Guild Wars 2

Why can’t we have cosmetic items to change Sex, Race, names?

Race change doesn’t work because of Personal Story and Racial armor. While the Racial Armor problem can be solved by changing the armor to the racial equivalent, the Personal story cannot. What the devs mentioned before is that it is apparently hard coded during character creation. So while gender can be changed, race cannot because of this.

There is a cosmetic item to change gender. There is a name change contract that does as it is called. Race cannot be changed because of the personal story and making that change is more difficult than it would seem.

Race change gets brought up a lot because the difficulty argument doesn’t work even within the confines of this game. Same goes for things like class change or a multi class voucher on a single toon.

All changes can possibly be deemed difficult but this is a business and these things provide stable revenue once implemented. People may stop buying storage spaces which seems to be the thing to push in this game but people will keep buying contracts to change their main character whenever something starts getting stale. This keeps players playing longer and the revenue will pay for the cost and more things down the road. If we had race change four years ago people would still be buying it today and it would add and allow them to invest more in improving other aspects of the game.

There are some easy methods that don’t rile up a community that can be effective methods to collect revenue. This game barely does any of it relying on things people will cap out on like skins once there set. Customer service is a place this game is severly lacking bag and bank tabs while increasing collectibles just angers everyone you need to get people to spend money because they want to not because they have too.

No race change possibly because of how race ties to the personal story, the personal story is part of the hero panel and the Hero panel seems rather inflexible.

It took months for them to be able to reverse changes on the hero panel where some people wrongly got AP points and titles for the Hall of Monuments. They had to close down the Hall of Monuments calculator during that time and a bug still pops up even now where people are randomly emailed by the bug fix announcement and get told that they wrongly got HoM points and that their points have been removed.

Yeah I forgot what turmoil would occur with the PS if they added Race Changes.

I might do that Sex change, I’m bored enough; how do female Norns look in outfits and armor do they rock the curves?

Ayrilana.1396:

There is a cosmetic item to change gender.

The Total Makeover Kit is the name of that item.

Once you’ve been with the game awhile, it’s also pretty easy to amass enough level boosters to jump straight to level 80. Or you can purchase the Heart of Thorns expansion and receive a level 80 booster. Either way, you can have yourself a max-level character of a different race in a jiffy.

Also if you want to do both a sex and name change there’s a bundle where you can buy a total makeover kit and name change contract together, it’s slightly cheaper than buying them separately.

There are also NPCs called Aesthetician in every major city that allow you to preview any possible changes without actually having a kit on hand. They are very useful if you want to see what your current armor setup would look like if you changed the character’s gender, for instance.

Race change would make a lot of money, they should figure it out. Reset the PS on the ‘new-race’ character if needed (though quite honestly your race only seems to determine choices from level 1-30 in the story). As for the race specific armor you might have on your character, convert it to the appropriate tier of the new race, or just send the armor to wardrobe and outfit the char with basic appearance 80 gear.

I’m sure race change would bring them a lot of money. But if after 4 years and many requests it hasn’t been done, then maybe there are fundamental problems with doing it. In a post about why they can’t make backpacks dyeable, the dev said something that I think is also relevant to this subject.

Ashe Lewis.9815:

(Snip) “We’d still encounter a ton of programing challenges and bugs from altering a core mechanic of the game and the years of code built on top of it. Every player and many npcs use items, so the wrong bug slipping through can have a major impact on everyone in the game. Not to mention finding that bug could be like searching for a needle in a haystack because of how fundamental this part of our system is” (snip)

I expect they have looked into it and found out it would result in a bugfest that would take too much valuable dev time to fix. Far better imo that people simply reroll and make a new char and let that dev time be used to make new content instead.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I’m sure race change would bring them a lot of money. But if after 4 years and many requests it hasn’t been done, then maybe there are fundamental problems with doing it. In a post about why they can’t make backpacks dyeable, the dev said something that I think is also relevant to this subject.

Ashe Lewis.9815:

(Snip) “We’d still encounter a ton of programing challenges and bugs from altering a core mechanic of the game and the years of code built on top of it. Every player and many npcs use items, so the wrong bug slipping through can have a major impact on everyone in the game. Not to mention finding that bug could be like searching for a needle in a haystack because of how fundamental this part of our system is” (snip)

I expect they have looked into it and found out it would result in a bugfest that would take too much valuable dev time to fix. Far better imo that people simply reroll and make a new char and let that dev time be used to make new content instead.

While a “Race Change Contract” might bring in a lot of revenue, it would also cost a lot to design, test, implement, and maintain. The question isn’t “will it earn a lot” but “will it earn enough to make it worth the risk and expense.”

Hamfast.8719:

Ayrilana.1396:

There is a cosmetic item to change gender.

The Total Makeover Kit is the name of that item.

Once you’ve been with the game awhile, it’s also pretty easy to amass enough level boosters to jump straight to level 80. Or you can purchase the Heart of Thorns expansion and receive a level 80 booster. Either way, you can have yourself a max-level character of a different race in a jiffy.

Probably, after nearly 4 years, most have already amassed the needed ToKs, and many own the expansion. =)

I don’t think the Cultural Armor problem could be easily solved. Once something is unlocked in the Wardrobe, it seems there is no way to ‘lock’ it again.

Would players be happy with the cost of Cultural Armor included in the price of the ‘Race Change Contract’?