Quote Originally Posted by Alabore View Post
Why am I stressing the no-constraint bit so much?
Because people are likely banking obsolete gear, hoping to COPY its appearance over to newer, better, suits of armour.
What if we could CREATE combinations instead?
We could keep suits as templates - but once we can freely pick layers, we could save those combinations as "armour appearance tonics", "appearance blueprints" or whatever we'd like to call them.
Yes, they would still take up one inventory slot - but at least they'd be lighter, and maybe we could share them around more easily.
Please keep in mind: the template tonic itself could be un-bound.
As long as the customising service requires some kind of paying or unlocking, Turbine need not draw the shortest straw in the deal.

How do appearance kits fit in this all?
Well, the ONE constraint Turbine could enforce is, some skins are store or favour only.
Either you unlock, find or buy them with TP - and you can freely use them in your own templates.

Maybe this isn't the best of the various worlds, but it could be a rough approximation.
Freely choose appearance, including exclusive skins as an option if you bought them.
Provide a front-end screen not unlike character creation for picking appearance parts.
Create an "armour blueprint" from the appearance you created.
Apply the blueprint as an appearance kit.
Allow for blueprints to be applied as a character-choice instead of an item-specific option, and you have your cosmetic slots.
We seem to be on pretty close to the same page.

As far as how many constraints on what combinations we can pick, I really do not object to loosening it up. But there will be some who argue that platemail looking like robes is cheating (for the 2 people who care about PVP) or spoils the suspension of disbelief, or just like meddling in other folks' business.

Also, from the Dev's point of view, I can imagine they'd want safeguards to prevent people from deliberately designing armor with the most horrible clipping issues they could find, then walking around Stormreach making the place look like it was programmed by chimpanzees.

Of course, if I want to make Stormreach look bad, I can just apply a 1-layer skin to a suit of Heavy Plate, since none of the 'no-gear' skins look good on anything but cloth, so maybe that's not a big concern of the Devs.

Frankly, if it means a truly CUSTOMIZABLE (which the system on Lamannia is NOT, it's just a small number of cookie-cutter options) armor appearance system, I'm willing to throw a bone to the meddlers and the Devs to get it.

It'll skip all the argument. Forget all the garbage about "ZOMG that leather looks like CLOTH!" and "How DARE you wear black and brown at the same time!" It's pretty impossible to defend an argument that armor you could pull randomly from a chest should be disallowed as a choice.

Once we have the system, we can negotiate on a case-by-case basis if we decide the flexibility already built into the armor appearance engine is insufficient.