I would also like to begin by saying that I really like the way they have implemented appearance altering. I suggested a long while back that they go off the armoury and allow you to set appearances of any item you have unlocked in your tome, but this expands and improves on that in several ways.
However, my focus today is on a pretty big drawback to this addition and that is that it can only be seen by your realm, not your enemies. More directly, this post is aimed at the reason posted today on the items and appearances article. I love all the guys over there at Bioware Mythic, so in a way it pains me to call them out like this, but unfortunately this is part of the reason I created BSD.
A couple years ago, my cell phone company sent me a letter in the mail, saying they were modifying my plan to include some extra charges that were not optional, for my convenience. I got a good laugh out of that because the most convenient thing for me would be to not pay the extra money for the same service.
This snippet from the post today explaining why the enemy realm can not see armour customizations reminded me of that, in part because I feel there is probably a good and valid reason kicking around somewhere why they do not want to implement it as showing to both sides, perhaps a performance issue, but instead we get a reason which seems to imply that players would prefer it this way.
“In light of the fact that we do not want players to use this system solely to confuse the opposing realm in RvR, the appearance you apply to your equipment can only be seen by players of your own realm. Players of the opposing realm will see the equipment as if no alternate appearance has been applied to it.”
Lets take a look at this from two different perspectives, both the Warhammer tabletop side of it, and the Warhammer Online practicality side of it.
Warhammer Tabletop: While I never played the tabletop version, one of the biggest selling points of the game seemed to be the ability to customize your figurines and paint them as you like. If you were a good artist, you could make them look pretty amazing, if you were not, your army would look pretty rag-tag. Either way, when you played against other people everyone had their customized armies on the board. Would anyone complain that it was unfair that they lost to a poorly painted army because they didn’t expect them to be able to fight as well as an army painted by a professional?
Warhammer Online: Imo, any person that is running into a battle, evaluating the equipment level of the people they are fighting, then adjusting the effort and concentration they put into winning the battle based on that equipment evaluation, deserves whatever outcome they get. Fight the player, not his gear.
Adding the customization should be a patch that adds the tabletop feature of making yourself look how you envision with the different pieces in the game and dye jobs available, but I feel it is important to reflect that appearance to your enemies as well for the full effect of taking pride in doing that to come through.
I really enjoyed the old way of doing things. In DAOC you knew very little about your opponent beyond his race. You had to fight your hardest no matter what and you had to expect the unexpected. With the gear sets and weapon restrictions/itemization in this game and the looks of the characters, most classes are easily distinguished. A bright wizard can not really be mistaken for a warrior priest etc, no matter how you customize it.
In conclusion, I would just say that if the reason posted is the actual real reason and it is being restricted to help the players out, toss up a poll for players and see how it turns out. I know how I would vote and I -think- I know how it would turn out, but I can’t say for sure. What do you guys think out there?
Read all about the appearance changes here: http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=1218