much development effort. The overall costume system already exists, so the only thing that would need to be added is a kind of "snapshot" tool that looks at the IDs of the items that are equipped and assigns them to a new costume generated for your account. It's possible that it may be more complicated to do this if it takes into account dye colours that you may have applied to those items, but if that's the case maybe you just wouldn't be able to have any dyes that you used translate to your costume. When it comes to turning disguises into costumes using tokens, there may be some additional work that needs to be done on the disguises themselves so that a disguise turned into a costume can have dyes applied to it. I doubt that this work would be extensive, though.

Any other considerations?

Well, there's pricing of course. I would expect these to be priced comparably to most (non-limited time) costumes, so probably in the neighborhood of 400-700 crowns. A price on the lower end of the scale would probably be a better business decision, as a lower price would probably lead to more people buying them on a whim whenever they have an idea for a costume that they might like to use, even if they would only end up using it a small portion of the time. A price on the higher end of the scale would likely lead to people thinking long and hard about their costume idea and whether they would actually use it often enough to justify the cost of the token. I would expect that a lower price per token would overall lead to more crowns being spent on tokens, but that's the kind of thing that marketing experts would have to figure out.

To ZOS: please do this I know I'd spend a ton of crowns on tokens like this, and I'm sure loads of other people would too.

It's super obvious to all of us that we need some kind of system like this, but the particular solution outlined above seems extraordinarily inelegant.

First, you'd have problems with runaway data storage needs, as every individual costume would need its own data structure and there's the possibility to make a nearly identical costume with only one item changed. So the per-player storage load could end up being ridiculous.

That's simply not true. All that you do is you have the costume have 7 attributes (8 if you include the option to turn disguises or tabards into a part of the costume). Each attribute is an equipment slot (feet, hands, chest, etc). When you use the token it looks at what is equipped in each of those slots, and assigns those item IDs to the costume's 7 (or 8) attributes. The data storage needs for the costume are then no greater than the data storage needs for inventory - from a data standpoint the costume is effectively no different from a container that has been opened but not had the items removed from it.

Recremen wrote: »

Second, there's the issue of how to dye the costumes. In this system, you'd be using the same costume dyeing system as exists now, which means that if you need to shuffle the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors around per-piece to make the look work, you're quite out of luck. For example, on a Khajiit Medium chestpiece the primary color is the main leather color, the secondary color is the metal trim, and the tertiary color is the cloth padding on the sides. If you want to match that well with a Nord Medium belt, however, you need to set the tertiary color to be the same as the secondary color on the Khajiit chestpiece, so that the metal parts/trim all match. Not possible in this system!

Not necessarily. Because the costume would simply be using the item codes for everything that had been equipped, the dyeing system could be exactly the same as the dyeing system for equipment.

But you have to save that variable per costume, so either you need to cap the number of costumes you can create in this way, or you need to reserve space for all possible combinations of armor items. And you need to do that per character. Sure, there's ostensibly an upper limit on how much someone is willing to spend on these theoretical "costume tokens", but at that point you're already admitting that the devs would assign some high, but arbitrary, cap on the number of costumes you can create.

No, you don't need to do anything on a per character basis. Like all other costumes any costumes you create would go into your collection. And of course there would be an upper limit on the number an account could have - just like there's an upper limit on the total inventory an account can have. If being able to have 2,808 different items in your inventory on a single account (not including crafting bags or items inside containers) doesn't cause any data issues, then the upper limit on custom costumes can easily be sufficiently high that it's effectively not an issue.

Recremen wrote: »

As to the second point: if the costume override is using the underlying data already, on a per-piece basis, then why not use the same system style that's already available in the collections tab? Why have this extra "create costume" step? Just let folks choose what look they want for their armor/weapons on a per-slot basis, same as they do with their hair, beard, adornment, etc. If it's because you think you need to bargain with ZOS about how to monetize it, don't worry about it. They could also monetize a per-slot system the same way they do all the rest of the cosmetics: one big purchase, and then free swapouts forever. I just don't see the appeal of moving away from that method and into something much more clunky.

