Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
There’s been some drama in the World of Warcraft community—I know, we live in a wild and mad world—over its overhauled transmog system, and I can’t say it’s entirely unwarranted. For the completely uninitiated, ‘transmog’ is a very fancy MMO lingo word for ‘playing dressup’, and for World of Warcraft: Midnight, Blizzard’s changed the entire economy around how it works.
That old transmog system is gone: In its place, players are now able to create outfits that will not visibly change as new gear is acquired—with a limited amount of slots they need to unlock with gold. The upshot of this is that you no longer have to re-visit an NPC to put your look back the way it was when you get a new piece of gear. The new system keeps you locked to your current skin.
So why were people so mad that Blizzard sliced costs in half this week? Well, firstly, we’re playing World of Warcraft. It’s a prerequisite. But the primary reason is because this system was a lot more expensive—kinda.
The idea was that in the long run, it’d be cheaper. Let’s say you’re a max-level character playing a new patch. In the previous system, you’d wind up nickel-and-dimed as you slowly ran the gear treadmill, having to revisit the NPCs to pay your transmog dues just so your new bits of kit wouldn’t make you ugly as hell.
In theory, this new system saves you money in that scenario. It’d also save you money while levelling, too. So what was the problem?
Different clothes, different folks
The major issue was that the new system didn’t account for the fact that folks play dress-up in different ways—it made the assumption that players stuck with one outfit for long periods of time. But some players might want to change clothes as often as they might in real life, and for them, they were paying more in raw gold than before.
To state the obvious: It’s not a genius move to make a part of your game more expensive for its most avid fans. That’s like making a loyalty card which increases the price of your coffee the more stamps you get.
That’s not to say there aren’t perks: The “situations” system is super cool. Basically, you can set certain outfits to auto-trigger in different scenarios without having to speak to a single Ethereal. Want to change to a swimsuit the moment your character hits the water? You can make a situation for that. Want different armour sets for PvE and PvP? Pyjamas that pop on the moment you step foot in your player house? Situations got you.
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I mean it when I say that this feature is legitimately great. I think it is an unequivocal good that WoW has this now, and it’s going to lead to a lot of really fun fashion concepts in the future. There are a lot of benefits!
The maddening thing was Blizzard’s choice, bone-headed in the rear-view, to have this new system override the old one. Because apart from some potential coding madness—and it might genuinely be an issue—why’d we get here in the first place? Why toss away the easy win?
Wasn’t there a world in which these new outfits and situations could just layer on top of the old system? You could’ve had transmogs applied to individual pieces of gear, ala 1.0, for folks who like to change their looks often—and you could’ve also had outfits worked in as a new addition, with situations as a cool incentive to use them.
Instead, the new system punished people who engaged with the transmog system the most, which seems completely backwards to me. Especially given these players are likely (but not always, I know some very hardcore fashionistas) to be more casual, and thus have less money to fork over for their outfit slots.
Of course, Blizzard fixed the cost issues with the new system, but this whole headache could’ve been avoided in the first place. I’d also like to point out that now, for the reasons stated above, transmogging is just plain cheaper than it was before—which means more gold in the economy, which means more inflation, which is likely what Blizzard was trying to avoid by making 2.0 pricier to compensate in the first place.
Doing both would’ve made everyone happy—rather than cornering folks into trading flexibility and affordability for convenience. Ah, well. It’s over now.
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