Costume items, to date, have been to date of six sorts:
- Stuff that’s there in the costume builder from the get-go.
- Stuff that requires a specific, mission (e.g., the cape mission) to unlock. (Arguably, this applies to recostumiing missions for Icon et al.)
- As #2, but event-related (Winter and Valentires costume pieces).
- Feature items with box sets (e.g., helmets via buying the CoV box set).
- Vet Rewards.
One of CoX’s greatest strengths has been its character creator and costuming. It’s constantly under expansion, and many folks are drawn to the game just for it. Requests for a stand-alone costumer are regularly received by the devs, and a lot of people roll up alts just to try out a new visual concept.
Note that most of the above items are available to anyone in the game, at least after a certain period of play. Options 3-4 aren’t, but the number of pieces involved, and their “hotness,” is pretty liimited. Having the toga is nice if you want a togaed character, but I haven’t heard too much wailing over that.
I9 introduces a new class of costume item:
6. Costume inventions.
Now, we’ll leave alone the idea of “inventions” for developing costume pieces. (“You mean I can get all this spiffy power armor stuff just for free, but if I want fairy wings vs bat wings I need to ‘invent’ something?”) The changed dynamic here is that in order to get the stuff, you need …
a. To find an invention recipe.
b. To buy an invention recipe.
c. To find or buy the underlying ingredients for the recipe.
Simply playing the game isn’t enough. Especially when these costume pieces — and I’m talking wing types here — are considered premium bits, by design. Quoth Positron:
I looked at the dataminer today at the costume drop rate and it IS lower than we anticipated.
We are looking into making some changes, but do not expect anything radical or quick.
We DO want costume recipes to be “commodities” that players actively seek and pay top inf. for, but we do not want them to be so rare that players can’t get them, ever, in the course of their play.
If you don’t have “top influence” or aren’t a high enough level to get it, you are SOL. If you don’t want to be a day-trader at Wentworths (“Where CoX meets eBay with 1985-style computer interfaces!”), you are SOL. If you want to play a fairy character or a draconic character or a winged robot or whatever, and you’re not a “playah,” you’re SOL.
That just strikes me as a horrible strategic decision on the devs’ part. If costuming is such a big part of the game, then leveraging that to taunt folks into the invention system is manipulative at best, and for those who don’t want to dive into its clutches, a shut-out at worst. It’s like going to Disneyland, getting your entrance pass, but being told that some rides can only be ridden if you pay a lot extra, or find a random FastPass ticket for them. It stops being about fun and starts being about commerce.
Bad idea.
