Feedback:User/Neithan Diniem/Main Hand - Righty or Lefty?

A picture of a traditional MMO Character; There you are, charging into battle with your sword raised in your right hand, brandishing your shield in your left, a look of sheer bravery (or stupidity) on your face. Such is the traditional character. Sure you can dress them up, give them shiny weapons bigger than your torso, and tell of your history growing up knowing they had a destiny of greatness before them, but you'll be just like everyone else. What if there was way to provide just a smidgen of more customization to your character? Well, there is; Choose which had your character is stronger in. Not everyone in the world is right handed, after all...

The Idea
Generally, this idea is simple. Upon character creation, you would have the option to select if your character was right-handed or left-handed. This would have absolutely no beneficial advantage over the other. Its just a preference of which hand you wish to have as your characters main hand. They would wield weapons and off-hands, fight, and have more things change to reflect this.

WHYYYYYYY??
You may say this is a useless suggestion, "Why put so much work into such a little and trivial thing?", well I say it is just one more way to make your character unique. Others would say that such an idea would be too hard to do, and again I say "not so." This is why:

Currently the characters have contact points on either hand, where items connect to the character to be used. These are probably named similar to Point A and Point B, which co-relate to Main Hand and Off-Hand. To allow for the righty-lefty choice, these point's would remian as variables. When the choice is made, the variables are set for their function. Selecting Right Handed would set the right hand as the Main Hand, where as selecting Left Handed would set the left hand as so. That takes care of the game knowing where to place weapons, items, off-hands, and the like.

Now the question is "How would animations work properly if you swap hands? Will I 'attack' with my shield?" No, you wouldn't. When the preference is set, the game will then have a variable similar to (using wiki-code for the example):. For you that are not privy to wiki-code as much, this basically takes the Animations and defines them as being dependent upon the preference set. Animations would be flipped across the x-axis should the character be a lefty (since im assuming currently all animations are right-hand dominate). This would produce a "mirror animation" effect. Attacks and other animations would all play out as normal, with the same end effects, only be mirrored. This would effect most animations (examples of ones not affected would be dance, interact with object, etc).

However...
The only two unfortunate side effects of this idea are noticeable and important.


 * Currently in Guild Wars 1, armors are tailored and designed with the specific ideal that the wearer of said armor is right handed. This can be seen is asymmetrical armor sets, in the bracer and shoulder appearances (more noticeable in archer and warrior armors). Therefor, for this suggestion to work, the armors would then need to be tailored to match, requiring 2 separate mirrored models of any asymmetrical armor set/piece. In a design point of view, these flipped armors would be easily made; requiring only the model be flipped across the x-axis and the texture to be likewise flipped. As a player who is having to load the game data however, these mirrored armors would functionally load like a completely different armor. This would minimally increase the total game data size and increase the time needed to load this data.


 * This would require animations to be tested for fluid movement. If the animations did not flow correctly due to the choice, then the animations would need to be modified to be correct. They will also count as separate animations from their mirrored duplicates, also increasing data space and load times.

Other than these, I cant think of any side effects.

A Reflective Alternative
As said in this page's talk, It was suggested to put a mirror effect over the entire character to achieve these flipped animations and armor. The problem remains with that is if the animation for something must be done a certain way. What if to fire that catapult you had to use your left hand due to its design? such a mirror would make you be reaching out with your right hand, either grabbing thin air facing the correct way, or grabbing the lever but facing the wrong way (Look out! He be fir'in blind!). So, what if this mirror simply effected the appearance of the character, and animations were still rigged out to be either righty or lefty? It would work, should this mirror be a possible thing in the GW2 game code. It would simplify the required character data in not needing to make additional armors and cloths, also items such as capes and all would be free to be excluded from the mirror effect (something like this Id assume: ). You wouldn't want your cape colors to be backwards from the rest of your creed now would you?

This is just a visual difference, and yet it will require some work to function properly. However should it be used, it will provide for a more life-like experience and also would make Guild Wars 2 be the only MMO I know of that has this function. If you can think of anything that might pose as a problem for this suggestion, please comment on it. I will analyze and try to develop a suitable solution for it. Thank you for reading, and if you have any comments, suggestions, or critiques, leave a message on the Talk page. Ill promptly respond as quickly as I can.