One Thing I've Always Hated About This Game

More than that, actually. Right now, when you see someone else in-game, you've got to be sent the code for the costume piece at each location and the color codes for both colors... essentially repeated for each part. This information is sent as "low-overhead" as possible, meaning that there's not often an in-data deliniator for these

(in English: rather than sending something that looks like "chest=34,color1=23,color2=12;chestdetail=1,color1 =11,color2=12) it would more likely be sending "342312011112" (in binary, of course) ... with the client code knowing "the first 2 characters indicate chest, next 2 are color 1, next 2 are color 2, etc." That keeps the data packet as lean as possible- only sending the minimally-needed traffic.

It sounds trivial in the days of broadband, but when you think of how much traffic must enter and leave those central servers, reducing every bit possible saves the devs money (they don't have the luxury of a "unlimited bandwidth" data plan) and lets them keep the costs of hosting the game down.

It does mean, though, that you've got to find EVERY place that parses and handles that data packet and update it correctly if you add more info (like color 3 and color 4) into it. These are some of the oldest (and usually the least-document) parts of a system with any change having a great deal of potential to generate all sorts of unintended consequences. The rule in most games is to do as much as possible within the existing data structure and avoid changing it if at all possible. THOSE "lessons learned" are better left for the sequel.

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Back to the OP: As others have said, I have my pet peeves with the system, but it IS remarkable that almost 8 years after its release, no game has really come along with options that offer more diversity and more customization that what we've found here- even when those games have double, triple, or even (reportedly) 10x the original budget of this game.

The devs did good here. There's always room for better, but the competition has shown that when the bar is set as high as CoH, "better" isn't easy to attain.

Probably not actually. What it would entail would be a reworking of the engine to allow an extra map to be used. What makes the colors right now is a black and white (greyscale actually) image that gets plugged into a node. It's possible when setting up materials to add an extra node in so that you'd have three color options (essentially using two b&w masks on top of each other), but I have no idea how flexible CoH's engine is nor how they even set up their materials. And then you'd have to set up the UI to work properly with three colors as well. So, the issue wouldn't require any work from the character artists; but it would require some significant work from coders and UI guys. Considering that the coders and UI guys generally always have a full plate of work in front of them and Paragon is looking to hire at least one more coder and UI guy, I doubt this is going to get any attention any time soon. Also, just because the theory of how to fix it is explainable in a few sentences, that means nothing about how time consuming or difficult the actual act of making it work is.