It's because the way I laid it out would piggyback more on existing development, and would almost definitely be less effort for ZOS to implement, while being both simpler to monetize and a more reliable long term source of income.

Recremen

UrQuan wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

UrQuan wrote: »

Recremen wrote: »

UrQuan wrote: »

I'd be happy with a wardrobe system as described above. My own idea for how to do it was based more on doing a system that would both be customizable for players, and provide crown store sales for ZOS, while being relatively easy to implement from a development perspective:

UrQuan wrote: »

I've talked about this several times in other threads, and I've seen similar ideas from other people, but it recently occurred to me that I don't know if I've ever seen this concept spelled out in the Crown Store forum, so maybe the folks at ZOS who work on stuff for the Crown Store haven't seen this idea before.

So I'm going to talk about the thing I would most like to see in the Crown Store, how I would like it to work, and how it would be a good business decision for ZOS without particularly cutting into their sales of other items in the Crown Store. Warning: detailed post incoming!

Crown Store Costume Creation Tokens

The basic concept is a simple one. I'd like us to be able to buy tokens in the Crown Store which could be used in order to create our own custom costumes.

The way I would like to see this actually function is as follows:

1. You buy a token in the Crown Store.
2. You equip whatever you want to turn into a costume. This could be normal gear, it could be stolen clothes (perhaps stolen items should have to be laundered before they can be used to create a costume), or it could even be a disguise. Heck, maybe you could even have no gear and just use "the naked look" as your costume. Guild tabards should possibly be excluded from this process and never become part of a costume, in order to prevent possible trolling. Tabards aren't unique, though, and it's already possible for 2 guilds to have the exact same design, so maybe I'm over-thinking that.
3. You use the token to take a snapshot of what your character is wearing. This consumes the token, but has no effect on the gear or disguise you're wearing.
4. The snapshot is saved to your costumes in your collections with a default name based on your account name and a sequential number (so the first one I created would be Ur-Quan001, the second Ur-Quan002, etc).
5. You have the option to rename the costume in the same way that you can rename pets or mounts. This is purely for your own benefit as nobody else will ever see the costume name, and if it would take much development to get this to work with costumes, it's probably not worth bothering to add this extra level of customization.
6. You use the custom costume you created in exactly the same way you use any other costume from your collection.

So what's the market for this/what's the "need" it addresses?

As ESO progresses, more and more players are using more and more dropped sets, and less and less crafted gear. For the segment of the player base that cares about how their characters look (and I'd argue it's a large segment), this can cause a problem, as you may want your character to look a particular way and use gear of a particular motif, but you have to use pieces from one or more dropped set in order to get the most out of your build. You end up having to choose between looking good or being effective. This is even more apparent if you like the way lower level gear pieces look. If I've got a max-level character, and I happen to really like the way iron Orc heavy armour looks, for example, I'm out of luck unless I want to really badly handicap myself.

Anecdotally, I've spoken to a number of people who used to try to get all motifs, but have stopped bothering because they never end up being able to use a motif to get a cohesive look for their characters. I suspect this is actually quite common, and that fewer and fewer people are bothering with new motifs when they come out, while others (like myself) collect them for the sake of completeness, but rarely end up actually crafting anything in those styles because of the need to use dropped sets.

Costumes are a solution to this, but of course we're currently very limited in our options for costumes, and if you have a particular look in mind for a character, there's an excellent chance that none of the costumes available will satisfy you. By adding in costume creation tokens, players would no longer have to choose between how they want their characters to look, and whether they want their characters to be effective. This should also serve to revitalize crafting, as people will seek to craft gear (for themselves and maybe for others) in various different motifs purely to create costumes using it. In turn, this is likely to increase demand for motifs - both in-game and those purchased in the Crown Store.

OK, what are the possible pitfalls about this idea? Are they serious? Can they be minimized?

