World of Warcraft devs Blizzard will offer folks a free wardrobe change just before Midnight, following fashion fee furore

Fine, we’ll let you hop in whatever the MMO equivalent of Superman’s phone booth is for a single round of free outfit transmog just before the launch of March’s Midnight expansion. So have degreed World of Warcraft makers Blizzard, in the face of vocal vexation among players unhappy about a sudden hike in clothes changing prices that arrived with the game’s latest patch.

This isn’t the only time Midnight’s ended up under a microscope fore money-related reasons prior to release, but it is the first time the ire’s been exclusive to fashionistas.

This situation kicked off with the deployment of Blizzard’s big pre-Midnight update – 12.0.0 – earlier this week. As part of a transition in the MMO’s transmog system, the feature that lets you slap a new visual appearance onto your character’s gear while leaving it unaltered under the surface, this patch swaps out paying to apply new appearances to individual bits of gear for a system based around buying slots where you can save transmog setups for full outfits.

In theory, cutting down how much paying you have to do in order to swap your gear’s look is supposed to be one of the new system’s pluses. However, with this patch’s arrival, folks have found themselves facing the need to pay to wear outfits they’ve previously paid for. How much of a pain in the bottom this is looks to depend on a number of factors, mainly the obvious stuff like how flush your character is with cash and how many alt accounts you’re running at the moment.

Cue forum threads where wowers have shown their displeasure by making the bill they’re facing the main subject line. Though, others argued the new system’s upfront cost was manageable and would be worth it in the long run. “I’m spending 1k per outfit, I have an average of 2-3 outfits per character. I have 30 characters. I didn’t notice the spending, and I’m not even rich (I have around 1.5 million gold across all my characters),” reads a post which could be read out backstage at a Paris fashion show and probably not raise any eyebrows.

In response, Blizzard sent out community manager Kaivax to ensure no bits of Elven jewellery or Dwarven pauldrons were thrown. “Although previously saved loadouts were converted to Custom Sets in the new system, it costs the normal amount of gold to apply the first Transmog to your character, even if you’re simply setting your appearance back to the way it was before,” they wrote. “This was an oversight on our part; you should have been able to maintain or reset your existing look without cost.

“With the 12.0.1 update before the launch of Midnight, all player-characters will be granted one free Transmog. This will be automatically applied to the next outfit created for each character. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by first-time Transmog costs.” They added that the studio are also looking into making Legion Artifact appearances less limited in terms of weapons they can be applied to in that next patch.

The Midnight expansion’s set to release on March 2nd, so there is a little bit of time for folks to wait until they get that free outfit change. Hey, it’s more time to plan out where you’re gonna stick all of your adventuring clutter in the player housing the add-on’s also set to deliver.