I’m going to trot out my old idea like the broken vinyl record that I am
Transmog should be opt-in by clients. In other words, there should be an in-game option that each player could change, which controls what the player wants the game to render: real armor or cosmetic armor.
If you want to make it really fancy, you can also add a server setting for the default armor display mode and then make the client setting have three options: “real armor”, “cosmetic armor”, “server default”. Then the decision table would look like this:
- if the client is set to “real armor”, render real armor
- if the client is set to “cosmetic armor”, render cosmetic armor
- if the client is set to “server default”:
- if the server is set to “real armor”, render real armor
- if the server is set to “cosmetic armor”, render cosmetic armor
And then you set the server to “real” for PVP and PVE-C servers and “cosmetic” for PVE servers.
But honestly, just a simple opt-in option on the client would be enough.