WoW's proposed transmog overhaul is 1 step forward, 2 steps back, and has Azeroth's fashionistas rioting: 'Blizzard truly are the masters at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory'

World of Warcraft: Midnight has a huge task ahead of it—fixing the arms race of AddOns by nixing combat-related mods (and thus having to provide its own offerings), installing Player Housing for the first time and, relevant to the problems I'm about to get into, overhauling the transmog system.

For the uninitiated, transmog (sometimes called glamour in other MMOs) is a system that allows players to slap a new appearance over their current gear. In WoW, you used to go to a transmog NPC, create an outfit, and pay a gold fee to throw on your fit. This would essentially overwrite the appearances of those items with the ones you transmogged them to.

In Midnight, that's all changing. You can see a handy summary by WoWHead here, but in essence, WoW's moving from this overwritten appearance system to an "outfit" system. And, while I'm about to do a whole bunch of grumbling, there are some major benefits to what Blizzard's put together.

Essentially, the system—currently on the Midnight Beta—allows you to make outfits that can, at the drop of a hat (and chestpiece, and trousers, and boots), be thrown over your existing gear without having to bleed gold every time you get a new purple. Instead, you just pay a one-time sum to get that outfit sorted.

The real draw here is the "situations" system which is, without any qualification, super cool. Each outfit can have situations wherein it'll automatically apply to your character—for instance, you can have an outfit for world questing and an outfit for cities, or an outfit that auto-applies when you start swimming. This is great, Blizzard is cooking here.

Where it's burning the whole entree is in the amount it costs. At the time of writing, characters start with a measly two outfit slots. Unlocking more costs gold—starting at 100 gold, and increasing to 100,000, for a whopping total of 800,000 gold to unlock all 20 slots on a given character. What's more, this isn't even account wide.

And then there's how much it costs to tinker with these things. As explained on this thread, applying a new set of gear to an outfit is roughly six times more expensive than applying an appearance to your equipped gear with the current system. And while you theoretically save a bit of dosh by not having to re-apply individual transmogs when you get new gear, that becomes less and less relevant at max level, where you're gonna be spending most of your time.

Basically, as it stands, if you're really into transmogging your outfits on a lot of alts, then you're going to be paying much, much more in-game gold than you were before, all for moderate quality-of-life improvements for folks who're content just whomping on a transmog or two and forgetting about it for months.

The people in said thread are pissed, by the way, and not without good reason: "Did some back of the napkin math, and even if I limit myself to just a few slots on each character I play, this will probably wipe out entire savings across my whole account that I've been playing since TBC," writes one player. "Blizzard truly are the masters at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory," adds another. Oof.

To briefly (and I mean briefly) defend Blizzard, here—goldsinks in MMORPGs are important. Since gold isn't actually real, any time a monster dies, WoW essentially "prints" money. If you don't take that gold out of the economy somehow, vanishing it into vendors or repair costs, then inflation runs rampant.

But this whole system seems like one big misstep. As it stands, Midnight's "outfit" transmogs would punish players who are the most invested into the system—who want multiple outfits for different specs or circumstances—while only providing minor benefits for everybody else. And the maddening thing is that you could be adding those benefits, like the situational outfits, without screwing those aforementioned mogheads over.

It is, however, beta, and this is exactly what beta feedback is for. I get the sense Blizzard's going to tweak the numbers while the pitchforks are being sharpened, if not do away with the idea of limited outfit slots altogether—that, or it's going to have a very angry horde of fashionistas on its hands.