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[SUGGESTION] Allow moders to use their custom weapon models for a fee


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Suggestion: Allow players to use their own weapon models (skins)

OPTION A - Models visible by other players as wellPlayers side:

  • Players who desire to be able to use their models pay ~20$ (the price of an expansion)
  • Watermarks prevent players to pretend that their art is Anet's one when taking screenshots

Anet side:

  • A tool auto-check max poly count / anchor points and scale upon model submission.
  • Someone check that players models are not offensive

OPTION B - Models visible locally onlyPlayers side:

  • Players who desire to be able to use their models pay ~20$ (the price of an expansion)
  • Watermarks prevent players to pretend that their art is Anet's one when taking screenshots
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I doubt you will get much interest in this from anet. You have to do achievements to get custom skins but what is the point if you can add your own skins? You can even add ones you ripped from the game? Legendary skins for just the cost of the transmutation charge anyone?

Not only that, it will slow down anyone near you. At the moment there are a finite number of skins and all of them are already downloaded into your client. If you allow the second option you will be downloading new skins all the time (then purging them out when the person walks out of range). Do not believe me? Log in to Second Life (which has player assets) and have fun with the lag. People there are used to it but it is not conducive to a gaming environment.

That is option A. Option B is problematic as well, like allowing people to fake screenshots.

Oh, not to forget with both (not just A) you need someone 100% of the time to verify assets. Who is going to pay that person?

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Like Menadena, very much against this. Not only would this take work away from other projects from AN, but also for a very small minority of players. Furthermore, the designs themselves could be so elaborate that it would undermined the work other players put into the game itself to achieve their weapon and armor collections. Part of the fun of GW2 is seeing players with unique and interesting item models and being able to look up how to attain them. Your suggestion would also make that impossible since it would be a unique creation exclusive to you. Also as Menadena said , and as a crafter I couldnt agree more, you could essentially duplicate the look of any legendary or combination of legendary items without any of the work.

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Totally apart from the technical difficulties, let's think of the aesthetics. While I'm sure there are lots of excellent graphic artists who would take great advantage of this option, it would also be available to non-excellent graphic artists. My concern is not that I'd have to look at wonky art from people still learning how to use Blender, but that every day I'd be looking at, say, Spongebob Squarepants hammers. Swords shaped like rubber chickens. Weapons in the form of human anatomical parts. Shields with bad puns, curse words, political statements, and photos of celebrities pasted on them.

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Modders are already using their own custom textures and even models. It's all client-side only of course, meaning no one else can see it. ArenaNet even officially allowed it in GW1; it has its own wiki page.

If they were going to do it so others could actually see it, that would add a lot of bloat. Imagine walking into world boss and having to downloading a couple hundred new textures, and now the game is 10 GB more after a few days. If they were going to do this, they would only accept the best of the best and then sell them through a new player-made gem store category.

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A couple games sort of do this, but differently. They use a platform where artists create assets (armors, weapons, accessories, etc) and upload it to the platform for everyone to see, the popular items are then officially sold in the game and the creator receives a reward. One recent example is Warframe, and they use Steam Workshop for it and reward 30% of the sales. The community essentially takes care of removing low quality work (as bad models wouldn't be voted on) and the reward entices those with skill to participate.

This is honestly something I wish more games would do.

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@"Yseron.8613" said:

  • Someone check that players models are not offensive

And that exactly is the reason why they will never allow that. Look, they don't even allow individual avatars on these forums, and it's actively used by only a couple of hundred players.

They will never give the possibility to create offending stuff and use it ingame for hundreds of thousands of players. And we all know the first things modders will create are weapons with svastikas or penises, or both lol (no worries, no offending content): https://kliosurft.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/swastika.jpg?w=450

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@"Yseron.8613" said:Modders have problems with unsuported third party tools each time a new patch is out. 15 years ago I was ok with "kind of working" solutions. But that was 15 years ago.

I'm sorry you're not personally okay with the limitations of being a modder.I hope you can understand that ANet can't possibly earn back the investment on only 1600 gems (US$20) per model. The proposals above don't factor in actual costs of implementing the idea; they only offer a price per use, without even estimating how much new income that might generate, above what the gem store already earns (since there's also a saturation effect).

Submissions processes cost people time and effort. According to the devs, it is not likely that folks using outside tools will turn out skins in the quality to which we are accustomed; they have to be reviewed and altered. It could even cost ANet more than starting from scratch.

