This is a topic that arose a long time ago in TMW terms, and not all of you may remember it, or remember it very well. For those of you who want to discuss it, here's a recap.
There was a bug whereby you could drop an item that was currently equipped, equip something else on the same slot, and pick up the first item. The next time you loaded a map, this would cause the two items to get mixed up, and your effective equipment in that slot would have some traits of the first and other traits of the second (though nothing from both).
Over fourteen months ago, this interaction was fixed on the server side, citing a couple of mechanical abuses that weren't possible except by using it:
-it took weapon damage and range (when they exist) from #2, but armor class from #1, so you could mix a shield and a bow and get each one's effect, meaning a bow fighter could get all the armor of a sword fighter but with the added range (albeit with the ammo restriction)
-weapon type was also inherited from #1, so that the bow fighter could forgo having that shield, but instead mix it with a bladed weapon to get its damage and lack of need for ammo, while keeping the range they're used to
When weapons aren't involved in the mix-up, though, the interaction is fairly routine. The mixed-up item has the spritesheet of #2 and everything else of importance comes from #1: armor, magic modifier, and even equip script (for stat-changing items like cat ears, so there wasn't even a way to cheat that for multiple agility bonuses). In effect, the incarnations of the bug that don't involve weapons are purely cosmetic.
So anyway, ever since the named commit, any attempt to drop an equipped item results in the item becoming unequipped first, which prevents new instances of items becoming confused in this way. However, this on its own didn't cause existing setups of illusionary equipment to revert themselves; they wouldn't revert until a practitioner changed or dropped the equipment they had in an affected slot. In the days following the fix, there was a crackdown on players demonstrating distance hits with blade animations, and most of the players who once used it for armor disguising eventually got caught up in one of the many fashion trends that swept the game in the year since. In fact, I believe that after this long, the number of surviving instances of illusionary equipment in the game is one.
And now the powers-that-be are wanting to reduce the number to zero, citing an earlier discussion they had among their ranks. I take it this was in the (a?) GM forum; in any case I wasn't able to see it, much less chime in with the decidedly unique perspective I have on the matter.
Again, I think it's important to note that none of the functional aspects of the outfit depicted in the above screenshot are out of the realm of the ordinary; in the equipment window on the right, the boxes surrounding the sprite show all the underlying items that were disguised, and all the derived stats are consistent with having just those items (including the 400+ penalty to magic...the arrows don't even factor into anything without a weapon designed to use them). The only difference is that it looks nicer.
So why do I remain the sole holdout and why do I take my case here? For one, I would lose much of my in-game identity otherwise. There are only so many ways for a character to stand apart in a game like this, and even fewer when you discount ways that are destructive of play and result in getting banned or universally shunned by the community. Handing out charitability and advice can help one become more memorable, and that's certainly something I partake in from time to time to the extent that resources allow it (to this day, I've never had a mule or other secondary character, or even a 7-digit GP total). Many characters even have a signature look to them, so that their friends, associates, or even new players who simply received an early jumpstart from them will recognize them more easily. A lot of times they settle on that choice because they just like the way it makes them look--in my case it's the closest to my ideal appearance I can get with extant TMW equipment, and nothing released in the past year has changed that. Not everyone, however, can take their signature appearance into the heart of battle with the fiercest enemies the game has to offer (at least not if they want to live for more than a few seconds), and such sights in combat may well be even more memorable than in the calm of the town square. (I can't be sure of this psychological aspect for everyone in the game, but that's why it's a post in a public forum.)
So at least for the time being, the fact that someone looking like me can, say, find someone being chased by loads of skeletons, save them by pulling the skeletons away, and proceed to wear the monsters down with impunity is truly a unique talent, even if there's no functional difference from a character doing the same with a stereotypical tank appearance. This concept of inimitability strikes me as the primary source of perceived value in games of this strain, and there are only a few characters who can actually claim that: GMs, possessors of one-off items like the crown and golden plate (and of course the dark talisman), and bot characters (like TradeBot) who have their restrictions lifted by special dispensation.
However, whatever value comes from that is strictly personal; the items in question are totally illiquid since they can't be traded without losing their unique capabilities forever. In that sense it's a different kind of uniqueness from "I bought a Superman #1 comic some 70 years ago and now it's worth a lot of money!" If the supply somehow goes back up, the comic collector will certainly face a lost opportunity and depreciation in its value, while I've still had 14 months of a nice experience in any case and can't rightfully encourage barriers to entry to a practice like mine--just responsibility for my own character decisions. In fact, I think it's good reason to formalize an in-game avatar system, whereby there would be separate "stat slots" and "appearance slots" for equipment, and anyone would be able to take their favorite appearance without regard to how weak it would have left them under the system we use now, without having to use a bona fide bug that had been fixed with good reason, and without having to settle on one way to look and commit to it for over a year.
A nice thing about virtual worlds like ours is that the binding of form to function is much more easily dispelled than in the physical counterpart. For instance, there's no requirement for forum avatars to be our actual photos, and in practice it only rarely ends up being such. When we clearly have the technical ability to separate the two, and the game has shown no propensity to stick to a realistic world (even outside the presence of magic), why not rechristen the cosmetic alterations as a sanctioned feature which can be accessed by ordinary means?
If anyone has anything more to say to this, I probably do too. But until then, you can have some time to finish reading.
