No New Customizations is the "Don't you guys have phones" of 2021

Community General Discussion
654

I’ve always understood that the release for customizations/improvements for allied races, particularly the Nightborne, was never certain, but I’m still immensely disappointed that we’ll essentially have to wait the lifespan of Shadowlands for this concern to be addressed, if they ever get around to it at all.

Engineer’s Workshop: Enhancing Character Customization - Just prior to Shadowland’s release, we have the developers revealing that backend systems have been massively improved to make customizations easier to implement. Naturally, you would assume this newfound freedom would see the players receiving added customizations in an expedited manner. Of course not. This is the WoW dev team.

The sparse communication coupled with the failure to acknowledge that player issues are being taken onboard leaves me with very little confidence in the developers.

7 Likes
655

Jeesh… if there is such a big problem to create them, why not allow for fans to deliver them pro-bono stuff? I’d gladly send them my alterations for free, so long they could give me some sort of recommendation in case if If I’d apply for 3D modeling somewhere.
And I’d be happy for people to use them and comment on it.

2 Likes
656

Fully agreed. I’ve barely touched the soulbinds. I clicked a few in that sounded like they’d be good with how I fight and that’s been it. I’ve not even changed to the second or third characters. The Heart of Azeroth was the same way. I think i used the same active ability on 90% of my characters. Wow so exciting.

I’d rather have kept the Legion artifact weapons and just keep iterating on it through various expansions. New appearances or new weapons to choose from. It was a system that made a lot more sense for a fantasy setting. How often do characters in movies or books and such throw out their legendary for some random drop?

Customizations last through multiple expansions, players quite like them as well.

I’m also quite disappointed they’re not continuing with customizations or more allied races in the short term as they’ve been extremely popular.

In a way it does make sense though, they like making these systems they abandon. They did a new system to support races, now they’re not using it. They made a new system to support customizations, now they’re not using it.

this is really hard for people to understand for some reason.

There were also some excellent forsaken suggestions made in fan art. Stitched flesh textures and then allowing hair and beards that humans use as those should be a given.
Did they even ever fix the weird bone mismatch colorings? You couldd have an exposed jaw bone but the color didn’t even match your exposed body bones.

Yeah, they were a good start. Definitely not what you’d expect from a final delivery.

Yep, I’ve seen mockups and it looked great. Think the females (or mayeb both?) even had a matching face texture but it was absent from the bodies.

3 Likes
657

The whole thing with soulbinds and covenants touches on another aspect that I think feeds into the backlash… More than ever before, all the things they create for these different expansions feel so damn ephemeral. I no longer feel any reason to be truly attached or invested in it, when I already well know that ~2 years later it’s just going to be discarded like used tissue. At least with the Legion weapons they retained some value after the expansion with being moved into the transmog system and there still being a reason to unlock all the different appearances.

So this one time we are for once being led to expect something that would bring tangible value to us for the rest of the game’s lifetime, we instead get told that nothing is on the cards any more for years to come, and instead they’re talking about how exciting it is to bond emotionally with these characters used for the soulbind system which seems completely out of touch with what the playerbase’s actual relationship to these systems are. Like, I barely even know who these dudes are nor can I really care when I know both the characters and the systems they represent are just going to quietly disappear once SL is done with.

9 Likes
658

Yep. It’s extremly dissapointing and we really can’t say if they will ever die more. Well before some time in 10 years or something.

They have seen huw much hype they can generate with more customization and it’s certainly simpler than creating a new race. So there is hoping they will come back to it… That said, to know it will be after Shadowlands, after they said Shadowlands will be the expansion of more character customization is really taking fun away for me.

659

I fully agree. The only thing that carries over from expansions is the visuals we use on our characters.

I miss the legion weapons. I’d much rather continue upgrading my weapon in that manner. I was a bit happy to find on my frost death knight that a pair of the swords were the color to match my necrolord armor. I guess someone had planned ahead as I always thought that color was a bit out of place.

I agree with this as well. We don’t really quest or adventure with the characters so why should we really care about them? Maybe if we could quest alongside our soulbind every day like we could our chosen companion back in Legion.

Now we’re missing out on things we actually want to further develop our characters likely due to time and costs, but at the same time they’ve got the time and costs for a Warcraft mobile game…I’m a PC gamer, I don’t typically play games on my phone. The only one I’ve played recently on my phone was this one and that’s by way of my PC.

I’d much rather have the allied races people have been asking for and the customizations people want than a mobile game.

2 Likes
660

To the point where their argument against swapping covenants was that they wanted this temporary system to become part of our identity. As if that could ever be more core to our identity than our race - which is, in many ways, a cosmetic - and our class.

My main is, first and foremost, a Pandaren, and secondly a beast mastery hunter. Blizzard may think it’s fine to expect me to toss aside the “beast mastery” part of hunter if I don’t want to do 2/3 the damage of my peers, but they could at least respect that I’d like my Pandaren to have higher-quality hairstyles (and no visible seam around her neck).

