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We NEED race change! [Merged]


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Seriously. We need to get race change as an option in the gem store.

 

I’m constantly creating new alts because I get tired of races looks and animations. So I’ve got multiples of all the classes I play… And I’m not alone. 
 

I know Anet has said it’s “impossible” because of personal story tied to the characters races. But that seems shallow to me. We’ve got the identity repair kit that lets you change a lot about your character, why is not a race change possible? Is it really just laziness and excuses or did I miss something crucial here? 
 

Would think it would be a great way for the company to make some extra money too, or do they simple make more by not offering it - forcing players to keep buying character slots, investing in new characters? I dunno, but every other MMO seems to be able to offer it. 
 

Edited by Tuen.5641
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Changing your gender, looks or your name is different than changing a race. It's all about personal quests which is different from race to race with 3 different routes and some other details. 

 

An items just can't modify the database in this way in GW2. Other mmos maybe offering it but they dont have personal quests and other things you chose in the character creation. 

 

It doesn't make sense to you because obviously u dont know kitten how games are working and u think its just one button clicking. 

Edited by phreeak.1023
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6 minutes ago, phreeak.1023 said:

Changing your gender, looks or your name is different than changing a race. It's all about personal quests which is different from race to race with 3 different routes and some other details. 

 

An items cant just can't alter the database in this way in GW2. 

 

It doesn't make sense to you because obviously u dont know kitten how games are working and u think its just one button clicking. 

It’s just plain silly to assume that I don’t know anything about how games work. I’m just asking a question and trying to create a healthy discussion worthy of the developers attention. 

Edited by Tuen.5641
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32 minutes ago, Tuen.5641 said:

Seriously. We need to get race change as an option in the gem store.

No. We don't. You do (well, you almost certainly don't actually need it, but let's not get into the differences between "need" and "want").

 

 

32 minutes ago, Tuen.5641 said:

I know Anet has said it’s “impossible” because of personal story tied to the characters races. But that seems shallow to me. We’ve got the identity repair kit that lets you change a lot about your character, why is not a race change possible? Is it really just laziness and excuses or did I miss something crucial here? 

Yes, you did miss something crucial here. The fact that your looks are not tied to anything beyond, well, your look. So, it's easy to change them without causing any sort of unintentional consequences. Your race however is tied to a lot of stuff. Stuff that might accidentally break if that connection was to be cut.

 

 

32 minutes ago, Tuen.5641 said:

Would think it would be a great way for the company to make some extra money too, or do they simple make more by not offering it - forcing players to keep buying character slots, investing in new characters? I dunno, but every other MMO seems to be able to offer it.

Other MMOs achieve that by unlinking your race from the story (which either prevents them from creating race-specific hooks in the story, or causing some story inconsistences), or by making large parts of the story inaccessible for some races.

 

Notice that both approaches have its advantages. The one GW2 took is far more restrictive (it is very hard to change race on a character, or to introduce a new race into the game), but it allows for more immersive/consistent storytelling. The less restrictive approaches give devs more mechanical freedom, but at a cost to the narrative side of the game.

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19 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

No. We don't. You do (well, you almost certainly don't actually need it, but let's not get into the differences between "need" and "want").

 

 

Yes, you did miss something crucial here. The fact that your looks are not tied to anything beyond, well, your look. So, it's easy to change them without causing any sort of unintentional consequences. Your race however is tied to a lot of stuff. Stuff that might accidentally break if that connection was to be cut.

 

 

Other MMOs achieve that by unlinking your race from the story (which either prevents them from creating race-specific hooks in the story, or causing some story inconsistences), or by making large parts of the story inaccessible for some races.

 

Notice that both approaches have its advantages. The one GW2 took is far more restrictive (it is very hard to change race on a character, or to introduce a new race into the game), but it allows for more immersive/consistent storytelling. The less restrictive approaches give devs more mechanical freedom, but at a cost to the narrative side of the game.

 

Very well sir! You have won me over. Thanks for the detailed reply. And I guess in the end of the day, my real issue is just being an altoholic lol.

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1 hour ago, phreeak.1023 said:

Changing your gender, looks or your name is different than changing a race. It's all about personal quests which is different from race to race with 3 different routes and some other details. 

they need only a matching list. or only allow it when you are done with your personal story.

the main problem is that they dont have enough devs to do it.

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1 hour ago, Tuen.5641 said:

Seriously. We need to get race change as an option in the gem store.

 

[...]
 

I know Anet has said it’s “impossible” because of personal story tied to the characters races.

 

There is so much information tied to your race that it would be a herculean effort to change all those entries in the databases.

 

I'd rather have them give me the option to tie a character's age to another character so I can safely delete the former and still receive all the goodies.

 

Edited by Ashantara.8731
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1 hour ago, Tuen.5641 said:

 

Very well sir! You have won me over. Thanks for the detailed reply. And I guess in the end of the day, my real issue is just being an altoholic lol.

A simple forums search would have yielded previous threads on this topic which already had these answers.

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6 hours ago, Tuen.5641 said:

It’s just plain silly to assume that I don’t know anything about how games work. I’m just asking a question and trying to create a healthy discussion worthy of the developers attention. 

Maybe if you took some time and searched, you could have read discussions that have already had the developers attention and contributed to those without reviving a personal 'dead horse' topic.

