World Of Warcraft’s Transmog Fiasco Ends With Price Cuts But That’s Not The Whole Story

Days after hiking up the prices to transmogrify your armor in World of Warcraft, developer Blizzard announced it’s reducing them in half—a decision that came after overwhelming player outrage.

The transmog fiasco started with the launch of the pre-expansion patch for World of Warcraft: Midnight on January 20. The patch introduced a plethora of updates to a number of the game’s systems, and the transmog system, which allows players to change the appearance of armor pieces for previously acquired gear without affecting their stats, was one of them. The transmog overhaul ushered in two big problems for the community: the new system is convoluted, and to make matters worse, it’s incredibly expensive. Or used to be, anyway, as Blizzard has already announced it’s dialing the inflation rate back.

“We’re going to lower the cost of outfit creation prices by 50% to bring them more in line with what the prices were prior to the Transmog update,” community manager Linxy wrote on the Blizzard forums yesterday. “This price reduction is currently under development and should be available within the next day.”

The change makes sense, as the new system has characters starting with just two outfit slots for their transmog creations. You can unlock more, of course, but initial prices started at 100 gold and ramped up to almost 800,000 gold to unlock all 20 slots on a given character. So, if you’re somebody who juggles five characters at once and you like to engage with the in-game fashion, having 20 slots for all five of them would cost almost 4 million gold. And this is all without considering the costs of changing the individual pieces in said outfits.

Now, all of these prices are being halved. In addition, Linxy said the team is “going to try” to grant one free transmog to all player-characters soon, before patch 12.0.1. This should “hopefully” happen via a hotfix.

The free transmog is also part of the response to community complaints. When Blizzard released the pre-expansion patch, all transmogs that were previously applied to gear were removed. As explained by community manager Kaivax on the forums, this was intentional to reflect the transition from a gear-based to a slot-based system. All previously saved loadouts are still present, converted to Custom Sets as part of the new system. The problem, however, is that it costs the normal amount of gold to apply the first transmog to your character, even if you only want to set your appearance back to the way it was before. Kaivax called this “an oversight” on the developers’ part, as players should be able to maintain or reset their existing look without cost.

“With the 12.0.1 update before the launch of Midnight, all player-characters will be granted one free Transmog,” continues the response. “This will be automatically applied to the next outfit created for each character. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by first-time Transmog costs.”

Pricing isn’t the only problem with the new transmog system

While the pricing reduction is a welcoming change, it hardly addresses the only qualm that World of Warcraft players have with the new transmog system. The community is also complaining about the convoluted UX, as it used to be simpler in the old system, as well as the multiple added steps the latest changes require.

“I think I’ve spent about half of my gametime playing dress up since transmog has been released as a feature,” reads a Reddit thread from a World of Warcraft player who says they’re quitting the game. “Now (…) trying to set up anything just fills me with apathy. Why was the icon selection and naming of sets downgraded for the ‘main’ transmog screen? The outdated all-in-one icon selection from classic, without search or prioritizing your outfit’s items is MASSIVELY more annoying than the previous transmog system’s auto-select that just went with the first item’s icon of your outfit. Also, 16 characters limit for outfit names is nonsense.”

©Blizzard Entertainment

This account is far from the only one voicing such complaints. In the replies to an explainer by World of Warcraft enthusiast site Wowhead, people have posted multiple questions about the minutiae of the system. “I just opened up WoW and ALL my warriors look ridiculous,” reads one of the comments. “All the gear I’ve put on them over the years is gone and they look like noobs. I have lost over 2K gold trying to figure out the new transmog bs and when I check them out, they’re still in the wrong stuff. I’ve saved, I’ve bought a slot. I’ve only played WoW since it’s inception so yes, I’m older than most but this is ridiculous and it’s enough to make me want to quit the game.”

Those on roleplaying servers are particularly impacted by these issues, as for many of them, transmogrification is particularly important to defining character identity, as well as adding to the immersion of certain events and actions. Say, for example, that your character is wearing a hood or a helmet, and you want to switch out to a scarf when entering a house. In the old system, you could open your inventory bags and select another transmogged item, switching it on the fly. Now, that individual item transmogging is no longer possible.

As explained by a veteran roleplayer in the forums, people in these servers are prone to keep flavor items in their possession, such as cloaks to change depending on the weather environment, or a set of white gloves when a character needs to provide medical care for someone.

The use cases are many, but unfortunately, the latest changes to transmogrification have introduced limitations. Instead of selecting an item from your inventory, you would have to pay gold to make a change to your current outfit, only to pay again once you revert it later. Plus, these actions take time, which can interrupt the flow of immersion during active scenes.

“I am not a coder, I have no idea how difficult it would be to implement a system where certain items are exempt from the outfit that your character is currently wearing, but I implore you Blizzard, please find a way to allow us to make changes to individual outfit slots on the fly without having to engage with the transmog interface and shell out gold every time,” concludes the post from the roleplayer.

World of Warcraft: Midnight is releasing on March 2. Whether Blizzard decides to roll out more changes based on community feedback remains to be seen.