Damned if they Do, Damned if they Don't

Here's some perspective. Imagine if you bought a shirt that you liked at a department store. After washing them once (using all the proper settings) the shirt you liked changed from blue to pink and you no longer like the look and would not have bought it in it's current state. Would you not go back to the store and demand either a non-faulty replacement or a refund? Of course you would, the same it true here. There's a lot of over the top qqing here, but this was a legitimate mishandling here.

That is not the case. It was an acknowledged bug almost as soon as it was released and they stated they were going to fix it.

Try telling someone who purchased a cubic zirconia for $2,000 that they need some perspective because it's "rocks" they're upset about. Bottom line is some people paid real money for these things (thankfully I never liked they way they looked, nor do I now).

Bioware is at fault for not taking proper preventative measures. Sending out a mass in-game mail would be more appropriate than a forum posting. Maybe a disclaimer warning about the future change? And once they discovered the sets were erroneously designed, sales should have been halted right then and there. Bioware stacked mistake atop mistake. You can't fault the player for being upset when Bioware's tower of mistakes falls over.

This is exactly right. I understood people feeling deceived, the pictures of some items didn't match the actual item originally, and they had a valid complaint. Others liked the look and bought it, knowing full well what it ACTUALLY looked like. To simply change it, after people had spent real money buying THAT outfit, was terribly poor judgement by Bioware. What they needed to do was offer an exchange tbh, not just hot swap players existing look for an "updated" one.

QFT
This is just the answer the OP was looking for.
You just forgot the "I'm leaving and so is my 1000-members guild"
They are indeed damned if they do, damned if they don't

They're damned either way because they screwed up. However, if they offerred to exchange the item for the look the person actually wanted (either the ad version or the original preview version) then I would imagine most people would be satisfied.

I am not trolling you.... But I am going to give you bad news...

You are obligated to come to the forums to check out what is going on. You signed ( sorta ) up for it, and agreed to do it, by clicking yes to the terms of use. ( not saying I agree with it, but it is there)

So you should have come to the forums ( not saying you have to but should ) to find out what they are changing..... blah blah blah.... It was a bug, they said they were going to fix.

Now I agree with Tux..... they should have had it where you can exchange it, that way everyone is happy.
( again not trolling you, just letting you know where Eaware stands on this)

And that's EXACTLY the problem with BioWare listening to the forum community. There's 0.1% of the active playerbase at best frequenting these general discussion and suggestion boards, yet during a period of several weeks you can see the same names frequently trying to demand the same, just for a part of them to vanish again once they got what they wanted.

Then guys like you in turn come, crying for it to be returned back to normal, it being a bad move, etc. Whilst the only thing which BioWare did was listen to "the community". It may just have been the very tip of the iceberg of the community, the part which was shouting the loudest, but still it's the community.

That's why BioWare needs to stop doing so on the forums, and any game development company for that matter if you ask me.

I'd much rather see them throw back in place feedback systems like they have during beta. Perhaps slightly less intrusive than a major popup after every quest and move, but a quick button on the side of the screen for example where you can give feedback or suggestions for example would be much better than these forums alone. Weekly polls, ingame, which highlight the frequently suggested changes to see if the majority of the users which can fill in these polls actually agree, ought to go on top of that.

But simply put, just stop listening to forums only. It's NOT representative for the game community as a whole.

Known bug to people who come to the forums. Back to my example. You bring your now pink shirt back and they tell you "oh it's been on kohl.com for weeks now, you should have known. No refund."

Oh wait..

QFT in spades.

The forums are an exercise in a couple of old sayings "You can't please all the people all the time" and "People can and will complain about anything".