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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Cosmetic wardrobe mechanics I would like to see.
Sathrago
Member, Alpha Two
As the title suggests this will be my take on what they should do for the wardrobe and specifically how to handle the plethora of different items in the game cluttering your storage spaces. This will also address any possible exploits such as teleporting items across the world.
Here is what I would like to see:
The wardrobe has an unlimited space for cosmetic items.
This, and not allowing duplicates of items, will allow those collectors go wild and still be able to play the rest of the game without most of their normal storage being clogged with gear from lvl 15 that is purely for cosmetic looks.
The wardrobe can be accessed from any node for free.
This one is quite simple, you should not need to run back to your freehold or node of citizenship to equip a new cosmetic. However I do not believe it makes sense to allow this on demand wherever you are in the world. Though I am not aware of how exactly they will allow access to wardrobes, I thought it would be good to at least state my stance on it.
Items placed in the wardrobe are permanently made into a cosmetic.
This does one simple but important thing, it removes the ability for you to "teleport" items between nodes by downloading them all into your wardrobe at point A and travelling to point B and taking them back out. It is an important decision the player will have to make and live with. I just ask there be clear warnings in place so that any complaints can essentially be ignored as they knew what they were doing when they clicked that button. No Refunds.
Changing cosmetics costing a small percentage of the materials.
While all of these are just suggestions this is one that I am more welcome to criticism as even I don't know if this could potentially turn out bad for the player experience. The thought behind this sort of limitation was to keep these items relevant to the economy. Instead of getting the item and never having to interact with it's materials again this would provide a never-ending demand for materials from gatherers, processers, and crafters. As for actual percentage of materials? That is really hard to say as you can't really do 1% of 3 iron bars if you get what I mean. This would need testing by those that know more than I, the developers.
Alternative way to implement the material cost that simplifies it and alleviates the issue of store cosmetics vs regular cosmetics. When a cosmetic is applied it causes the chosen item to take a small durability loss.
Alright, those are my current thoughts on the matter, what do you all think?
Additions:
Preview window for mixing and matching cosmetics.
This in my mind was a given but it seems I should have put it up there anyway to prevent confusion. One thing that would be nice for this is to allow a preview of things that are not just our characters such as boats, mounts, pets, freehold stuff, furniture, etc. Basically, if it's a cosmetic I would like to be able to preview it before I decide to use it, especially if there is a material cost as said above. Having this be usable on an item at any time would be amazing.
The Wardrobe being viewable through the UI.
A simple thing that I honestly just assumed would be apart of the game but it does not hurt to list it here as it would be really annoying to have to go back to a node just to look at your own collected cosmetics.
Here is what I would like to see:
The wardrobe has an unlimited space for cosmetic items.
This, and not allowing duplicates of items, will allow those collectors go wild and still be able to play the rest of the game without most of their normal storage being clogged with gear from lvl 15 that is purely for cosmetic looks.
The wardrobe can be accessed from any node for free.
This one is quite simple, you should not need to run back to your freehold or node of citizenship to equip a new cosmetic. However I do not believe it makes sense to allow this on demand wherever you are in the world. Though I am not aware of how exactly they will allow access to wardrobes, I thought it would be good to at least state my stance on it.
Items placed in the wardrobe are permanently made into a cosmetic.
This does one simple but important thing, it removes the ability for you to "teleport" items between nodes by downloading them all into your wardrobe at point A and travelling to point B and taking them back out. It is an important decision the player will have to make and live with. I just ask there be clear warnings in place so that any complaints can essentially be ignored as they knew what they were doing when they clicked that button. No Refunds.
Changing cosmetics costing a small percentage of the materials.
While all of these are just suggestions this is one that I am more welcome to criticism as even I don't know if this could potentially turn out bad for the player experience. The thought behind this sort of limitation was to keep these items relevant to the economy. Instead of getting the item and never having to interact with it's materials again this would provide a never-ending demand for materials from gatherers, processers, and crafters. As for actual percentage of materials? That is really hard to say as you can't really do 1% of 3 iron bars if you get what I mean. This would need testing by those that know more than I, the developers.
