Cosmetic Shop is P2W

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And I want to play a genocidal murderer, but the game will stop me from doing so by nerfing my stats to such an extent that I can no longer kill anyone. So playing a role of a genocidal murderer is not an intended way to play the game. Of course I could just use my imagination and pretend that I'm said murderer, but at that point I'm not participating in the game's gameplay, I'm just imagining shit.

And one could draw a parallel between that system limitation and a potential limitation of playing as a part of any given NPC group. You can always imagine that you're a part of that group (and cosmetics would have no real influence or limitation on your imagination), but gameplay-wise you might not be able to directly play the role of a member.

There's a reason why we'll have a system-based Marriage feature. Because Intrepid directly supports people marrying each other in the game and have this event as an intended part of gameplay. I'm sure there's a ton of mmos where there is no such feature, but players still RPed as a married couple there. The system itself didn't stop them from pretending that they're married, but there were no wedding clothes in the game nor was there any feature/mechanic related to 2 people being together.

So with that in mind I can't see how any potential cosmetic in the shop is, in any way, stopping any player in the game from partaking in RP. Would the cosmetic make it easier to RP? Yeah, probably. But, as I've said before, this would make the whole cosmetic store a p4c feature rather than a p2w one. There's no difference between 2 people saying "I'm a knight". The sheer fact of them proclaiming that would mean that they've reached their goal of "RPing as a knight". The cosmetic doesn't suddenly make one of them more of a knight, while any other "p2w feature" does have that effect.

And as I've stated before, if you positioned your argument around cosmetics being p4c and said that you were against them, more people would be on your side, because the argument of "p4c is pretty much p2w" is a much more debated one than the "cosmetics are p2w" argument.

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Ok, so then what if Intrepid has an in-game list of "collectible cosmetics" that does not include a single store cosmetic in it. Would you still consider them p2w?

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Afaik WoW is still selling box+sub+cosmetics+tokens.

And if you wanna say they didn't start out this way, then yeah, they started out 18 damn years ago. Times have changed and the industry has changed with them. Iirc GW2 is selling cosmetics too, and that shit's infamously known as Dressup Wars (or whatever equivalent name for "people measure their dicks in cosmetics rather than anything else). Yet I'm pretty sure that in-game super rare cosmetics are way more valued there and I don't think I've heard GW2 players ever mentioning the unfairness of buyable cosmetics. If we got any GW2 players here, please do correct me if I said smth wrong.

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Iridianny is just combining her own gameplay style with the game's intended gameplay, then applies her view of cosmetics empowering her gameplay and produces the result of "store cosmetics can directly influence the gameplay of the game which is why they're p2w".

Crow did a good joke about it. For Iridianny, as it seems to me, the visual presentation of her character is the most important part of the game. And any and all activities in the game are (or at least might be) directed at changing/improving said visual. Any other form of gameplay is secondary, which is why the impact of story cosmetics is the biggest on her.

I'd assume that in her eyes being a king means having a proper attire to go along with the mechanical/gameplay side of literally being a king in Ashes. And if there was a super cool store cosmetic that looked exactly like a king should look like (there was one a few months back btw, the one with the corgi) - then a King player who has said cosmetic is now a "better king" when compared to any other king in the game.

I'd assume Iridianny claims that you don't know how mmorpgs are played because in her social bubble her pov is highly valued and is seeing as the "right" way to play. And due to said bubble she feels justified to call store cosmetics p2w, because to her social groups they truly are that. I'd assume @Dygz could see her pov much better than any of us cause I think he's quite deep in RP too. He might not agree with her views on the matter, but I'd assume he at least understands where she's coming from.

But as for anyone outside of said bubble, I'm not sure any of them would give a flying fuck about how the King looks if said King can just make anyone the enemy of the state (though it's the mayor who does that, but let's forget about that for now) and/or make his guild attack some dude on sight. And this was the reason for Crow's joke. The functionality of any given mechanic is in no way hampered by the visual presentation of the one who controls the mechanic, and it could be seen as humorous if you assume (as Iridianny does) that it is.

Or, well, that's at least what I took away from this particular thread and the other messages I've seen Iridianny write. I might've completely misunderstood her (she said as much several times now sooooo).