 

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11 minutes ago, Mortifera.6138 said:

I agree; we need race change. Just make it a requirement to be level 80, so it doesn't affect your personal story.

Create a new character and level it to 80 immediately using Tomes of Knowledge. That character would still be at the start of their personal story and yet you have made eligible for "race change".

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50 minutes ago, Mortifera.6138 said:

I agree; we need race change. Just make it a requirement to be level 80, so it doesn't affect your personal story.

If it only were so easy...

30 minutes ago, Katary.7096 said:

Create a new character and level it to 80 immediately using Tomes of Knowledge. That character would still be at the start of their personal story and yet you have made eligible for "race change".

This is one of the cases why it is not that easy - being a level 80 doesn't tell you which parts of the story are done (and which aren't).

 

Notice, btw, that having finished personal story up to level 80 doesn't help either. Basically, when your story progresses, there are some script flags that get "baked into" your character data. Those things are sometimes getting referenced by later story steps (and those story steps can, then, set their own flags). I.e. IBS does reflect your legion and warband picks if you happen to be a charr.

 

If your race were to change in-between those two events, one of two things can happen. One is that an absurd result might happen, when a member of one race will end up getting references as if they were a member of another. That's a relatively minor (even if immersion-breaking) concern when compared to the other - that one being that the whole script may just break at that point, either causing a crash, or a stall of some event (or story progress).

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@Tuen.5641 I think its a valid question as many have asked in the past, I myself asked this over several years back when I made my 1st character as Asuran and desperately wanted to change race, however i politely directed to the Search Option of this forum, and Race Change as been brought up countless times before with all the reasons why Anet will not implement it as as far as I can see if this change was going to happen it would have been years ago.  

 

Search Option of this Forum = MVP

 

@Astralporing.1957sums up the the masses of these previous threads perfectly in their first post on this thread.

 

On the plus side - we can make use of 69 character slots per account, and only 5 Races to choose from so we can have at least x13 characters of each race if we choose.   If our accounts were only limited to < 10 characters then I think Race Change would become wholly viable, but 69 characters are more than enough for each and every Race/ Profession we desire.  Heck I'm lucky if I have time each day to log 3-4 different characters let alone 69!

 

 Just have to adapt to how it is atm: For example I made my First Warrior: Charr and wanted to show off some infusions that I'd bought, but was gutted as Charr is like the worst character for displaying infusions ( except of Ember, Celestial perhaps, but others like Winter's Heart you can't barely see it): So i made 2 new characters: 1 human warrior, 1 sylvaria warrior to see which worked better with the infusions, and eventually ended up with 3 Warriors( I just equipped them slowly over time with Asc. Chest drops):

 

This itself became a bonus, since I turned 1 warrior into a SpellBreaker for WvW, other warrior BS for fractals, and other one: General open world PvE.  Advantage of not having race change: I made more standalone characters ready for different game modes ( saved me on build/equipment templates i guess, so pros and cons to everything!)

 

Edited by Gregg.3970
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7 hours ago, Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

they need only a matching list. or only allow it when you are done with your personal story.

the main problem is that they dont have enough devs to do it.

also a check if theres cultural armor being used.

 

aside cultural armor/personal history i cant remember any more game mechanics tied to race.

 

or even more simplier: just reset personal history. most ppl want race change dont bother with history,.

Edited by ugrakarma.9416
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8 hours ago, Tuen.5641 said:

Seriously. We need to get race change as an option in the gem store.

 

I’m constantly creating new alts because I get tired of races looks and animations. So I’ve got multiples of all the classes I play… And I’m not alone. 
 

I know Anet has said it’s “impossible” because of personal story tied to the characters races. But that seems shallow to me. We’ve got the identity repair kit that lets you change a lot about your character, why is not a race change possible? Is it really just laziness and excuses or did I miss something crucial here? 
 

Would think it would be a great way for the company to make some extra money too, or do they simple make more by not offering it - forcing players to keep buying character slots, investing in new characters? I dunno, but every other MMO seems to be able to offer it. 
 

 

Can't be done! 🙄

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43 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Notice, btw, that having finished personal story up to level 80 doesn't help either. Basically, when your story progresses, there are some script flags that get "baked into" your character data. Those things are sometimes getting referenced by later story steps (and those story steps can, then, set their own flags). I.e. IBS does reflect your legion and warband picks if you happen to be a charr.

Good observation. The suggestion to limit the feature to characters which have reached level X or finished the personal story is actually backwards. A much more functional requirement would be that the character in question has never done any story content, but considering that story content is the first thing the game will throw you into after character creation, the better solution here is going back to character creation.

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11 minutes ago, Mortifera.6138 said:

People also said we didn't need mounts, until we got them.

Irrelevant to the thread or my post. I don't care what someone said about something else at one point in the past. What I know is that I said we don't need the ability to change race, so if you want to quote me then stick to commenting on that, thanks. 

 

 

Edited by Sobx.1758
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39 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Irrelevant to the thread or my post. I don't care what someone said about something else at one point in the past. What I know is that I said we don't need the ability to change race, so if you want to quote me then stick to commenting on that, thanks. 

 

 

People were being defensive about not having mounts in the past, you're doing the same with race change now.

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