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

[DumdogsWorld]

This whole argument is beginning to remind me of how I hate modern copyright laws. IMO, you really have to be doing somebody some kind of harm in order for it to be wrong. But no, because the zeroes and ones on my physical drive are configured to resemble the zeroes and ones on another person's physical drive, I can't do anything to that section of my drive. It doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to whoever made the original configuration of zeroes and ones. It doesn't matter if I don't deny the creator any revenue, and it doesn't matter if the creator has been dead for 50 years. I have no right to alter it because it doesn't belong to me. A section of my hard drive, which I bought, doesn't belong to me.

Back on topic, saying it will never become a feature is one thing - that's most likely the case. But to say I have no right? Yeah, no. There's no way in the seven hells I'll ever agree to that.

[Pepsi_Plunge]

I'm pretty sure we already had this thread a few weeks ago. And it's still the same stupid argument:

It's actually because it's breaks the theme and feel of it being a final fantasy game. Tanks should wear plate, healers should wear robes, and no one should be in a fight seriously wearing carbuncle slippers and lingerie.

You haven't played many FF-games, have you? Because this is proper ff-fighting-armor:



Also, there is Serah Farron in FF XIII, fighting in a school girl uniform. And don't get me started on her alternate beach-outfit.

I think in the newer FFs the only guy wearing real plate armor was Steiner in FF9

[Enla]

I'm pretty sure we already had this thread a few weeks ago. And it's still the same stupid argument:


You haven't played many FF-games, have you? Because this is proper ff-fighting-armor:



Also, there is Serah Farron in FF XIII, fighting in a school girl uniform. And don't get me started on her alternate beach-outfit.

I think in the newer FFs the only guy wearing real plate armor was Steiner in FF9

And he was pretty much one of the biggest comical relief characters in that game along with his Knights of Pluto. The rest of the Alexandrian military - the actual competent ones - wore leotards.



Even in the older games though odd armor choices were the norm due to Yoshitaka Amano's art style. The man has three loves - belts, capes, and impractical pieces of armor. And even if a character was the odd man out and was given a proper piece of armor in the old games it was often highly impractical, with I think FF4's designs being one of the lone exceptions? (Except the girls had leotards for daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaays in that too.)

Edit: Oh, Cyan too from FF6. I'd say out of all the older FF's his design is the most classically 'tank' looking without too many extras.

[Gemina]

And he was pretty much one of the biggest comical relief characters in that game along with his Knights of Pluto. The rest of the Alexandrian military - the actual competent ones - wore leotards.


Even in the older games though odd armor choices were the norm due to Yoshitaka Amano's art style. The man has three loves - belts, capes, and impractical pieces of armor. And even if a character was the odd man out and was given a proper piece of armor in the old games it was often highly impractical, with I think FF4's designs being one of the lone exceptions? (Except the girls had leotards for daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaays in that too.)

Edit: Oh, Cyan too from FF6. I'd say out of all the older FF's his design is the most classically 'tank' looking without too many extras.

It doesn't change that Steiner still looked the part. When I think about the series in general, anytime the game featured a more D&D traditional job system, the characters would be less frilly, and take on styles more suited to the role they were given. FFIX incorporated the job system, and Steiner looked very much like a knight. A Rune Knight iirc. And many of those outfits, like the one in my sig, pay homages to the original FF.

Artwork from FFIV, which heavily used the job system:





Then we have our two MMOs FFXI and FFXIV. Both use the job system, and the former really looked the part too especially back in '04 when I started playing it. Now we have XIV. In short, characters like Squall, Tidus, Cloud, Yuna, Tifa among a whole host of others are more anime fan service. And like all those cute waifus tanking our instances, they don't do much to adapt to traditionalism.

[Ammokkx]

I, personally, am fond of slightly more practical or covered up armor. I think bikini armor is gaudy and just doesn't look very good or appealing.

I still don't want the option to remove other people's glamours.

Glamouring, in the first place, is a feature to make yourself look to both you and other players in a manner of your choosing. Giving another player the option to hide that customization, goes against the very premise of glamouring.

[MsQi]

It's ok to tank in a bikini if it's a metal bikini.

