I had a thought the other day, and have mulled it over a bit since then. What if, wait for it…Grey Havens et al. changed the way they do promotions and the associated gear? My idea is this: rather than having all these different items in different colors for different promotions (ex: “Cool Mohawk”, “Cool Bolted Vee”, “Polar Bolted Vee”, etc.), separate the palettes from the items. All these purely aesthetic items tend to hog up space in the Auction House (and the Wiki).

I propose there be implemented a new “Palette Kit”, akin to the current Style Kits, which would allow for a palette (ex: “Toasty”) to be applied to any purely aesthetic accessory and gear. You might be thinking at this point, “but won’t that take a lot of work?”, “won’t that screw up the SK economy for those making their crowns and energy off such unique accessories and costume gear?”, and “wouldn’t that ruin prize boxes’ value?” I have considered these concerns, and frankly only the first concern, that being of a lot of work, stumps me a bit.

As for the other two: Rather than selling things like “Hallow Pith Helm”, players could open the prize box and decide whether to sell or use/learn the “Hallow Palette Kit”, the “Pith Helm” (being in a default palette determined by the player’s starting gear set), and whatever else it contains. This would do at least two major things for such items. It would make the Palette Kits valuable given their ability to be applied to any or all of the learned players’ accessories and gear at will, just like how Style Kits work. It would also increase the value of accessories, etc as the items could be turned any color provided the player owns the Palette Kit. As for the Prize Boxes themselves, they would retain their value due to the increased value of their contents. For obvious reasons, Palette Kits would need to be insanely rare drops from Prize Boxes.

Now to address the issue of effort needed to make this change. As I understand it, every item in this game gets its color scheme from a skin, rather than from an indexed palette. I am by no means a programmer, but I imagine this presents a fair-sized obstacle for my aesthetic overhaul to be realized. For matters in this area, I refer to those more knowledgeable than me. In addition, I am not sure how this would affect present inventories or Auction House listings given the separation of palettes from accessories and gear.

TL;DR - Separate accessories and costume gear from their palettes to make gear re-colorable.