Guild Wars 2

lordkrall.7241:

Cloud.7613:

He has a point, nothing you can get from your personal story is that valuable. As for pact skins, they will still need to do the story line from start to that point to get them to begin with, not a big deal in my eyes since they still have to work for it.

So because they are not valuable people should be able to get as many of them as they want?
What would be the point in having a branching story line if you could just do all the parts with the same character anyway?

Some people like having only one character and still be able to do all the content. As I said, they need to do story line from start to that point to obtain the pact skin, so it’s not like they get it for free. No rewards for your second race, I’m fine with that as well.

My suggestion would be to offer race change only once a character has completed their entire story. Then, they could buy a token from the gem store which could be used on a new Asuran device that can alter one’s appearance entirely. Something to that effect, anyway. :P

This feature is gonna happen, it’s not a question of if, but when. Anet will realize there is too much money to be made from this, and I am one of those suckers.

Clipbord.8726:

This feature is gonna happen, it’s not a question of if, but when. Anet will realize there is too much money to be made from this, and I am one of those suckers.

While this may be true to an extent, developing a feature like this takes resources that may be committed to other (higher priority) areas of the game currently. I’m guessing that from ANet’s perspective developing the character makeover kits and name change contracts were a lot easier to justify putting resources towards given that these features also don’t have the technical complications that a race change feature needs to overcome.

Janson Smalling.1850:

As always, we try to listen to feedback and suggestions. We certainly wouldn’t rule anything out, but we aren’t currently working on it.

That shouldn’t keep you from giving us your opinions or ideas!

I honestly think some of us want race changes so badly we would pay $20-$30 or more for a complete reset barring level:

1. Personal story reset to beginning. Lose all personal story rewards and faction armor.

2. If there is any kind of exploit related to karma here, feel free to reset karma as well.

3. If necessary, lose all your gear except named items, precursors, and Legendaries. Only if there is some kind of exploit that the above do not solve.

4. Keep your level, XP, and skill points.

I think many of us appreciate that there are real technical difficulties to doing this, but I’m not sure ANet appreciates how much many of us would be willing to trade to have this implemented.

Even if it means having to re-do the personal story from scratch and re-farm most of my 80 exotic gear, I’d be ok with that, given that the extreme drudgery of re-leveling to 1-80 would suck 10x worse.

I have 3 80s and a 60 and there is 0% chance I’ll ever relevel 1-80 again, but there is a decidedly non-zero chance I would pay for a race change, even under the conditions mentioned above.

Seriously ANet, do keep this in mind and consider it. It could be another money-maker for you, and I for one would have no problem without supporting you like that.

Please give race change, even if it means resetting all the personal story line.

What I don’t get is how people get so far in to a character before realizing that they hate the aspects of that race. You all claim to have all this Karma/gear invested on these characters. Am I the only one that would stop working on that character the instant I realized I didn’t like it? Or are you all too slow to realize at level 2 that you character’s size, etc is not for you?

Race change would be great !

kurtosis.9526:

I honestly think some of us want race changes so badly we would pay $20-$30 or more for a complete reset barring level:

1. Personal story reset to beginning. Lose all personal story rewards and faction armor.

2. If there is any kind of exploit related to karma here, feel free to reset karma as well.

3. If necessary, lose all your gear except named items, precursors, and Legendaries. Only if there is some kind of exploit that the above do not solve.

4. Keep your level, XP, and skill points.

I think many of us appreciate that there are real technical difficulties to doing this, but I’m not sure ANet appreciates how much many of us would be willing to trade to have this implemented.

Even if it means having to re-do the personal story from scratch and re-farm most of my 80 exotic gear, I’d be ok with that, given that the extreme drudgery of re-leveling to 1-80 would suck 10x worse.

I have 3 80s and a 60 and there is 0% chance I’ll ever relevel 1-80 again, but there is a decidedly non-zero chance I would pay for a race change, even under the conditions mentioned above.

Seriously ANet, do keep this in mind and consider it. It could be another money-maker for you, and I for one would have no problem without supporting you like that.

I agree 100% with kurtosis. Please Anet, make this available to your customers?

I want a race change too

Pennry.9215:

What I don’t get is how people get so far in to a character before realizing that they hate the aspects of that race. You all claim to have all this Karma/gear invested on these characters. Am I the only one that would stop working on that character the instant I realized I didn’t like it? Or are you all too slow to realize at level 2 that you character’s size, etc is not for you?

For me, it wasn’t until well into my 70’s before I picked up an alt and realized I liked playing a different race more as it just felt more “fun” to play. I went and finished leveling up my first character to 80 only to quick the game shortly after. I enjoy the game but just hate the animation of my first and primary character.

So far, I’ve been really impressed with all the options Anet has offered to us via the Black Lion TC. And yes, I’ve already purchased several “makeover” kits… lol.

