No race change?

[Fueki.4753]

17 minutes ago, booma.4326 said:

looks like anet dont want my money i hate the animations and voice of my male german human i would like to change the race and try a different one but im not going to make a new char and farm everything again .

While it's not a race change, a Total Makeover Kit should let you change that man into a woman.

Edited August 24, 2023 by Fueki.4753

[DeanBB.4268]

25 minutes ago, Fueki.4753 said:

While it's not a race change, a Total Makeover Kit should let you change that man into a woman.

I did that. Changed a male guardian to female, then changed the name. I'd been playing that character for years and really wanted a change. Worked for me.

[Arianth Moonlight.6453]

gee, pulling the "bUt tHe gEm sToRe" and "mUh mOnEy" won't work. There are like 3 people asking for this...

[DarcShriek.5829]

On 2/16/2023 at 7:40 PM, Deathleecher.8532 said:

Why is there no race change? We are in 2023, people love to change race.

Make it happen.-

Unfortunately, the code was written in 2012.

[Mortalux.6902]

cant they make it possible to change race once we have finished the entire personnal questline from 1-80 ?

[Linken.6345]

1 hour ago, Mortalux.6902 said:

cant they make it possible to change race once we have finished the entire personnal questline from 1-80 ?

No they tried messing with just the story before and it broke some characters imagien they try to mess with something that is hard coded into each character race when creating them.

[DerpyDavid.4563]

Time to come out of my dormant slumber of not posting for years to talk about this. ArenaNet has addressed this countless times. The reason race changes don't exist is cause the personal story is tied to your character creation choices.

However, there is a way to introduce a race change to the game and make it work. I've played this game since the beta and the one thing I've noticed through multiple characters is the majority of any race and personality tie-ins stop at level 30 or about when you meet Tybalt in the original story and start uncovering the story about Zhaitan. The first 30 levels of the story or so are all your character introduction and racial tie-ins. You can introduce a race change but make it only available to use after you have reached a certain point in the story as well as reaching a certain level requirement on a character. This would then save the dev team untold hours of work and all that would left to do is go through any of the story afterwards and "clean up" or rework any miscellaneous racial stuff that doesn't relate to the main story of Zhaitan. As far as I can recall, any of the expansions have no inclusion of your racial or personality background.

Now, whether that work is worthwhile or can turn a profit for ArenaNet is not something I can't predict. Whether ArenaNet does introduce a race change or not doesn't matter to me and I don't blame them for not putting in the work to try and introduce something like that. What I mentioned earlier is merely a suggestion as I have no way of knowing how the game's backend works. That being said, if ArenaNet ever does introduce a race change, awesome! And hopefully, the above suggestion helps in figuring out a way to introduce one.

Edited April 22 by DerpyDavid.4563

[mercury ranique.2170]

Just to mention. There are actually two reasons
1: Personal story. The issue does not only has to do with doing the personal story, but also with the coding of the personal story log. If you change the race, it gets damaged due. They experimented and it is a real dissaster to change things there.
2: Racial armor. This is the same issue. You have obtained items that can not be equiped anymore.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

It's basically: "They would if they could". 

To much Code to mess with. 

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, DerpyDavid.4563 said:

Time to come out of my dormant slumber of not posting for years to talk about this. ArenaNet has addressed this countless times. The reason race changes don't exist is cause the personal story is tied to your character creation choices.

However, there is a way to introduce a race change to the game and make it work. I've played this game since the beta and the one thing I've noticed through multiple characters is the majority of any race and personality tie-ins stop at level 30 or about when you meet Tybalt in the original story and start uncovering the story about Zhaitan. The first 30 levels of the story or so are all your character introduction and racial tie-ins. You can introduce a race change but make it only available to use after you have reached a certain point in the story as well as reaching a certain level requirement on a character. This would then save the dev team untold hours of work and all that would left to do is go through any of the story afterwards and "clean up" or rework any miscellaneous racial stuff that doesn't relate to the main story of Zhaitan. As far as I can recall, any of the expansions have no inclusion of your racial or personality background.

Now, whether that work is worthwhile or can turn a profit for ArenaNet is not something I can't predict. Whether ArenaNet does introduce a race change or not doesn't matter to me and I don't blame them for not putting in the work to try and introduce something like that. What I mentioned earlier is merely a suggestion as I have no way of knowing how the game's backend works. That being said, if ArenaNet ever does introduce a race change, awesome! And hopefully, the above suggestion helps in figuring out a way to introduce one.

It's been explained many times over why that's not feasible either. But, to repeat: the choices you make during personal story have repercussions that go beyond that story. There's a lot of stuff later that is based on those (and not all of those things are even visible for us). It would have been fine if all the later cases were built with safeguards in place, but it seems a lot of them weren't (and were coded with the assumption that some things in character data will never change).

1 hour ago, DerpyDavid.4563 said:

This would then save the dev team untold hours of work and all that would left to do is go through any of the story afterwards and "clean up" or rework any miscellaneous racial stuff that doesn't relate to the main story of Zhaitan.

Yes, it's that "all that is left to do" part that is the issue. They already had issues with following all the connections to "clean up" at the time of HoT release. By now it would definitely become even harder (not only because some stuff got added later, but also because some of the coders that might have remembered part of that stuff no longer work at Anet).

1 hour ago, DerpyDavid.4563 said:

As far as I can recall, any of the expansions have no inclusion of your racial or personality background.

On the contrary, while callbacks to your race or personal story choices are rare, they are sprinkled all over the game. HoT content has several elements that work differently if you are sylvari. Drizzlewood has callbacks to your Norn and Charr character selection choices (spirits for norn, legion and warband selected for Charr). There's stuff in your home instance that is dependant on story choices you made. Some of those things check your current status, but some check for (hidden) switches made in the past - and if all those switches won't get properly sanitized, issues might happen.

I for one would not like if, for example, Drizzlewood map crashed every time a character that is currently a Charr interacted with the parts that depend on your warband choice, and realized you have made none, because you were a Norn then.

Now, some of the things i have mentioned are obvious, and thus can be "cleaned up" easily during race change process, but (as already mentioned), there's apparently much more of those connections, with a number of them so obscure that devs weren't able to properly track all of them down even years ago, much less now.

[Manasa Devi.7958]

They could just change character model and voice, unequiping all racial equipment, but leaving everything else the same. Yes, it would create weird nonsensical situations and NPC conversations, but people who'd buy a race change are probably not into role playing anyway and wouldn't mind any weirdness. Yes, you could see a norn using sylvari racial skills, but who cares? Only alliw it after completing the personal story to avoid some of the weirdness. 

Edited April 22 by Manasa Devi.7958

[kharmin.7683]

22 minutes ago, Manasa Devi.7958 said:

They could just change character model and voice, unequiping all racial equipment, but leaving everything else the same. Yes, it would create weird nonsensical situations and NPC conversations, but people who'd buy a race change are probably not into role playing anyway and wouldn't mind any weirdness. Yes, you could see a norn using sylvari racial skills, but who cares? Only alliw it after completing the personal story to avoid some of the weirdness. 

Or, players could buy an additional character slot and create whatever race from scratch.   /shrug