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KA Wardrobe Feature

This was part of the Kunark Ascending Crafting and Housing Preview. It has been updated with new information on December 6, 2016

This article has two sections. In the first, I will explain how the wardrobe feature works, and in the second, well, I will say some things that I feel need to be said. :P

How it Works

Your character sheet (provided you are using either the default UI, or a custom UI that has been updated to reflect the expansion changes) will have a new Wardrobe tab. It will contain storage for all 11 appearance slots. The amount of storage you are granted will be based on which version of the expansion you own. (6 slots for Standard Edition, 12 for Collector's Edition, and 18 for the Premium Edition). That adds up to "up to" 66 slots for Standard, and "up to 176 slots" for the Premium Edition.

You may now also purchase additional wardrobe slots. The purchased slots are per-character, NOT per-account, and you are buying an individual row for a single slot type at a time for 45 DBC. There is also some limit (not yet known) as to how many slots you may add, but it is a decent number. (Testing by one player has gone up to 96 slots for one gear slot, and still climbing.) To purchase extra slots when you run out of room, access the wardrobe tab on your character sheet, and each gear slot should have purchase buttons.

There are a few things to note before we cover how to add things, as you don't want to go adding items until you note the following details:

  • The physical version of the items you are adding are destroyed, leaving you with just the base appearance of the item. Thus, you don't want to add anything to this tab that you might actually need for stats (such as crafting gear, harvesting cloak, etc.)
  • Once you use up all the available storage space for a specific slot (such as cloaks), you will have to remove one from a filled slot in order to replace it with another, thus losing the appearance of the item you removed. This means packrats will need to make choices
  • Items stored in the wardrobe can be used for your personal appearance, appearance sets, and all mannequin-type interfaces (house mannequins, guild uniform mannequins, house actors)
  • While I mention "the base" appearance of the item in the first bullet point, let me spell out the fact that it will not keep any particle effects that you added via essences at the reforger. (It keeps particle effects that came with the item, not any that you add later.)

To add items to the wardrobe, open up the container(s) where the gear is stored, click on the Wardrobe tab and either drag the item over to the proper slot section, or just drop it in up at the top where it says "Add to Wardrobe." You will be given a confirmation box, to be sure that you want to stuff the item into the wardrobe and destroy the physical version of the item. (If any of it is old gear with adornments, you may want to remove the adornments first so that you can keep those, too.)

To access these items once they have been added to the wardrobe, click on the slot (on your appearance tab, on the mannequin customize tab, etc.) and it should show you all the items that you have stored for that slot in your wardrobe.

You will also be able to tell, at a glance, which slots are filled with normal items, versus which are filled with items from your wardrobe. Wardrobe items that are equipped for appearance will show with blue dots in the bottom right corner, such as the chest and forearms in the picture below.

That's the very basics of the feature as it stands now on beta.


Now for the part that I really dislike doing, but feel that I "should" say anyway. It may fall on deaf ears, and it may be the redhead on steroids talking. (4 months of them, ugh! And yes, they were/are "needed" and I will finally be off them soon.) Still, I feel the need to try to add some reality checks, and a plea.

Gather a dozen people together to talk about what they want in any new game feature, and you are likely to have at least a half-dozen, if not more, varying opinions on what they visualize such a feature including. Some of these wishlist items are seemingly simple, others are mutually exclusive, still others are unrealistic given various restrictions they may or may not be aware of.

Since folks have seen the wardrobe feature for themselves, or simply heard about it from others, there's been a nasty undercurrent of venom on certain fronts, because it isn't exactly what some people wanted/expected/needed/etc. Some seem to even taken "just another example" of Daybreak staff personally screwing with them. Yep. Someone at Daybreak got up one morning and apparently said, "I'm going to mess with so-and-so's vision of how this feature "should" be handled."

If you're in that category, then nothing I or anyone else can say, will change your feelings of persecution. For the rest of you, though, I'd like to explain a couple things that may help you understand why some of these decisions might have been made.

What about just putting a wardrobe in the a house, and store all your appearance gear there? Yes, this could have been done, BUT if it was house-based storage, it would only be able to be accessed from inside your house. You would need to run back to the house that has the wardrobe every single time you wanted to do an appearance change for yourself, your mannequins or your house actors. Why? Because houses and their contents are not loaded until someone enters the house in question. They can't "just" always load the wardrobe and still have it be physically stored in a house without loading all the houses and all the things in every single player's home in all of Norrath. It would bring all the servers to their knees in record time.

Why are they deleting the physical items that go into the wardrobe? I haven't heard an actual "why", but here's a guess as to at least part of the reason. Some of us are horrid packrats. We keep everything we can until our bags and bank slots are filled to the brim with maximum-size containers crammed full of ... stuff. That's a lot of data to be tied to a character, and that, of course, causes server load. Every time they add more storage space to a character, they have to think carefully about how much extra "stuff" is going to be tied to character data. Since we can pretty much guarantee that once you move stuff into the wardrobe, you will fill up those newly free spots with other stuff, they're looking at 66 to 178 more "things" tied to your character. By stripping off the stats, adornments, effects, attunement and other tags, and just storing the base physical appearance of the items, they can trim down the load a little. Pretending to strip it for the wardrobe, but having to remember it in case you ever decide to pull it out of there would rather defeat the purpose of stripping it in the first place. No, not everyone will use all the item limit for all the slots, but it has to allocate the potential for everyone who gets the expansion, and keep it reserved, just in case you decide to do so.

Why couldn't they just give us room for X number of items and let us use it for whichever slots we want? At a guess, in order for us to have the ability to just click on an appearance or mannequin slot and have it call up only the appropriate gear for that slot, it needed to have the player pre-sort items into the right display category. Yes, there may have been other ways to do it, but without knowing a lot more about how things are handled on a technical perspective, there's no guarantee there would have been an easy way to do it without either major coding effort, or a large risk of breaking something else in unexpected ways.

But Game _____ does it _____ way! Why can't they do it like that, so we don't have to have these limits? Because this isn't Game ___. That game likely has different data structures, different ways of coding how such items are handled, etc., etc.

{Piles a second soapbox on top of the first and clambers on top of them.}

Yes I personally would have liked more storage space, especially for the neverending stream of cloaks that we get from practically every event under the sun. Yes, I would have liked it to not be gated based on which expansion I order for which of my two accounts, especially in these tough economic times. But I am also realist enough to know that as someone who doesn't work there, I can't know why certain decisions were made, and certain compromises were reached. I may have some better-than-average guesses based on my background, but I can't know with 100% certainty.

I do know a few things though. I do know that this makes a good time for me to go over some of the gear that has been stored, utterly untouched, in my bank for up to a decade, if not more, and decide which I really feel attached to and which isn't worth keeping any longer for that alt. I do know that I will have several items that will quite happily go in those wardrobe slots. I do know that, as a self-proclaimed packrat, it is very likely I'll rapidly fill up those newly freed slots with other "stuff" I think I need to keep, only to stare at them a couple years later wondering why I kept the durn things. I do know that, for me, if there comes a time when some small feature like this becomes the "final straw", it will be time to take a step or three away from the game for a bit, lest I ruin the fun and enjoyment of those around me as well.

So, please, folks. Be upset if you truly feel you need to be, but please, please, PLEASE, stop spewing at the rest of us. We don't need that, we don't deserve that, and there are far too many people spewing hate and unhappiness out in that Real World thing right now. Please don't make our escape from all of that a place of such unhappiness too.

Created: 2016-10-31 05:51:07          
Last Modified By: Niami Denmother          
Last Modified on: 2016-12-08 11:06:47          

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