[Suggestion] Backpack Dyes - Set aside resources and do it, please

TLDR: Read bold

Hello,

I know it was posted that allowing players to dye backpack items would cost a lot of resources (time, money, developer tears, etc), but I think the cost would be worth it. Here are some pro's and cons:

Pros:

• Player / customer happiness: A lot of players have been wanting and waiting for this feature, it would generally raise the morale of players
• Creative boost in game's appearance: For new players / people just trying it out, logging in and seeing the wide variety of choice included with the new feature would make the game look even more appealing to invest in (expansions / gemstore items / etc)
• Selling feature: Comparing MMO's to each other has become an internet pass-time at this point, adding an extra feature into the game that is either on-par or far exceeds the other top MMO's out there really helps GW2 stand apart
• Helps in selling more gemstore items: For me personally, and I'm sure for many others, I've been sold on gemstore items based on seeing different dye variations on players in game or in my hero panel's costume preview with my own dye channel. Changing the dye of an item completely changes the entire feel of that item and has been a huge factor in where I spend money on this game

Cons:

• Huge time pit: It would take developers an enormous amount of time to retroactively open dye channels on pre-existing backpacks
• Huge money pit: Time paid to developers to do the work takes away from time paid from other features
• Takes away value from some of the existing backpack items: Black winged vs White winged backpack vs Macaw winged backpack - those are 3 separate sales that could be reduced to 1 if EVERY backpack item was given a dye channel - REBUTTAL obviously the easy way to prevent this would be to handle the backpack items exactly the same as the glider skins - lock dye channels for certain specified items to prevent the loss in sales

Suggestion:I would suggest that this feature use the glider dye channels as a base for the backpack items (above example). Set this feature aside to be done in waves - work with the most recent / easiest items (glider skins) that could be more quickly translated, then slowly roll out the older items. Another way to implement this huge change is to provide this feature in an expansion, where it can be chipped away little by little then presented completely in a selling feature for an expansion (this option is a little slimey to paywall a dye feature, but just giving suggestions).

Final thoughts:Overall, despite the money and time it would take, I honestly think providing this base feature could add an enormous player morale boost / selling boost to the game, in other words - it'd be worth it.

I know it was posted that allowing players to dye backpack items would cost a lot of resources (time, money, developer tears, etc), but I think the cost would be worth it.

And bugs resulting from rewriting spaghetti code that's in the core of the game from before launch. That needs to be mentioned also as a time and money cost

On its face doing this sounds like a great idea, since this is what fans want. As a fellow player I'd like this as well, but unfortunately our systems were not designed with this in mind. Not only would we have to go back and code each item so it can have dye channels/sufficient UI and prepare for the veritable bugfest that would ensue from altering a system that has years of work built on top of it, but we'd also have to retexture these items. Why? Our dye system is balanced around a red base color which has an impact on how every other color will appear when a channel shifts to it. Anyone who has played with dodging/burning in photoshop will know that red has some strange properties when it comes to shifts in values. Many dyes would have blown out/dull/oddly saturated textures as a result.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's SO much more to the process that I don't have a firm grasp on.

The devs here are gamers and we love what we do. We want fans to get excited about what we make because we're fans, too. However, we have players clamoring for every fix/feature under the sun so we have to do a ton of prioritizing. Game development is never plain and simple.

Thanks for bringing that up.

I don't really think that's a con considering EVERYTHING needs to get qc'd and there are bugs with every form of coding. I've never been someone who saw bugs as this avoidable evil in video games - then again, I've been a fan of Elder Scrolls games for a while so that probably says something about me lol.

Thanks for the point though, I'm sure others don't share my insight and would consider that something to take into consideration, while I think it's just part of the job ;)

@TheUndefined.1720 said:Thanks for bringing that up.

I don't really think that's a con considering EVERYTHING needs to get qc'd and there are bugs with every form of coding. I've never been someone who saw bugs as this avoidable evil in video games - then again, I've been a fan of Elder Scrolls games for a while so that probably says something about me lol.

Thanks for the point though, I'm sure others don't share my insight and would consider that something to take into consideration, while I think it's just part of the job ;)

And of course there's this part of the quote

However, we have players clamoring for every fix/feature under the sun so we have to do a ton of prioritizing.

My take on what he said is that the problems listed to be solved are "the tip of the iceberg" in what needs to be done and with all the other features requested by players, such as build templates, setting up backpacks to be dyeable are not on the to do list. Not when time and resources are limited and other things can be done with those resources that are also wanted.