Alternative way to implement the material cost that simplifies it and alleviates the issue of store cosmetics vs regular cosmetics. When a cosmetic is applied it causes the chosen item to take a small durability loss.
Alright, those are my current thoughts on the matter, what do you all think?
Additions:
Preview window for mixing and matching cosmetics.
This in my mind was a given but it seems I should have put it up there anyway to prevent confusion. One thing that would be nice for this is to allow a preview of things that are not just our characters such as boats, mounts, pets, freehold stuff, furniture, etc. Basically, if it's a cosmetic I would like to be able to preview it before I decide to use it, especially if there is a material cost as said above. Having this be usable on an item at any time would be amazing.
The Wardrobe being viewable through the UI.
A simple thing that I honestly just assumed would be apart of the game but it does not hurt to list it here as it would be really annoying to have to go back to a node just to look at your own collected cosmetics.
7
Comments
It kind of reminds me of FFXIVs system. I did not see it in your post, but I would like the limitation that items turned into cosmetics can't be turned back into their base item. I want it to be a one way trip. Just to keep the economy stimulated by increasing sales. Which I think is good for the games health.
I know people see MMO economics as a inconvenience, but no economy really shortens the life of a game. Part of the reason people end up playing patch to patch is the lack of driving forces in a games economy. When everything that is valuable this patch is going to lose value next patch. People don't see the point in making money. I know this seems unrelated, but having more valuables in the economy helps address some issues related to long term goals. There is no silver bullet for a healthy economy. Something as small as converting base items into cosmetics can have a large impact on the games health in the long run.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Number 3 is about making them permanent so you cannot take them out
A good thing because FF14 glamour system is great ^^
I would like cosmetics to be able to go into a sharable "wardrobe" so they can be exchanged with alts at will.
Formerly T-Elf
- You can right-click any looted equipment and choose to add the skin to your wardrobe if you haven't unlocked the skin yet. However, you lose the ability to sell that weapon, because it becomes character/account bound by doing that.
- All the wardrobe items are in a separate inventory tab. So they don't take up any inventory space.
- You can access it from anywhere, just by opening the wardrobe tab in your inventory. You can apply all the skins you've unlocked within your inventory to any of your equipped items.
- The common skins you can apply for free to your weapons, whereas the rare skins cost a couple skin tokens that you get over time through quests etc.
- All the characters share the same wardrobe.
fair enough on the first point, I went ahead and added that. As for the sharing with alts all cosmetics, I am not so sure. It would be neat, but I think this opens up a pandora's box of issues. Will this be allowed for items that are legendary or unique?
Will this clash with the vague rules on Cosmetics being only per character that were stated in the latest dev stream? I say vague but what I mean is that it's not clearly hashed out yet. They have not set it in stone, and were also talking about potentially allowing players to change which character has a cosmetic, but on a cooldown. Hopefully this helps you understand why I am on the fence for this particular suggestion.
And of course if you disagree you can come at me brah lol
Sheath location on the player model for melee weapons, or at least some of them. Specifically waist and back sheaths. Some might want a weapon on their back and some would want them on their waist.
Read the comic here!
With the scale of the map I would find it very off-putting if I needed to leave the node I am trying to build up just to change cosmetics. It's already, I feel, a decent limitation for them to be accessed from a node or freehold. Imagine wanting to go out into the world with your friends to explore new nodes and require hours of travel back to civilization just to change a cosmetic. If that is what you like, that's your opinion fine, but I do not personally think that would be a good idea.
Hate to say it, but I agree with you.
I can't think of any reason at all to not add in any of the things in the OP - and I am sure you know I would speak out if I could.
Prior to Stage 3, we wouldn't have a wardrobe available at Nodes. We will have access to a Warehouse at some Stage but that won't be permanent storage.
Gear will be in our inventory/warehouse. Shop cosmetics will mostly be on our account, rather than in a character's inventory. I guess when we assign shop cosmetics to a character, they will appear in that character's inventory.