[Iscah]

I think the critical point I want to make against people saying "others shouldn't be forced to look at your glamour" is that there's a difference between forcing that and demanding to be the centre of attention, versus just not wanting your appearance to be altered by someone else.

As I wrote in more detail below, I would rather have my character not seen at all, than seen wearing something I don't want them to wear.

Your character is unaffected in any way that should matter to you. What some stranger sees on their screen, likely thousands of miles away from you, shouldn't be your concern or your business.

Did you miss the parts where this is entirely an optional feature that only the person using could see? It's not like OP is asking Sqeenix to remove glamours entirely, just a feature that lets someone, on their own display, turn them off. How hard is that to understand?

At the core of this argument there's a question of how a person thinks about player-characters in this game. The way I think about it, every one of those characters is a "real person", or directly representing one, in a communal world.

Your character does not stop representing "you" when they appear on my screen. My character does not stop representing "me" when I appear on your screen. I'm not in "your game", we're in a shared game.

An analogy in the real world would be photographs. An image of a person in a photo is still thought of as "that person", and the image is not detached from the person's identity even if what happens to the image does not affect the real person in any way.

Right now it is technically possible for someone to take that photograph and then edit it so the person appears to be wearing something they wouldn't want to wear. They may never know it happened, but that doesn't mean they would (or should) be okay with the thought of someone doing it to them.

Now imagine if Facebook announced a new feature that would automatically alter what people appear to be wearing in photos when they display on your screen. It's only affecting you! Nobody needs to know that their image was changed! ....yeah, I can't see that going down well.

Your character in generic job appropriate gear is still your character as much as your character in fuzzy 64 bit low textures. How do you feel about people silencing bard performances? People's carefully crafted songs, silenced. Why? Cause some people find it obnoxious.

I would quite seriously be happier for people to turn my character entirely invisible than to have them displayed in an outfit that I don't want them seen in.

A fuzzy 64-bit version of the outfit I picked is still the outfit I picked, just in a different quality of game. It is still conveying my choice and not overriding it.

It's not about "everyone must see me!" - it's "everyone must not see my character in the gear that I don't want them seen in".

And I definitely count a lot of "generic job-appropriate gear", ie. relic gear, as things I don't want to be seen in. Not because I don't want to be job-appropriate, but because a lot of the relic gear is more revealing than I want it to be, or just looks awkward on my character.

I'm not going to pretend I know what it's like on your Data Centre, but on mine it's very rare for people to glam with the sole purpose of making other people feel bad. I very rarely see glams that could be considered seriously lore breaking, never mind obviously intending to cause offence. When I do see them it's usually in Limsa. In instances? Not often. Most people are very well dressed!

This has been my experience as well. Last time we had this argument, I went and did a "poll" of glamours by sitting in Limsa (I think it was Atomos server) and examined all the players one-by-one. From memory, out of something like 70 players about a third were in unique job-themed glamours, another third in not-job-themed glamours, the rest were in things like leveling gear or crafting. Only three were in novelty glamours: one Vanu Vanu and two in bright metallics IIRC, and nothing more revealing than the Uraeus coat and 2B outfit. (Which isn't to say I never see anyone in skimpier things, but they're sufficiently few and far between that you're not guaranteed to find them even if you're looking.)

So if I, as a man IRL, decide to wear a thong with my junk nearly hanging out, and forcing you to look at it, it's all good right? That's just my self-expression. In a dungeon or similar fights, you are basically forced to look upon the person in the obnoxious clothing.

You've gone into this over several posts, and I disagree about the degree to which you are "forced to look at" people you are playing with in a dungeon.

Generally speaking, I'll admit that I'm very prudish, and I certainly don't want to be forced to look at someone (of either gender) in skimpy clothing. BUT if someone in my party is wearing it, as much as I'd prefer that they hadn't... I just don't look. Obviously they're on the screen, but I'm not at all focused on them - I'm looking at the enemies, HP bars, gauges and skill icons. My camera is zoomed out so I can see the larger scale of what is happening. I'm not processing much about the other players beyond where they're standing.

In short, it's not that hard to tune out to it if you're not actively looking at them and thinking about how much you hate seeing them.

