Anyone who has played an MMO before, knows that your character hair, is going to flow straight through that sweet shield you just got from said boss, and that shield, is going to clip through those nice new shoulders you got, and that sword, well you catch my drift.

Does anyone wonder why there isn't some sort of Item Clipping Department, solely dedicated to the repositioning of items on your toon so that it doesnt look silly? Ever since i started playing MMO's all those years ago, its been a persistant thorn in my side. Now i do understand that in the broad scope of MMO Gaming, not ALL items will fit perfectly together, i understand that I really do. ( i have to for my sanity) But most items only need slight repositioning, or perhaps some minor graphic tweaks, so that all items fit nicely in with eachother, and i can spend my days wondering why the next pointless problem exists. Am i missing something here? is it just me?

Short answer: It's not cost effective.

How is fixing minor graphic bugs not cost effective, its got nothing to do with cost effectiveness its like selling a car, and the panels are all overlapping, and we are all buying that car. like idiots.

I understand your point. I find poor clipping slightly annoying as well.

But from a developer's perspective would you rather have your design team work on developing more art assets or refining subtle clipping problems? There is more mass appeal to having "large character customization" than "limited armor clipping."

As such, it's more cost effective to develop a variety of models than to refine a smaller set.

I would rather just let it go for now until graphics processing improves to the point where we can simulate the cloth, metal, skin, etc. interactions in real time. At that point it will be cost effective.

It's easy in concept, but very complicated in practice.

Some games have hundreds of armor models for a single slot. Then they have different races with different physical dimensions and hairstyles.

The amount of time (and code) it would take to tweak every single gear model for every possible combination of character appearance is impossible to calculate. Not to mention tweaking armor models so they don't clip with other armor models.

Is it possible to do? Yes. But it would probably take more time to tweak the armor models than it would to develop the actual game.

Right now, the technology doesn't make it easy to do. Eventually there may be armor models with collision detection so they shrink in size or crumple up when they come in contact with other armor. For now we gotta deal with clipping.