The Queue: Transmog is still too expensive

I’m just going to start and end with that: transmog is too expensive.

And I’m going to keep saying it until Blizzard hears me.

But I guess I can take a break from screaming at the sky to write the Queue.

A little concerned. While housing is in pretty good shape on the beta, it isn’t feature complete. Blizzard has been saying there will be additional housing exteriors — other than generic human house and generic orc house — they’ve never been seen on the alpha or beta. In fact we haven’t seen so much as a screenshot of night elf style housing, because every time Blizzard mentions it in a video they cut away and start talking about something else the instant after they mention night elf housing.

It’s not a make or break feature, certainly, but one of the promises of neighborhoods were that you wouldn’t all have the exact same little house. You could make your house your own. And you can… to an extent. You can change what the exterior windows look like. You can move your front door. You can put chimneys or dormers or (small) towers up on the roof to change your home’s profile. You can switch between stone and stucco exteriors, or change the color of your roof.

But, at the core, all houses in beta (and in alpha before it) are just the same houses, with some greyed out options that say “additional options coming soon” if you mouse over them.

So we’ll see what winds up in the early access period, or if it’s just an extended beta period.

You’ve given me a great opportunity to clarify things about the guild housing system, which — much like guilds themselves — is a bit of a disaster.

Guilds can now be cross-faction. I’m in a horde guild, but I’m playing a gnome these days, and our guild leader primarily plays a night elf. But we’re here to play with our friends, no matter what our friends are playing. Cross-faction means we can always play together.

Guild neighborhoods… aren’t quite like that, and I think it’s because the faction divide is so fundamentally built into the game. If you’re a horde guild, the guild leader must be horde, and if the guild leader is horde, the neighborhood is also horde. There is no option to pick a neighborhood; it’s simply based on current GM.

So what about all of the alliance characters in the guild who want to live in the alliance neighborhood? Or even horde members who want that creepy Duskwood vibe that you won’t find in Razorwind Shores? Out of luck. Guilds are one or the other, not both.

Players can have an Alliance home and a Horde home, and all characters in your warband can use these homes, but the two factions still don’t neatly co-exist… and if you’re an alliance player in a horde guild, you have to learn to love the beachfront life of Razorwind Shores.

My own guild is getting around this in a convoluted way; with an Alliance guild that will have an alliance neighborhood. If everyone has a character in this second guild, that character can buy a plot in the alliance neighborhood, and then every character on the account can enjoy having a home there (while still being in the main guild). It’s a win, but it’s also convoluted, when all we wanted was to be able to play with our friends.

It’s hard to capture a home in a single screenshot, so I certainly recommend going and looking around the neighborhood to pick the perfect plot… and I do have good news for you in this regard.

The in-game house finder will show you houses in different neighborhoods, and you can click on any housing plot that interests you. Click on “visit” and it will teleport you to that plot in the neighborhood you’re browsing, and reserve this plot for you for five minutes.

That’s not a ton of time, but it is enough time to have a look around and decide if you love the place. From there you can wander around the neighborhood or go back to the house finder and try again with a different plot (or a different neighborhood). Whenever you pick a plot in the house finder and visit it, that plot will be reserved, so you can jump around and find the perfect place.

The recently announced transmog changes are a big help.

The recently announced transmog changes also don’t solve the problem.

For those of you who haven’t followed my ranting, the new transmog system in Midnight changes transmog from applying to individual items to applying to item slots, so you can set a transmog and it will stay that way even if you change gear. You can also set different outfit slots to automatically activate in certain conditions, like when you enter a raid or when you’re swimming. (I am definitely making good use of this swimming option.)

When the new transmog system first arrived in the beta, it was ludicrously expensive. You had to unlock slots for every outfit which started at 100 gold but increased to the point where you would spend 800,000 gold to unlock all 20 (per character). And setting the look of an outfit or changing the look of an item after you had set it also ran from 400% more expensive to 700% more expensive, depending on your level. The system went from being a home run to being an unaffordable luxury, like eating avocado toast every day.

Now Blizzard is making some changes — though none of them are currently available in the beta, so we still don’t know exactly what the final costs are. Firstly, buying outfit slots will cost less and the cost will not increase as you buy more outfit slots, and the unlocks will be warband-wide so you don’t have to buy them again if you switch mains or just want more options on an alt. There will also be more outfit slots you can buy, up to 50, so you can have tons of options to switch between.

Blizzard says the cost to unlock outfit slots will be reduced by 80%. The cost to unlock outfit slots in the beta is currently 800,000 gold, which would mean unlocking slots for outfits would still cost 160,000 gold. That doesn’t count the transmogging of them, just the buying slots to save transmog in.

And the thing about changing or setting transmog looks in the beta is that it is much more expensive than it is in live right now. On my live character, changing every single item I have equipped costs 1000 gold. On beta, the same character, transferred over, spends 4300 gold to change the same pieces to new looks. That’s at level 80. By level 90, the cost nearly doubles: a level 90 character costs 7500 gold to change the appearance of every item they have equipped.

Once you save these looks, you can switch between them for free in the future, but the changing and saving of the looks in the first place is massive… and Blizzard agrees, at least in part, and says it will cut the cost of changing transmog looks by 60%. That would mean a max-level transmog change would cost about 3000 gold in Midnight, compared to it costing 1000 gold in The War Within. That’s still a significant increase.

So if we take Blizzard’s new costs as stated, here’s what you might pay to set up your transmog outfits in Midnight:

• 160,000 gold to unlock 50 outfit slots
• 150,000 gold to save outfits in each slot
• 300% more expensive when you want to change any item in any existing outfit

Note that these numbers are not final nor are they confirmed by Blizzard. These are just the numbers you would get if you apply Blizzard’s stated price reductions — unlocking outfit slots costs 80% less and changing transmog appearances costs 60% less — to the prices that are currently in the beta. No price changes have appeared in the beta test, and Blizzard has not announced what things will cost.

Sorry. I went down a math rabbit hole there.

Tldr: Transmog costs are still too expensive.

So, hooray, great, you’ve reduced the price, but you’ve reduced the price by a lot less than you initially inflated the price. Transmog is still going to be much more expensive, with high up-front costs.

Yes, the fact that you can freely change between slots is great, and may make transmog (after said upfront costs) essentially “free” for many players. For players like me, who like changing up looks a lot, this is a system with high up front costs and then is then 300% more expensive.

This is better than it was. It’s still wildly more expensive than it is right now.

That’s all today. Sorry for the later Queue, as the delays were almost entirely driven by trying to find exact costs and doing some transmog math.

I hope you having a great Wednesday, as great a Wednesday as possible. Tomorrow is a holiday in the US, but Matt should be back with a new Queue, and I will wish all who celebrate a happy Thanksgiving tomorrow in advance.

I’ll see you in the comments.