But no, instead they’ll focus on a covenant that I’ll barely remember once 10.0 drops.

4 Likes
661

I’m breaking my forum silence this once to say this.

Imagine if I burst into the forums and said this:

“People need to stop complaining about classes and systems. They’re good enough already, the community is just whining.”

or

“Who cares if the raid is buggy or untuned, or boring? Doesn’t affect me. We have plenty of raids. They don’t need to add more in.”

I would be considered ridiculous. Of course, some people will burst in saying “THAT IS THE MAIN CONTENT”. Well, guess what? It isn’t to everyone. So imagine if tons of those who really don’t care about raiding high end were to say ridiculous things like that, because it’s not a part of the game we’re interested in.

Again, we’d be seen as ridiculous.

So why is it so hard to understand that there’s a different part of the community, and we’re allowed to be upset/complain, too, when our voices are not being heard? People are downplaying it as “barbie dress up”, well I could call raiding “Call of Duty simulator”. Both statements are just completely ignorant.

Blizzard should be looking at all parts of the community. Again, no one expected it in 9.0.5 or 9.1. Lackluster as the 9.1 content is (in my opinion. Nothing even remotely interesting being added, to me, there), people were content to wait several months.

But the entire expansion? After being told “yeah, we’re accepting feedback, keep it coming!” and “It won’t be the main focus, but it will be an ongoing focus!”

Give. Me. A. Break.

Well, here’s our feedback. And we’re not going to be dismissed as just “not being satisfied” when people can complain about other parts of the game in the same breath and be taken seriously.

No we are not.

Edit: I’m “Fantasyvixen” (unfortunately stuck with the name, made it as a kid because I liked ‘fantasy’ and ‘foxes’. Had no idea implications as a middle school child and figured “hey this is a neat sounding name!” sigh.) on the WoWhead article about this and getting insulted/called ‘entitled’ for expressing my frustrations. Yet people that complain about other parts of the game apparently are justified in everything.

I’m so sick of white knights.

36 Likes
662

No More Character Customization Planned in Shadowlands Community Backlash - Wowhead News

WoWheads got it as the top article today.

9 Likes
663

I feel this. If you want High Elf Haircolors you get brigaded by the whole forum.

Even before the no customization options thing happened.

664

Her statement literally wasn’t about High Elves.

But the way you brought it back literally solves your own problem with peoples annoyance on the topic.

As for dissenting opinions on High Elves, well it’s valid and idk what to tell you.

3 Likes
665

Wonderful. The more exposure to this stupidity the better.

1 Like
666

More exposure is good… also the amount of people in this forum defending blizzard’s actions/decision is gross

4 Likes
667

The kind of aggressive pushback we constantly see pop up among the playerbase itself whenever the issue is brought up, is really bizarre to me. How did we get to the point where the community seems to treat it as some kind of zero sum game? Does it have to do with that one Blizzard comment years and years back (I think during WoD and it was about the scrapped garrison customizations?) that it was “going to cost us a raid tier”, and this has been seen as the mantra for WoW as a whole ever since?

Why is this seemingly such a pervasive issue with WoW while its less successful peers in the market don’t have these kinds of problems with delivering the kind of content its audience wants?

15 Likes
668

It has to be a management issue. I really can’t think of anything else other than spite or ego.

2 Likes
669

I had to make a similar argument on Reddit after seeing the ridiculous number of comments saying nobody gives a sh* about customizations or cosmetics, and they’re less important than other things in the game so we should all just shut up basically. Luckily all of those comments on the posts I saw were sent to the bottom, but still. The fact that they’re made in the first place is depressing.

12 Likes
670

Seems like the people vehemently against character customization wants WoW to be more like agario where everyone is the same blob and get to show off how big their blob is compared to everyone else.

4 Likes
671

How are people ignoring the massive changes made a few months ago for shadowlands? They even made a paid service free for sake of customization…

672

I’m glad they’ve added those things. Because of how bad character customization was, it’s still light years behind. People were just hoping for more. And it turns out we’ll be waiting for at least two years until then.

With a company as giant as Blizzard. I mean it’s a bit silly imo

11 Likes
674

Literally nobody is ignoring them. We’re saying they weren’t near enough. The only time this game has EVER had any sort of new customization added was in WoD when they redid models, and then we only got maybe one or two hairstyles added on a couple races. NEs are the only ones I can really remember. This has been 15 years overdue and they still are pathetically behind virtually every other MMO on the market.

And yeah many of us are rightfully upset that allied races, despite being just added last expansion, now have the least amount of options in the game. Some look like they were never even finished in the first place. And they’re the races that we actually have to put effort in to unlock and play. It’s unacceptable.

15 Likes