Why can't we dye our weapons?

It's been 8 kitten years since release and we still couldn't dye our kitten weapons. Why the kitten not?

To do so is such a massive task to add channels it would create so much work and apparently such a large patch, the devs have decided against it.

They had to decide this during the original game design apparently and they chose not to/were unable to get it into the game

There are threads on this topic already which answer your question. The forums search function is a wonderful tool.

Because they make money by selling recolored versions of weapons :)

@Guthix.5138 said:It's been 8 kitten years since release and we still couldn't dye our kitten weapons. Why the kitten not?Because they were not made to be dyed.

It was the same with backpacks and they changed it for future ones, so maybe in the future we will get new weapons that can be dyed OPWont help with all the old already released weapons tho.

Why can't we dye our weapons? - Because ANet has not implemented that feature into the game. Mystery solved.

because that was something they decided early in the game's development

We don't know why that decision was made. It would certainly have resulted in more work since it would require creating all the masks for the different channels but it would also impose design constraints. There are probably other constraints but one of the most obvious one is that you can't make anything that requires more than 4 colors if you are going to make it fully dyeable. In theory weapons don't always need to be fully dyeable. For example a sword blade will typically be a uniform material and have a color appropriate for that material but that will not stop all the people arguing for their need for glow sticks. Of course the more sensible approach would have been having some undyeable ones, some partially dyeable and some fully.

On the other hand that would have no impact on the number of posts by players complaining about dying weapons. It just gets replaced by "why can't we dye this part or that part" and "why is this part's color using the same dye channel as that part". From this perspective not allowing dyes is the right decision. You'll have just as many players complaining but the development cost is cheaper. In other words ... this is why we can't have nice things.

The reasoning was explained in a long ago post

I can't give you specifics or anything (they'd be very tedious to compute even if I still had access to the code), but GW2's codebase is very much an evolution of the codebase used for GW1. We did not start over, or anything crazy, but nor did we use the GW1 code unchanged.

Huge chunks of gameplay code were added, removed, or refactored so heavily as to be effectively-new (even things you might think would be the same, like inventory). The core rendering and networking capabilities had some significant reworking to support new features, but a lot of the fundamentals remained the same. The very low-level stuff, such as the classes we use to manage collections of data, do math, sort things... those didn't change much and some files might even be identical to the ones in GW1, except maybe for some copyright or header date changes.Essentially if you view the code as a vertical stack of functionality, with very-game-specific gameplay code at the top and generic data structure/algorithm stuff at the bottom, the closer something is to the top the more likely it experienced significant tweaking at some point during GW2's development.

To address the specific topic of this thread (dying stuff)... what I recall (so I might be wrong) is that the decision to dye armor but not weapons was a design one (in the sense we chose to do it, not that there were insurmountable technical issues), and made pretty early. We wanted a much richer dye system for GW2 than we had in GW1. This would require some changes to the way that the source art was authored, which increased the complexity (and thus time) of doing so. That additional complexity pays off best for armor, which is more visible on-screen than weapons generally are, and so (I think) it was decided that we wouldn't bother authoring dye support into the weapon art. Eventually this decision would have led to code changes or optimization relying on that assumption, and we arrive at where we are today.

As with all things, it could be made possible to dye weapons with sufficient code and art resources sunk into it. But it would be a nontrivial undertaking (and probably a non-trivial patch download!) to re-author all the existing source art with appropriate metadata for dye channels.(Please keep in mind that all of this is from memory from a long time ago, so I may be forgetting/misremembering/et cetera some things.)

Simply because Arenanet decided eight years ago that they don't want us being able to dye our weapons.

Because, "everything you loved about GW1," was not meant to include many of the most popular elements of GW1.

I still have hope that one day we can dye weapons, If I could dye Kudzu to not have pink on it I would probably make it.

@Vavume.8065 said:I still have hope that one day we can dye weapons, If I could dye Kudzu to not have pink on it I would probably make it.

If we 1 day could dye weapons we would not be able to dye any of the old ones.

Just look at backpacks were none of the old ones, even legendarys dident get dye channels after they invented the tech for it.

@maddoctor.2738 said:Because they make money by selling recolored versions of weapons :)

What weapons have they resold with different colors? Not saying you're wrong, just can't think of any other than SAB weapons, that you earn in-game.

@jokke.6239 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:Because they make money by selling recolored versions of weapons :)

The non-exotic crafted ones also are just recolours from eahc other.The Restored Boreal weapons are recolours from the Ancient Boreal Weapons.The Inquest weapon set is a recolour of the Mystic weapon set.The Mad King's weapons technically also are recolours of the AC weapons.And I think there are yellow and grey versions of the Seraph weapons.

I probably missed a few sets.However, I don't think any of them of them were sold on the Gem Store or at the BL Weapon Specialist.

@Fueki.4753 said:

@jokke.6239 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:Because they make money by selling recolored versions of weapons :)

Also

Ascended weapons (5-6 colours)Fractal weapons (normal and gold)

I think there a wvw one and possibly the set from the meteor crafting

There shouldn’t be any bl ones as the one time they did that, they pulled the set and redid them.

I don’t think they do it to make money though as they are earn able, but a limited way round the non dyable problem

@Fueki.4753 said:

@jokke.6239 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:Because they make money by selling recolored versions of weapons :)

I believe they've said in the past that they never just recolour an item. There are always detail differences in the layout of colours and above all in the geometry.

It would be cool if we could dye our legendary weapons though. I know it would be a massive task to add dyes into the game but with a finite number of weapons, wouldn’t that make the task a lot more easier and sustainable ?

the problem is, many weapons only look good if you go for a certain dye theme. Mesmers, rangers, thieves and necros? They have plenty of good options. Mesmer-purple is also the standard stuff you get from plenty of legendaries and legendary auras.

I do not want purple.

But if you want say a sylvari with lots of greens - you are totally out of luck. The nightware stuff is mostly purple, or blue-ish. The daydreamer stuff looks silly. The verdant weapons look flimsy. Bioluminiscene is blue-ish again.

Not dyeable would not be a problem, if there were a wide array of options. But sadly, between 'grotesque' and 'stupid looking' there aren't many options. And those few options are mostly only good for dark or purple schemes.

@Linken.6345 said:

@Vavume.8065 said:I still have hope that one day we can dye weapons, If I could dye Kudzu to not have pink on it I would probably make it.

Sounds like you are expecting Anet to be consistent, I'm not.

@Linken.6345 said:

@Vavume.8065 said:I still have hope that one day we can dye weapons, If I could dye Kudzu to not have pink on it I would probably make it.

This. If ANet ever introduces dyeable weapons it will be gemstore stuff and they will never look back into making existing weapons dyeable.

Same story with backpieces.

They decided not to dye weapons for practical reasons. Yes, it sucks in a lot of cases, but it saves on development resources, which is why we have so darn many weapons in any single category versus armor pieces.

@"Ashen.2907" said:Because, "everything you loved about GW1," was not meant to include many of the most popular elements of GW1.

Weapon dyeing was hardly one of the most popular elements of GW1, a third of those weapons couldn't be dyed either, and half the ones that could was so minimal as to be effectively unnoticeable.

@The Greyhawk.9107 said:

Weapon dyeing was hardly one of the most popular elements of GW1,

Anecdotal I admit, but I ran a very active full alliance of full guilds that had half a dozen guilds on a waiting list for entry and I don't know of a single player who didn't dye at least some of his weapons.

@Ashen.2907 said:

@The Greyhawk.9107 said:

Weapon dyeing was hardly one of the most popular elements of GW1,

That's an odd coincidence, because no one in my full alliance ever dyed their weapons.