Well, of course there's always the argument that this would allow someone in PVP to appear to be in light armour (or maybe naked) when they're actually wearing full heavy, or whatever. So you won't really know what you're going up against. This could have been a valid concern a year or two ago, but frankly that ship has sailed. People can already wear costumes or disguises or polymorphs to keep enemy players from having any idea what kind of gear they're actually using. Some of the existing costumes and disguises also specifically look like particular types of gear, so it's not necessarily obvious that someone's wearing a costume or disguise today. People who would do this in an attempt to fool enemies in PVP are already doing it. This won't change that.

Won't this idea detract from sales of costumes in the Crown Store though? Maybe a bit, but for the most part there won't be overlap between Crown Store costumes and costumes that players could create for themselves. The majority of Crown Store costumes are original and cannot be replicated with the various motifs and gear that you can get in-game. Because of that, if someone sees a Crown Store costume that they like, they'll still have to buy it (at whatever price it's been given) if they want to use it. For the cases where an existing Crown Store costume actually can be replicated using various motifs available in-game, you could still sell those costumes in costume packs where it's cheaper to buy the pack than to use tokens to create them.

Will this allow people who aren't ESO+ subscribers to get around the limitations on non-subscribers dying costumes? Well, maybe kind of, because you could dye your gear however you want and then turn that gear into a costume. But again, kind of not, because if you later decided you wanted to change the colours of that costume you'd still be limited in the way that you are currently. And, of course, it still wouldn't give you a loophole that would allow you to dye a Crown Store costume like the Breton Hero one or whatever. And on top of that, even if you're kind of using this as a loophole to dye a costume, it's still costing you crowns, so it's not going to hit ZOS in the wallet anyway. And of course, maybe the costume creation token would work in a way that it doesn't copy the dye colours anyway, and only makes the costume out of the base items (see the next paragraph for a possible reason why it might work this way).

What about development effort though? Obviously I'm not a ZOS dev, so I can't really speak to this with much authority, but in my opinion this is unlikely to require much development effort. The overall costume system already exists, so the only thing that would need to be added is a kind of "snapshot" tool that looks at the IDs of the items that are equipped and assigns them to a new costume generated for your account. It's possible that it may be more complicated to do this if it takes into account dye colours that you may have applied to those items, but if that's the case maybe you just wouldn't be able to have any dyes that you used translate to your costume. When it comes to turning disguises into costumes using tokens, there may be some additional work that needs to be done on the disguises themselves so that a disguise turned into a costume can have dyes applied to it. I doubt that this work would be extensive, though.

Any other considerations?

Well, there's pricing of course. I would expect these to be priced comparably to most (non-limited time) costumes, so probably in the neighborhood of 400-700 crowns. A price on the lower end of the scale would probably be a better business decision, as a lower price would probably lead to more people buying them on a whim whenever they have an idea for a costume that they might like to use, even if they would only end up using it a small portion of the time. A price on the higher end of the scale would likely lead to people thinking long and hard about their costume idea and whether they would actually use it often enough to justify the cost of the token. I would expect that a lower price per token would overall lead to more crowns being spent on tokens, but that's the kind of thing that marketing experts would have to figure out.

To ZOS: please do this I know I'd spend a ton of crowns on tokens like this, and I'm sure loads of other people would too.

It's super obvious to all of us that we need some kind of system like this, but the particular solution outlined above seems extraordinarily inelegant.

First, you'd have problems with runaway data storage needs, as every individual costume would need its own data structure and there's the possibility to make a nearly identical costume with only one item changed. So the per-player storage load could end up being ridiculous.

That's simply not true. All that you do is you have the costume have 7 attributes (8 if you include the option to turn disguises or tabards into a part of the costume). Each attribute is an equipment slot (feet, hands, chest, etc). When you use the token it looks at what is equipped in each of those slots, and assigns those item IDs to the costume's 7 (or 8) attributes. The data storage needs for the costume are then no greater than the data storage needs for inventory - from a data standpoint the costume is effectively no different from a container that has been opened but not had the items removed from it.

