Re: Patch Notes 04/02/2021
Posted: Fri Feb 05, 2021 5:26 am
I think the idea of the appearance toggle being an absolute resolution of the issue is silly.
Its mechanically advantageous to see what your enemies are actually wearing. This means the meta choice will always be to turn it off, and while you may think 'all is well because people who want to see it still can', when your enemies will mostly see your actual equipment it will lower the motivation to bother using the alternate appearances in the first place. This will have a snowball effect to lower the general passive social pressure to worry about it.
If it was simply off it would at least mean the actual appearances of the various armors would become held to a higher standard. If some endgame armor set looked horrible to the point people hated having to wear it that would become an issue that could hopefully be addressed. With the inclusion of this toggle such complaints can simply be brushed off by telling people to hide their appearance despite still looking incredibly silly to others.
I joined the server during this controversy and resolved to simply not care about alternate appearances because alternate appearance in mmos is never about how you look to yourself but how you look to others. By creating this dual system, where some people will see you one way and other people will see you another way, you are simply doubling the cosmetic load the player who wants to look good must undergo. Therefore i decided to simply look as good as i could with the actual armor appearance i had and ignore the cosmetics entirely unless things were made to how they were before. This change does not alter that position because it still preserves the real issue that some people will see you one way, and others another way. So while it doesn't affect me all that much I do feel bad for the people who put time into gathering a unique appearance for themselves to create a character identity who had that character identity stripped from them which this patch does not resolve.
Its mechanically advantageous to see what your enemies are actually wearing. This means the meta choice will always be to turn it off, and while you may think 'all is well because people who want to see it still can', when your enemies will mostly see your actual equipment it will lower the motivation to bother using the alternate appearances in the first place. This will have a snowball effect to lower the general passive social pressure to worry about it.
If it was simply off it would at least mean the actual appearances of the various armors would become held to a higher standard. If some endgame armor set looked horrible to the point people hated having to wear it that would become an issue that could hopefully be addressed. With the inclusion of this toggle such complaints can simply be brushed off by telling people to hide their appearance despite still looking incredibly silly to others.
I joined the server during this controversy and resolved to simply not care about alternate appearances because alternate appearance in mmos is never about how you look to yourself but how you look to others. By creating this dual system, where some people will see you one way and other people will see you another way, you are simply doubling the cosmetic load the player who wants to look good must undergo. Therefore i decided to simply look as good as i could with the actual armor appearance i had and ignore the cosmetics entirely unless things were made to how they were before. This change does not alter that position because it still preserves the real issue that some people will see you one way, and others another way. So while it doesn't affect me all that much I do feel bad for the people who put time into gathering a unique appearance for themselves to create a character identity who had that character identity stripped from them which this patch does not resolve.