Different human skin tones have been planned since pretty much the beginning of TMW, but for various graphics-related reasons they were never implemented. IMO this has become one of the areas where the game really shows its age. I also think that continuing to treat this as a low priority issue will only lead to us having this discussion again in another 10 years. For any MMO in 2023 it should be high priority to have some form of racial equality in the "human" race. Especially given the fact that over the years many non-human races have been developed with a higher priority than real non-white humans.
I'm white, so I can only imagine how annoying it must feel to get to the character creation menu and finding out that I must be a different race and there is no way at all to make the character resemble myself. It must be alienating for many potential new players and it certainly isn't a good look for TMW itself. It's one criticism for which I can find no excuse. It must be fixed.
So, with all that said I'm calling on every past, present and future graphic artist to try to do something about this. The main issue in the past has been to make these skin tones look good, but with all the wonderful things that have been made for TMW (including many alternative races) I cannot believe that it is still impossible to make a good looking dark-skinned human.
The most basic version of what we need is 2 extra skin tone options, essentially light brown and dark brown. The goal here is not to represent every possible skin colour humans can have, but to give everyone something at least close. To this I would note that even white-skinned sprites aren't exactly the colour of human white skin, so we're definitely not going for hyper-realism.
I am posting in Home of Development because this is something that IMO should be of priority for all game projects and the resulting coloured sprites should be made available as a basic option in any TMW-related game.
P.S.
I've been urged to acknowledge Moubootaur Legends' efforts. There are different skin colours, but the recolour was not done properly and therefore ML can also benefit from this.