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.