You're so vain...

I used to play City of Heroes.  The character creation setup gave players a HUGE amount of control over exactly how their avatars looked.  It was practically its own game...and then you could use the characters in the real content!

I liked that.  Being able to customize how you appear in-game is a wonderful option, even if it's just fluff.  It's easy to write it off as "my current gear looks stupid as hell, and I don't want to look at it anymore," but for a lot of us, it's something more...