It's simple. If I'm engrossed in the story, and am in the Hades fight for example, seeing someone in a frog suit jars me right out of that immersion.

To be fair, it is more jarring in cutscenes and I wish there was a simple solution that doesn't involve interfering with people's glamour.

The only solution I would personally be happy with is swapping out the entire character for a generic one, at which point it is no longer "my character forced to wear a different outfit" but playing a different character created by someone else, wearing what that character was designed to wear. But from the way some people complain about our occasional roleplaying interludes, I assume not everyone would be happy with that approach.

[Krotoan]

I think the critical point I want to make against people saying "others shouldn't be forced to look at your glamour" is that there's a difference between forcing that and demanding to be the centre of attention, versus just not wanting your appearance to be altered by someone else.

As I wrote in more detail below, I would rather have my character not seen at all, than seen wearing something I don't want them to wear.

While I understand this desire, it is an unreasonable expectation with any sort of client side rendered graphics on an MMO.

At the core of this argument there's a question of how a person thinks about player-characters in this game. The way I think about it, every one of those characters is a "real person", or directly representing one, in a communal world.

Your character does not stop representing "you" when they appear on my screen. My character does not stop representing "me" when I appear on your screen. I'm not in "your game", we're in a shared game.

An analogy in the real world would be photographs. An image of a person in a photo is still thought of as "that person", and the image is not detached from the person's identity even if what happens to the image does not affect the real person in any way.

Right now it is technically possible for someone to take that photograph and then edit it so the person appears to be wearing something they wouldn't want to wear. They may never know it happened, but that doesn't mean they would (or should) be okay with the thought of someone doing it to them.

Now imagine if Facebook announced a new feature that would automatically alter what people appear to be wearing in photos when they display on your screen. It's only affecting you! Nobody needs to know that their image was changed! ....yeah, I can't see that going down well.

Real life comparisons don't hold up since the real life consequences for altering someones likeness and misrepresenting them are actual crimes, whereas your online character (as customized as you may think it is) is a piecemeal of pre-generated resources and could never really be used to represent you in any legal way.

Real life alterations and misrepresentations have legal basis. Your ingame avatar is like a custom car at best, there are probably quite a few characters out there who look just like you.

I would quite seriously be happier for people to turn my character entirely invisible than to have them displayed in an outfit that I don't want them seen in.

A fuzzy 64-bit version of the outfit I picked is still the outfit I picked, just in a different quality of game. It is still conveying my choice and not overriding it.

You are still being represented in a different way than you chose or wished. I'm not sure if you've ever seen truly all low settings but it's pretty horrid.


The problem with your solution being if you're in someones party and they cannot see you, actual gameplay gets affected. However if you wanted an option where if someone is "normalizing" glamours you wish to not be visible, audible or partyable. I don't have a problem with that addition since people already request ways to exclude themselves from interacting with certain other players.

To be fair, it is more jarring in cutscenes and I wish there was a simple solution that doesn't involve interfering with people's glamour.

The only solution I would personally be happy with is swapping out the entire character for a generic one, at which point it is no longer "my character forced to wear a different outfit" but playing a different character created by someone else, wearing what that character was designed to wear. But from the way some people complain about our occasional roleplaying interludes, I assume not everyone would be happy with that approach.

Making peoples characters look like generic representations is the whole point. If the system HAS to swap out your face as well to make you happy that's a reasonable compromise.

[Alleo]

I would be fine with such an option. First its only an option so if you dont want to use it you dont have to and the others will never know it anyway. Its like people using mods to make their and other characters appear different. I honestly dont care about it because I still see my character how I dressed them, so I am not sure about the argument that you have taken your time to glamour your character a certain way so everyone needs to see them. Maybe I have a hard time understanding it because I dont glamour my characters for others but for me. I dont care what others think about it.

I am just happy that I can do most of the stuff with trusts now. Makes cutscenes much better.

[Brightmore]

I am just happy that I can do most of the stuff with trusts now. Makes cutscenes much better.

Was going to say that right now.
People nowadays is just heading back to good ol'days of single play.
Why talk, interact in a MMO?
If I notice the glam of someone during a dungeon is while the gate is blocking the fun.
Other than that, for MQS I do it first time with trusts so I can savor the scenario.