Old Player Returning with some questions.

So I stopped playing Guild Wars just prior to the release of Eye of the North. Now I got bored recently and re-installed the game on my comp, loaded it up, and was extremely confused.

Many of my characters skin colors have changed drastically, as well as their gear appearance. I'm still downloading the zone I was in last so I haven't been able to check anything else but I'm wondering if they did something that changed character skin colors and such while I was away.

Your characters will have their appearance once you log in with them. There was a bug in one of the updates that caused everyone's characters to look different on the login screen.

You are probably experiencing what IrishX has explained. Seeing as you have not downloaded all content yet and have just used the disk then the chracters will be showing placeholder armour. As soon as you login to a character it will download the necessary information and will update their apperance.
There have been no updates that change what you originally picked for your character's apperance, or any updates to armour etc.

Im pretty sure that what IrishX is talking about, is the update where we got the ability to change the apperence of all out charaters, where all of our chars looked weird untill we logged into them.

Never the less, a login on each character should fix it

Correct. It was merely a bug that was introduced when Arena.Ner implemented the ability to change one's character's appearaence. Logging in with each character once will restore the way they originally looked on the log-in screen and in-game.

I'm not sure that it was a "bug" as such. I think it was purposely done to get people talking about their changing character looks and to promote the new make-over kits. But either way, you just need to log in to each character to turn their appearance back to what you had. And, there's no rush (obviously).

My my, how conspiracies fly...

In order to allow changes of looks, Anet had to recode the way faces were stored. Side effect was that the old characters look weird until you log in with them. Once you log in, and after, they will look right.

So, just say the characters have been having a party while you were gone