Recremen wrote: »

Second, there's the issue of how to dye the costumes. In this system, you'd be using the same costume dyeing system as exists now, which means that if you need to shuffle the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors around per-piece to make the look work, you're quite out of luck. For example, on a Khajiit Medium chestpiece the primary color is the main leather color, the secondary color is the metal trim, and the tertiary color is the cloth padding on the sides. If you want to match that well with a Nord Medium belt, however, you need to set the tertiary color to be the same as the secondary color on the Khajiit chestpiece, so that the metal parts/trim all match. Not possible in this system!

Not necessarily. Because the costume would simply be using the item codes for everything that had been equipped, the dyeing system could be exactly the same as the dyeing system for equipment.

But you have to save that variable per costume, so either you need to cap the number of costumes you can create in this way, or you need to reserve space for all possible combinations of armor items. And you need to do that per character. Sure, there's ostensibly an upper limit on how much someone is willing to spend on these theoretical "costume tokens", but at that point you're already admitting that the devs would assign some high, but arbitrary, cap on the number of costumes you can create.

No, you don't need to do anything on a per character basis. Like all other costumes any costumes you create would go into your collection. And of course there would be an upper limit on the number an account could have - just like there's an upper limit on the total inventory an account can have. If being able to have 2,808 different items in your inventory on a single account (not including crafting bags or items inside containers) doesn't cause any data issues, then the upper limit on custom costumes can easily be sufficiently high that it's effectively not an issue.

Recremen wrote: »

As to the second point: if the costume override is using the underlying data already, on a per-piece basis, then why not use the same system style that's already available in the collections tab? Why have this extra "create costume" step? Just let folks choose what look they want for their armor/weapons on a per-slot basis, same as they do with their hair, beard, adornment, etc. If it's because you think you need to bargain with ZOS about how to monetize it, don't worry about it. They could also monetize a per-slot system the same way they do all the rest of the cosmetics: one big purchase, and then free swapouts forever. I just don't see the appeal of moving away from that method and into something much more clunky.

It's because the way I laid it out would piggyback more on existing development, and would almost definitely be less effort for ZOS to implement, while being both simpler to monetize and a more reliable long term source of income.

I meant on a per-account basis, not character, my bad. Either way, though, that's can still be a sizeable data structure when you consider millions of accounts. Compare that to the rest of the collections interface, for which ownership of an item can be stored bitwise, which is the most efficient structure possible. If you have to store a whole outfit then you're going to need, at the very least, to store some unique mapping per item, then concatenate all of those mappings together to store as the whole costume. I'm pretty sure you couldn't even use a Huffman encoding or otherwise losslessly compress the data without requiring an undue amount of dev work on it, either to dynamically allocate more memory for frequent-use accounts or based on the ever-changing trends in motif use making optimization impossible. Of course, it also gets worse and worse as each new motif comes out.

As to your second point, I'm sorry but I don't see how your suggestion piggybacks off of existing development at all. We don't know anything about the dev cycle and can at best make educated guesses toward that end. I am personally guessing, however, that neither the snapshot tool you describe, nor the data storage and retrieval systems for this setup, not the integration with dyeing or the collections UI, are currently under development. This is because those are all new bits of functionality that we've never seen before. We don't even know what the item and costume data structures really look like under the hood, so we can't tell if that's easy to integrate or if it would require a whole new development cycle. So it's not likely to be simpler, not likely to be piggybacking... really the only thing it might be is easier to monetize, as they'd only have to monetize the token itself. It wouldn't be a more reliable long -term source of income, as a per-use cost tends to drive players towards conservative spending, while a more permanent unlock, like the hair, beard, adornment, etc. systems which already exist encourage both more player participation in purchasing and use of the product.

I'm not saying that your pitch is without merit, it's just that this particular implementation leaves something to be desired. We still agree that there needs to be some kind of better system for integrating the dozens of beautiful motifs into our character's appearance without having to trade build viability for it.

Path

Loved the LotRO system. Dye application was a nice feature as well.

SanderBuraas

Path wrote: »

Loved the LotRO system. Dye application was a nice feature as well.

Though, ESO has a more complex dye system.

Gargath

Imho SWTOR has one of the most convenient outfit system.

SanderBuraas

Gargath wrote: »

Imho SWTOR has one of the most convenient outfit system.

Literally the same?