Dyes sound so simple, don’t they?
However, they’re very hard to get right.
Yes, while a near-herculean task at this point, the “easiest” way to implement this would be to shift all armor to a greyscale and allow application of a single color. Except… doing that causes either dark colors to look washed out (such as red appearing dingy pink) or light colors to look dim and dirty. Pure white? Pure black? Can’t happen, not without almost completely removing the detail on the texture. All the multicolored bits would be gone. And that’s something we don’t want to do; the textures of the game provide much of the liveliness in the art style of the game.
If we want to do dyes right, it’s a far greater task that would require special attention to each and every piece of armor in the game, creating maps to define where the dye would and would not apply, etc. in addition to making sure the colors would be the vibrant and strong shades we’ve come to know from Warcraft. It’s not a simple thing to implement by any means, and there are no plans to do so at this time.
Other Blue:
Character customization is definitely something we would like to increase, but as far as customizing specific armor we would probably move to something that allows you to choose from color variants for some items long before we allowed actual free-form dying. That’s just my take on it right at this moment, but of course anything is subject to change.
As Cay said back in the day dyes are extremely difficult to do right as well, and would either be severely limited or just ruin a lot of the art put in to the armor. The ability to dye makes a lot more sense for certain games as the game and art style support it, but World of Warcraft just isn’t set up to do so, and tacking the ability on would contradict some core art philosophies for the game.
Like I said we definitely love giving players choices and the ability to customize, and that’s only going to increase as we go, but dyes aren’t currently something we’re considering for any future types of customization.