I would like something like that. Although I wouldn’t use it at the moment, additional playable races might change that. If Largos were made playable, I would turn my main into one without a second thought.
As many have already suggested, the personal story should be resetted in that case and maybe it should be available only to those who have already finished their story.

I’d like to have a race change because it’ll at least kill some of the boredom. I have no intention of making an alt, I’ve always only played with 1 character in every MMO i played, and having the option to play as a different race will definitely keep my interest.

Grappler.2389:

one of the problems is what if you bought cultural armor on one character then switched that character to another race what would happen to the gear

So gear would just changed too. If You have Charr and change race to Human so your cultural armore will change to human too. This work already in other games. And sure it is not so hard to make :-)

daros.3407:

So gear would just changed too. If You have Charr and change race to Human so your cultural armore will change to human too. This work already in other games. And sure it is not so hard to make :-)

The problem is that you have achievements tied to the Cultural pieces, so simply changing it with a race change would screw up that system.

I think it would be very interesting if ANet introduced something like the Bonus Mission packs of GW1. An instanced solo-mission, that can be repeated on any other character but can only be completed once by each character, that takes you into some more lore of the five races.

They could unlock access to other races’ armor by completing events like: you’d have to prove your prowess to the Norn before they will craft you armor, or prove your intelligence by passing a crazy jumping puzzle for the Asura, go on a scavenger hunt for the Sylvari, kill a bunch of renegade Charr to prove your ferocity, and do something related to politics for the Humans), and even give you an option to change your race. As for the Personal Story, since you’re level 80 and have completed the game (assumption), they could just wipe it. Heck, it could be a requirement to have completed the game before you take part in this story.

As for the level of difficulty scaling to the reward… your character is already level 80, so put in a few Vets and such and make it tough to complete solo forcing you to THINK and use a survivable build.

To be quite honest, even if the Story panel were unchanged as well as the Home Instance, I don’t EVERY go there for ANY reason, so I really wouldn’t care if I have a Human-turned-Charr in Salma District talking to the humans as if I were one of them (still).

And with that said, I’d gladly pay $30 bucks for the additional content.

Good idea Kristofferus.

More than often I have felt my level 80 character would feel better as another race. I have known people who have deleted a level 50 character because they want to play the class as another race.

Perhaps add a race change token to the gem store which is only available to level 80s or completely resets your character’s quests and history while keeping your level the same. (So that there will be conflict with the story section of the character profile)

An alternative could be to just randomly set all the decisions that the character would have made except for their Order/Alliance decision. Personally I would use two/three of these instantly on release.

I can understand that. I wish I hadn’t gotten my Guardian to level 28 FotM in full ascended/exotic gear given that I don’t like the race of the character. That was my silliness though.

Janson Smalling.1850:

You’ve all brought up great reasons why a race-change item is very appealing to you, and how you, personally, could see it happening. Others have brought up great reasons as to why it is not simplistic or easy for us to do this.

There are a lot of far-reaching consequences of allowing one character to play through every race’s personal story or equip any cultural armor/weapons. For now, we feel that it would take away from the experience of Guild Wars 2 for the majority of players.

I agree here Janson. But what if you allow race change, and if they equip such gear or so. Just switch it over to that race as well. Such as if a charr buys cultural stuff, and wants to be an asura, then swtich his/her charr cultural with the asura. I realize this could be difficult. But its an option.

Keep you hopes up for a race change guys. There is no reason why there shouldn’t be a race change option for the future.

I have already spent 180 euros on this game and I would gladly put more into it if we would get a race change option since I have 2 character I would like to race change and that would also mean name changes aswell.

Lets take a look on the benefits and disadvantages.

Disadvantages

• Personal Storyline – Fixed by clearing the history of your story i.e everything resets including ability to choose a new background history for your character.
  There are more ways this could be done but this would be the easiest.
• Race unique Achievements – This isn’t a big problem as of now, since you get 30 achievement points from each race. These achievements could be disabled upon changing race.
• Cultural armors – You would not be able to use your old cultural armor but it would be best if the armor is Transmuted into an equivalent piece of armor.
• Slight Character slot sales decrease – Less reason to start a new character from scatch but in the other end there would still be more money made from a race change option (see “other” below).
• Development time – To be fair it wouldn’t take that much effort by the Dev team to implement this, unless of course there would be some conflicting code.

Benefits

• Player fatigue – Players would not have to start all over just to change the race of their character therefore draining the fatigue of the player by leveling or collecting equipment etc. all over again.
• Huge increase in Gem sales – This is a no brainer. Not only would people love to buy a “Race Change Kit” from the Gem store but Name Change and possibly other items in the store would see an increase in sales due to some naming their character after the lore etc.
• It would mostly just be cosmetical – Character cosmetics is important for many players out there. Opinions on the looks of a Character change over time for many and changing the race is one of those thing many would like to change for cosmetical reasons.
• Character revival – Many players gets bored or realise to late that they would like to play another race. After spending to much time on a character and dont want to get all those Exotic/Ascended items and World Completions etc. You just give up and in worst case you get bored of the game and quit.
• Great risk/reward – For ArenaNet and NCSoft it would benefit their economy for the better.
• Players satisfaction – People who’d like to change their race gets their wishes true and there isn’t any reason for anyone to hate on this.

