It's time (Option to Hide other players Glamour)

[Packetdancer]

You are both right and wrong, and the reasons why have already been explained in this thread (go read the whole post, it's really good):

Somehow appropriate that my old post gets quoted right as I accidentally re-read the thread and then fail my willpower check not to chime in again.

But yes, I still feel like the key problem is not that either side is wrong per se, but that the sides are just using entirely different criteria and definitions.

First, both sides are approaching the problem with wildly different views. And, as the old post notes, taken on their own, each viewpoint is wholly understandable and reasonable; no one would argue that it's a bit jarring to see a metallic gold snowman on the battlefield when you go to do the Dying Gasp in Shadowbringers for the first time and are at the emotional height of the narrative. But similarly, I don't think anyone would argue that a literal 'turn the game into gender-conformant white people' button is something that's a great look for SquareEnix.

To put it another way, if you're looking at the Grand Canyon, the view is going to be very different if you're standing up top looking down at the river winding through the canyon below versus if you're standing down in the canyon and looking up at the cliffsides towering overhead. This doesn't make one view 'right' or 'wrong'; both viewpoints exist, even if the people standing at them perceive the landscape entirely differently. But it does mean if you ask the two people to describe the Grand Canyon just based on what they saw at those two different viewing spots, you're going to get wildly different descriptions of the same thing.

Then you have the fact that there's at least eight different ideas of what this feature would be. Some folks talk about blacklisting individual folks' glamours so they can just get rid of distracting gear. Others talk about stripping all glamour away globally (for everyone but the player). Some folks want a list of 'objectionable gear' to be added to the game so you can push a button and just that gear gets stripped away when glamoured; others want a custom blacklist where you can define for yourself what the objectionable gear is. People don't even agree on what 'stripping glamour away' actually means; does it show just the real gear (i.e. the tank currently leveling through Stormblood who was glamoured into plate is now wearing the Shisui fending set?), or does it replace it with job-specific artifact gear?

So you have this giant complicated matrix of possible implementations, where 'remove glamour' could mean "put all remote players in job-appropriate artifact gear, but let me still use glamour for my character" to one person's mind, could mean "I get to put together a list of glamours I never want to see, like the frog suit or the wedding dress, and if those pieces show up on someone they'll just be deglamoured to the actual gear" to a second, and could mean "I get to pick and choose individual people and they'll have glamour prisms disabled on my client-side and appear as the racial default" to a third.

And so people are not only arguing from different viewpoints, but entirely different maps. So some people are standing there and looking at the Grand Canyon from two different viewpoints, another person's over on Mt. Everest, two are down in the Mariana Trench while another is on a boat up on the surface, and a fourth's... I don't know, randomly off on the moon. (Cue Destiny-style "That argument came from the MOON.")

Which means there is basically zero chance of this thread ever achieving anything remotely akin to agreement; the best we can hope for is a sort of equilibrium of misery where everyone is equally unhappy, and then—Twelve willing—its eventual surrender to natural forum entropy and disappearance into page 20+ of the General Discussion post history, hopefully to be forgotten forever.

Or until someone like our resident forum troll comes along and necros the thread in 2023.