Character Customization

So the Ask the Devs questions for armor and weapons became available and one question, which I have talked about quite a few times came up.

Q: Is it possible to let the players create/edit their own looks? - Zed Loft (Taiwan), Vysha (NA/ANZ), Ráchel (EU
German)


A: As we said in an earlier Q&A, we definitely hear loud and clear from players that they want more customization for their character. This is something we want to provide, but we want to do it in the right way. Consider the Barber Shop feature. It lets you change your character's hair, but there's not a lot of gameplay to it. We're not sure that feature really added a lot to the game in retrospect. Is WoW more fun for you now that you have a Barber Shop? Are you more likely to keep playing because of it? Maybe, but it wasn't a cheap feature to add in terms of development time. Dumping a bunch of dyes on the game might have a similar effect, where some players might have fun playing around with the system for a bit, but a lot of players might change their colors once or twice and then forget about the feature after that. Now, not every aspect of the game needs a ton of depth and a lot of interesting decisions, but we tend to attract more players to a feature the more robust the feature is.

We also think it's fair to argue that the game just needs more armor and weapon art. As we said above, we deliver a lot of art these days, but we also produce an enormous number of new items every expansion or patch and it's understandably disappointing whenever items use the same art. It would be really cool if not every mage or priest converged on the same look after a given expansion or patch.

So...

What I don't agree with in this statement is they are comparing armor set customization to the barber shop. Why do you ask? Well for the simple reason is you don't get a new head every tier level. Many people use the barber shop once or twice and are done with it. Others use it multiple times and I agree that is a few and far between. So that comparison I think is the wrong one to use.
 
The only reason I would be against dyes is a simple one. Even if you have so many colour choices it comes down to the fact that they don't want everyone picking the same colour for everything. As you have seen in LOTRO there are so many people in black it is stupid. This is why I think my idea of reusing old sets would be the best course of action. It keeps the art design useful that has been made in the past and we won't have screenshots where we have a sea of single coloured toons.