Proposal: Toggle for cosmetics with individual player white / black lists

The more relevant consideration is not that it is a representation of what you've achieved, but that gear is a representation of what your build style is. Obviously "plate vs cloth" will still be obvious, but in games where there are certain stylistic choices (from an art perspective) based on what types of stats a gear piece focuses on, or where higher level gear pieces are visually unique enough to be recognizable, even if they're not "legendary" or otherwise special, you get a much clearer idea of what your opponent is built for, that I'm not sure the "gear type" icon promised by Ashes will be able to live up to. Transmog cosmetics break this recognisability.

Sadly, that ship has sailed. Possibly before the potential benefits were even recognized. But then again, a costume shop is a lot of revenue. It's hard to say no to in this day and age.

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It's 50,000 * 50,000. Each user has white/black tags for 50,000 other players. The server as a whole has 50,000 users.

Also, the answer is 6.25 KB per user. Which doesn't even need to ever be on the server side, but if you wanted to sync it, it'd still cost under $7/month in AWS S3 storage for the whole server.

Nonetheless, you'd never bother storing it that way, because an individual user on average isn't gonna have even 1,000 entries on their list. You don't even need the 6 KB, in that case.

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My first calculation was based on 1 bit per player, assuming unique server-relative player IDs could be sent at runtime. This is the smallest possible uncompressed non-sparse representation, which is what Strevi's "calculation" seemed to be "asking for".

As you note, nobody would use a non-sparse representation for this sort of thing. I therefore adjusted my calculation to a sparse storage of 32bit unique account IDs, which is a reasonable basis for player identification. You can get a list of 1500 of those for just 6 KB.

You could use a relational database, but the OVERHEAD involved would be higher, since you'd need rows of, at a minimum "(your_player, target_whitelisted_player)". There's efficient ways to represent this, but a file per player only needs "your_player" once. Now, obviously you'd probably still do this. But if Strevi was making an argument based on "this is an unimaginable amount of data", there's absolutely methods that make that not even matter a little.

Would I prefer a toggle? Yes. I'm very pro-cosmetic, but cosmetic griefing is something Intrepid is literally willing to fashion police and disrupting the ability to have certain forms of customization on. Steven has been very heavy handed about it. And the reason he has been heavy handed about it is because there is no toggle and he wants to limit griefing. I therefore think that it's reasonable to say that if the cosmetic is in the game Intrepid has put it's stamp of 'this isn't griefing' on it and excluding stufferton most players will agree with this.

It would be the perfect world where you could have 'total freedom without all the restrictions on how you dye your gear and what color in some sort of white list that just automatically includes your guildies (but can be black listed if they so choose) and no one else and everyone else gets 'the 'public' version with all the proposed restrictions in place. It'd be a great feature, but I don't think it will happen.

I like freedom in my cosmetics. I like the ability to make all sorts of choices that others may find immersion breaking. And I respect those people. So I would rather them not to have to encounter cosmetic griefing if we can find a balance between style guidelines that allow for freedom while still minimizing immersion.

I personally don't buy cosmetics to 'feel more important than others' or to 'show off'. Showing off to my friends/people I'll party with? Absolutely. But you random jerks and laggards? I couldn't care less. Exclusivity is in almost all digital cases artificial and therefore has no meaning to me.

STEVEN on the other hand. DEFINITELY does. He's been VERY vocal about caring about such issues such as 'two people wearing the same outfit at an event' and preaching that 'exclusivity is the whole point and should be honored' which only really can have value if other people can see this 'exclusive cosmetic'.

It's not going to change because Steven is that person. He is the fashion queen (fashion king I guess?) that will want to show off his 'exclusive' set of cosmetics. It's his game. He has every right to design the game that way. And enough people here AGREE WITH STEVEN. The only way this ever had a snowballs chance in hell of being implemented if there was solidarity. There is not.

So it's not going to happen and I've made my peace with that. But hey if IS really wants to please all audiences.... Maybe consider my suggestion if you are reading. It keeps exclusivity and freedom intact even if it's extra work. I know it would certainly boost your cosmetic sales from me and I doubt it'd compromise your values.

Welcome to Ashes forum new person.