Streaming queues... if it's not already part of the game, this is going to be hugely expensive. Watermarks might not be that expensive, but they certainly aren't part of the game yet. They already have trouble with moderating the sheer number of effects in the game, especially from player characters; this will only make that more challenging.

And no, they aren't broke in part because they don't implement ideas just because they sound cool. They pick & choose carefully, and plan stuff out, sometimes over a year in advance.

added: I forgot to mention: I'm not against the idea; it could be fun for some people. I love mods in single player games and I've enjoyed some types of add-ons in this one. That doesn't mean I think that this is where I'd like to see ANet spend its current resources.

tl;dr it's not going to happen, because it's ultimately not as profitable as the OP thinks it is. (And it might not even be all that interesting for everyone.)

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@"Yseron.8613" said:According to your logic, you must stop trying to pass through check points in airports because a passenger might carry something illegal.

Maybe you haven't noticed the huge amount of security in airports. Do you really want Anet to commit a large chunk of its resources to paying people to babysit weapon designers with no sense, instead of improving the actual game?

And do we really want the forum to be full of whiny posts about "My design was not approved! It's unfair! It's infringing my right to free speech/freedom of religion! Anet just didn't understand the meaning of my brilliant shield slogan!"

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@"DarkForcE.9210" said:Imagine whole server running around with Eternity skin...

I like the idea, but it doesn't make skin looks unique anymore

Illconceived has this pretty much nailed down imo, but to chirp in on what your saying.. Unique skins were only there the first day they were added.. now everyman and their dog runs an eternity or a moot or a .. "name unique skin here".Obtaining items that were supposed to be unique and very hard to come by .. are now nothing more than a credit card away.At least modders would bring a sense of the creative uniqueness to the game, but like Illconceived has said.. there is a lot more to it than just saying yay , mod away.

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@"Cragga the Eighty Third.6015" said:Totally apart from the technical difficulties, let's think of the aesthetics. While I'm sure there are lots of excellent graphic artists who would take great advantage of this option, it would also be available to non-excellent graphic artists. My concern is not that I'd have to look at wonky art from people still learning how to use Blender, but that every day I'd be looking at, say, Spongebob Squarepants hammers. Swords shaped like rubber chickens. Weapons in the form of human anatomical parts. Shields with bad puns, curse words, political statements, and photos of celebrities pasted on them.

You just KNOW someone will use a unique 2048x2048 texture for each jewel in an accessory within 24 hours.

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I'm all for a design-a-weapon contest to allow modders and other enthusiasts (artists) to submit their designs to ArenaNet who can select a few to add to the game at a later point. This has been done before and was quite a success.

But I see many practical issues of allowing players to use their own modded items in game. When you want them to be visible to all players you will need to get them to the clients of other players and there is your problem. Do you want them to be included in every GW2.dat file? Do you want to stream them live? This may give bugs, security issues, is technically challenging and costs more bandwidth.

Generally, modding in games is done at client-side only or on games that allows players to host custom servers. With an exception for a pure client-side mod I don't see this happen in a MMO like GW2. Too much practical issues. Therefore my opinion is:

/notsigned

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@Yamazuki.6073 said:A couple games sort of do this, but differently. They use a platform where artists create assets (armors, weapons, accessories, etc) and upload it to the platform for everyone to see, the popular items are then officially sold in the game and the creator receives a reward. One recent example is Warframe, and they use Steam Workshop for it and reward 30% of the sales. The community essentially takes care of removing low quality work (as bad models wouldn't be voted on) and the reward entices those with skill to participate.

This is honestly something I wish more games would do.

I'd be 100% behind ANet allowing this.It'd be hell for their legal team. Try to catch all the thieves and plagiarizers would be maddening. And would it be cash reward or in-game cash reward? Huuuge number of questions.But the income stream alone for Community Creations might just warrant it. Set aside a few folks to vet and test the designs, and we could get dozens of new armor skins (not outfits, skins!) that the players have been salivating for. And with those on the gem store, the teams can be working on designs as in-game rewards, which we've also been begging for. With in-game rewards, we can have material sinks for something other than T5 metal/wood invested into legendaries.

Just seeing that as a potential cascade of stuff to add to the game makes me back this 110%.

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It undermines the gemstore, devalues every skin in the game, creates additional work on Anet to police, creates the opportunity for artists to sell their skins for real world money, and so on.

I doubt this will ever be supported. In fact, I could have sworn that doing this was against the rules.

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