As anyone would tell you, fashion isn't free—but in World of Warcraft, it's suddenly feeling less free than ever. WoW's latest pre-expansion patch introduces a sweeping set of reworked systems ahead of Midnight's launch in March. Those changes included an overhaul to the armor transmog system, which is generating a lot of angst from players who are finding themselves forced to pay thousands of gold for the privilege of wearing outfits they'd already paid for.
While we were skeptical about the proposed transmog updates back in November, the new system does have some appeal: Previously, transmogrification applied item appearances of your choice to equipment directly. You could save and apply entire ensembles at once, but whenever you replaced one of your equipment pieces—or if you just wanted to change outfits—you'd need to reapply your desired transmog and pay the associated fee for each piece of gear.
The new transmog system is meant to replace those frequent transmog costs. Rather than paying to apply appearances to your gear itself, you instead purchase outfit slots that you can save ensembles to. Saving a transmog setup to an outfit slot costs a fee, you won't need to update that outfit whenever you change gear, and you can swap between saved outfits for free. The system also introduces options for automatically switching between outfits based on location, activity, and character specialization.
On paper, this should save players gold in the long run, as they won't have to repeatedly shell out transmog fees to ensure their gear looks their preferred flavor of cool. In practice, however, it's meant many players are logging into WoW today to find that they're suddenly expected to pay piles of gold just to wear the outfits they had already paid for.
While the cost of the initial outfit slots are relatively cheap in WoW terms—a mere 100 gold—the price escalates with each additional slot up to an eventual 10,000 gold price tag. But the real price shock is the cost of saving an outfit. If you assign an item appearance to every available gear slot (as many players likely will), it'll cost over 2,000 gold to save that ensemble. And unlike in the previous system, that cost doesn't scale downwards for low- level characters.
For an individual character, especially if it's one that's been accumulating gold over the 20 years since WoW's original launch, that's not a massive chunk of change. But for the many players who shuffle between piles of alts, repeating that cost across multiple characters, specializations, and associated outfits could mean paying tens of thousands of gold just to replicate outfits they were wearing yesterday.
On Reddit, transmog frustration is dominating the top threads of the WoW subreddit. One player in a thread with hundreds of comments says the updated system "feels like they hired a mobile game monetization consultant." In another, a user makes their best guess at Blizzard's rationale for the overhaul: "Have you tried not being poor?"
Similar threads on the official WoW forums are likewise attracting hundreds of replies. In one, an irritated dwarf notes that their collection of alts are requiring "easily 1000g each to put them back the way they looked last night when I logged off." Elsewhere, a blood elf says they've cancelled their account's next autorenewal, because "I hate having my efforts stolen by a company."
To protest the unexpected fashion fees, some players are adopting a time-honored form of protest: nudity. Rather than paying to wear the outfits they already had, they're instead forcing their fellow players to deal with a sudden uptick in scantily clad orcs and dwarves. I'll admit I'm skeptical about how effective that'll be. Anyone who's passed by Goldshire on an RP server is probably desensitized to that particular tactic.
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