Other

• Gem prices would rise – But they would probably go down again. If they would stay up there there would still be potential more potential buyers for Gems rather than player choosing to convert gold to Gems.
• Price – Since there is slight lower reason to buy a new Character Slot (IF needed) and the Total Makeover Kit cost 350 gems a suggested price would be around maybe 1200 gems (15 US/EUROS).

Sorry for any grammar mistakes and sentence structure I’ve read it a couple of times so hopefully it isn’t to bad.

Please discuss this further since I probably missed some and not all would agree with some of the notes. I also hope Anet would read this because I think it covers most of everyones concern.

Cheers!

Itisfinished.2167:

I agree here Janson. But what if you allow race change, and if they equip such gear or so. Just switch it over to that race as well. Such as if a charr buys cultural stuff, and wants to be an asura, then swtich his/her charr cultural with the asura. I realize this could be difficult. But its an option.

Wouldn’t that make the whole achievement for cultural armors rather pointless?

lordkrall.7241:

Itisfinished.2167:

I agree here Janson. But what if you allow race change, and if they equip such gear or so. Just switch it over to that race as well. Such as if a charr buys cultural stuff, and wants to be an asura, then swtich his/her charr cultural with the asura. I realize this could be difficult. But its an option.

Wouldn’t that make the whole achievement for cultural armors rather pointless?

Think outside the box. Those achievements would be locked out if you had a Cultural armor and then switched race you would NOT get the achievements for the “Transmuted Armor” you would have to buy the T3 again.

KRUSSIDULL.6845:

Think outside the box. Those achievements would be locked out if you had a Cultural armor and then switched race you would NOT get the achievements for the “Transmuted Armor” you would have to buy the T3 again.

That does of course depend on how they have coded the achievement.
Is it coded so that you get it when you buy the last piece and have the others?
Is it coded so you get it when you actively have all the items?

lordkrall.7241:

KRUSSIDULL.6845:

Think outside the box. Those achievements would be locked out if you had a Cultural armor and then switched race you would NOT get the achievements for the “Transmuted Armor” you would have to buy the T3 again.

That does of course depend on how they have coded the achievement.
Is it coded so that you get it when you buy the last piece and have the others?
Is it coded so you get it when you actively have all the items?

You get it when you buy them I have 3 characters with full T3 armors, each individual piece counts. When you buy 6 pieces of a T3, T2, T1 randomly if you so wish u get the first achievement for that race.

KRUSSIDULL.6845:

You get it when you buy them I have 3 characters with full T3 armors, each individual piece counts. When you buy 6 pieces of a T3, T2, T1 randomly if you so wish u get the first achievement for that race.

In that case it might be quite simply to solve the achievement problem, since you don’t get it for having them, but rather buying the last piece.

I’m able to say with 100% confidence that if there was a race change option i’d sink a LOT of gems into changing 3 of my characters races….

The way i’d see it work is it essentially puts you in the character creation screen again, you choose everything and it resets your personal story. Any Cultural items would be converted (since it’s on buy and not on own you wouldn’t get the achievements).

Essentially it’d change everything about the character (should you choose) including the name (could also make a cheaper version where the name one is not there).

So 800 gems to make a new character is out. Why?
Saving the name?
Want to sidestep leveling the new character to 80?
Want to not go through the process of gearing them up again?

Basically making a race swap available is a way of NOT playing the game. By-passing a few hundred hours on your way to a goal might have a reasonable gem cost, but it’s going to be one based on you shortening your involvement with the game by several months and the corresponding loss of opportunities to sell gems to you over that period.

Would you still be interested for say… 2000 gems per swap?

Janson Smalling.1850:

You’ve all brought up great reasons why a race-change item is very appealing to you, and how you, personally, could see it happening. Others have brought up great reasons as to why it is not simplistic or easy for us to do this.

There are a lot of far-reaching consequences of allowing one character to play through every race’s personal story or equip any cultural armor/weapons. For now, we feel that it would take away from the experience of Guild Wars 2 for the majority of players.

There could be requirements like having your personal story completed, and there could be slots in the changerace item to put your cultural armor so it transmutes to the race you want to change to. I do understand it would probably very challenging to do. :/

Just wondering, how would it take away experience of gw2 for the majority of players, wouldn’t it only take away experience for those who change their race? Which is their decision to not experience the other races content.

Nike.2631:

Would you still be interested for say… 2000 gems per swap?

I’d pay even more.