On Damion Schubert's entertaining Zen Of Design blog, there's a post called 'Orc Shrinkage and Heroic Asses', in which the BioWare designer discusses unexpected changes to MMO characters both old and new.

Firstly, there's what he calls 'the great shoulderpocalypse': "In a [World Of Warcraft] patch almost two months ago, Blizzard somehow shrunk the scaling on all shoulder pieces worn by orcs to a size which looks… well, almost reasonable. The reaction from the fans was quick, visceral, and seething with shock and hatred." It's amazing what tiny changes will engender in a committed fanbase, eh

Schubert goes on to note: "The lesson from all this, of course, is as old as the hills: Fuck with a player’s visual appearance against his will at your own peril. I still bear the scars of this lesson. As part of the original Meridian 59 team, we shipped a game with character art that was, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty much directly exported from Poser, a popular-but-not-very-good 3D modeling program of the era." And what happened when the (female) art director wanted to fix things up? "The horrifying thing is that every woman in the game logged in to find that, in their judgment, they had a fat ass." Wuhoh.