/shrug. Maybe eventually they will rewrite the spaghetti code and fix all the bugs. However it took one Dev about a year to fix one bug that gave people extra AP points, so the time to fix all the bugs that spring up in core code might take a while.

I think it would take years worth of allocating resources to changing backpacks, and, from what the Devs have posted previously, it seems to be an all-or-nothing venture as far as implementing it (not just offering a few at a time). Backpacks are an odd duck, being sort-of armor, and sort-of trinkets. They would not be able to support the Glider dye channels.

Regardless, I think I would rather all that time and resources be spent on other features; either those requested by the playerbase, or, my choice: new features/content.

Good luck.

Actually, this would cost them money. At the moment, for example; there are black angel wings and white angel wings which are separate. I am sure you can already see where the problem lies with that. As it stands they could charge you for a whole host of coloured wings, Golden, Parrot, you name it... oh wait.

I find it silly that they never incorporated dye channels into back packs from the beginning. Same applies to weapons.Now we have gliders that are separate from back pieces as well. Why it is that they have not offered the butterfly wings or similar back pieces as stand alone, dyeable glider skins makes little sense. They clearly have the resources to introduce not just new glider skins, but new glider mechanics (standing on a spinning meteor, being carried by chickens, etc.), so I don't see that as being a barrier to creating gliders out of older back pieces.They've shown already that the mechanics are in place on the Trading Post to allow people to receive a discount on a package item where they have already purchased one or more of the items contained within the package, so that's not a barrier either.

@Neural.1824 said:I find it silly that they never incorporated dye channels into back packs from the beginning. Same applies to weapons.Now we have gliders that are separate from back pieces as well. Why it is that they have not offered the butterfly wings or similar back pieces as stand alone, dyeable glider skins makes little sense. They clearly have the resources to introduce not just new glider skins, but new glider mechanics (standing on a spinning meteor, being carried by chickens, etc.), so I don't see that as being a barrier to creating gliders out of older back pieces.They've shown already that the mechanics are in place on the Trading Post to allow people to receive a discount on a package item where they have already purchased one or more of the items contained within the package, so that's not a barrier either.

For backpieces, I'm going to guess that back then they didn't realize backpieces would be an important vanity cosmetic item. When you think about it, how many backpieces were there at launch? There was the Engineer backpiece that you can get in character creation, but off hand I can't think of any others. The first cosmetic backpiece I remember was the Mad Memoirs at the first Halloween. Then no more till the next holiday, the Toymakers bag.

As for the weapons, they had this to say.

jpetrie

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.)

@ProverbsofHell.2307 said:Actually, this would cost them money. At the moment, for example; there are black angel wings and white angel wings which are separate. I am sure you can already see where the problem lies with that. As it stands they could charge you for a whole host of coloured wings, Golden, Parrot, you name it... oh wait.

I touched on this - just lock the dye channels like the glider. The color specific items wouldn't be dyeable. ;)

@TheUndefined.1720 said:

• Takes away value from some of the existing backpack items: Black winged vs White winged backpack vs Macaw winged backpack - those are 3 separate sales that could be reduced to 1 if EVERY backpack item was given a dye channel - REBUTTAL obviously the easy way to prevent this would be to handle the backpack items exactly the same as the glider skins - lock dye channels for certain specified items to prevent the loss in sales

Thanks for all the interesting responses! I'm totally aware this is a non-essential piece of coding that would take a large amount of work, but to simply accept that without requesting / encouraging it would be a disservice to the game imo. Obviously, ANet are good at their jobs. I don't underestimate their potential with making games. I absolutely know they can do this. The game has been out for 5yrs. They have 2 expansions under their belt as well as a plethora of living story episodes.

So yes, ANet can do this and honestly, I think they should :)

It would have been great if Anet had included dying for backpacks and it was extremely shortsighted of them not to. But at this point it is not something I would like them to spend all of the resources on that it would take. I would much prefer they spend the resources on additional armor sets.

@Djinn.9245 said:It would have been great if Anet had included dying for backpacks and it was extremely shortsighted of them not to. But at this point it is not something I would like them to spend all of the resources on that it would take. I would much prefer they spend the resources on additional armor sets.

They're going to do that anyways. Settling with them not creating this option is one of the reasons why we dont' have it (not the prime reason by any means). Don't settle! ANet are terrific coders! They can do both ;)