I don't think we are going to want to keep cosmetics that are permanently stored in a wardrobe at a Node in such a way that we have to be in in the Node to change cosmetics because if the Node gets destroyed, we would have to wait until we become Citizens of a new Node and gain housing before we could gain access to our cosmetics.
Seems more likely it will be something similar to WoW's transmog. Might very well be that we can only change transmogs at Node that is Stage 3 or higher. I'm not sure that it will only be possible to change transmogs at our home Node. Seems unlikely since we don't have to become citizens of a Node. And, being a citizen should not be a requirement for using transmogs.
The wardrobe should be accessible from anywhere but maybe changing your appearance should only be possible from safe areas or nodes.
Also, I would like to have a preset system in the wardrobe to be able to save a certain amount of costume combinations and be able to use them easier in the future.
I don't really like to pay for change a cosmetic appearance. If you have to convert the item into a cosmetic item in order to put it in the wardrobe I think payment should be made at that time and not every time you want to change, for example, your hat.
Also, there is a question it comes to my mind. What would happen to the cash shop cosmetics, what would be the payment in materials for these items?
It would be my hope that they put a little magical box or npc at each and every node at stage 1. Even if the node gets destroyed he/it can still have a spot among the wreckage.
My thoughts on this were exactly that, a system much like wow where you can look up all your collectable cosmetics on the move.
Oh boy, a lot of stuff like this is something I would just assume is par for the course but maybe that's just from me mainly playing WoW and FF14 over the years.
The idea for paying to change cosmetics is a pretty standard thing, I am only proposing that instead of a pure gold sink where the coin disappears into the aether we have a material sink that feeds back into the economy.
As for the store-bought cosmetics there are two ways I would go about it. My first option would be to simply not have a cost on them. There is no advantage to equipping a cosmetic set so it would be fine if these just didn't have a cost. No real need to think further on that.
My second option would be to go through each cosmetic and choose the materials it would be "crafted" with. This would not be too difficult since the cosmetics we see are things that will be worn by npcs throughout the world, and to some extent us when we find similar sets of gear. Then you use the same metric as you do with normal gear to determine the cosmetic change cost and you are done.
I doubt that there will be a transmog NPC at Stage 1, but maybe.
Transmog NPC is closer to WoW than a wardrobe.
Well I am not really caring what they call it, a box, an npc, whatever. The point of it having unlimited storage space is not to keep things for later use as gear, its a cosmetic. I guess I can ask this question too, Will store bought cosmetics take up inventory slots that you have to manage too? That just seems so anti-fun. Unlimited space is the right way to go and it has nothing to do with the node size it should just be a core mechanic of the game that cosmetics do not hinder you.
Shop cosmetics have to be assigned to a specific character, so those exist somewhere on our accounts that's not taking up inventory space.
The closest to the suggestion in the OP would be something similar to WoW: you can look at your cosmetics inventory from anywhere, but you have to find a transmog NPC at a city in order to change the transmog.
Ashes has cosmetic slots, so it seems like we place actual items in those slots...and seems like those items would have been in inventory (or storage) prior to being placed in the cosmetic slots. We don't know what the mechanic is for storing collections of cosmetics.
It's highly unlikely that changing cosmetics will have a material cost because that would not apply to shop cosmetics and would therefore effectively make shop cosmetics P2W.
I really need you to think this statement through again. There is absolutely no pay to win mechanic being introduced if cosmetics from the shop dont cost materials because having the cosmetic brings no actual advantage to the game. They were never apart of the player economy in the first place so it's completely fine if they have no material cost.
We are not going to agree on this.
With the 'hide helmet' option, hooded stuff should also un-hood.
Would also like to see partial face-masks.
Wait that's actually a sick idea. This would make it work for store cosmetics too.
I do like the gold sink. Every time someone uses a mat. That creates a need in the market for me to sale them another one down the line. These cosmetic collectors could be very profitable for me.
GREED IS ETERNAL!
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Well I would just put this option in the options menu to change at will rather than force someone to go back to a node to take their helmet off.