Guild Wars 2

Why is this so service so hard to add.
other games have race restriction and such but still have race changes as a service the players can buy why doesn’t gw2 have this basic service for its players.

I want to change my human female thief To something else because they removed the idle animation and changed the running animation.
I want to change my asura necro because they armor really does show on a small model.

other things I have problems with.

after 2.5 years of the game being out among the lack of new skills and etc which finally seem to be happening but only till the xpac. Yes I see the specialization is laying the ground work for possibility more to each class further down the road but this xpac is pretty late if you ask me

all I can say price wise for Heart of thorns should be around 40 which is the normal for an “expansion”(their adding basic kitten to the game that gw1 had in far less time like guild halls which were at launch for gw1. and new skills in about 6 months after launch) 50-60 for some collector’s kitten anymore would be a sign to me of greed but again the gem shop is greedy as well as time wasting to farm needed gold for exchange.

Since you don’t know a thing about guild halls yet, or the way they’re adding them, saying that Guild Wars 1 had them at launch is pretty much pointless. It’s not going to be the same Guild Halls.

I wasn’t into GvG and I never really found a use for Guild Halls in Guild Wars 1 anyway. But without knowing that the new Guild Halls are going to be like, it’s very hard to say compare.

As for race change, unlike most games, there is a personal story in this game that is linked to race. There isn’t going to be a race change for that reason.

OP, it helps if you post different things in different threads. Or just make the thread title more generic.

Vayne.8563:

As for race change, unlike most games, there is a personal story in this game that is linked to race. There isn’t going to be a race change for that reason.

There is a way to implement it, but it’s questionable if it’s as easy as it looks on the surface, which is probably why it’s not being done.

I would assume the problem lies to the racial locking of specific features to that character. This would include your bounded racial elite/utility skills, home instance, culture armour and personal story. These things will inevitably bug the transition when shifting a character from one race to another. To avoid such incidents would mean the resetting of armour remodels, soulbound armour, entire personal story progression, and/or geodata location bounds.

Other games may allow the transition between races simply because they have less of racial bound features. Changing appearance is usually the easiest part of the race change transition.

What i been thinking about is add in tonics for the beast races that let you be in-combat and use your skills. So you get a race change when you want it but you do not get any more ability and no need to a crazy number of PS to make these races have more back story. So this could fall into other races with out killing your own PS.

Akikaze.1307:

I would assume the problem lies to the racial locking of specific features to that character. This would include your bounded racial elite/utility skills, home instance, culture armour and personal story. These things will inevitably bug the transition when shifting a character from one race to another. To avoid such incidents would mean the resetting of armour remodels, soulbound armour, entire personal story progression, and/or geodata location bounds.

Other games may allow the transition between races simply because they have less of racial bound features. Changing appearance is usually the easiest part of the race change transition.

-Racial skills would simply be ‘forgotten’ in the process
-Home instance has no bearing on race (a norn can use a sylvari home district, etc)
-Unequip armor as a requirement for item/service use
-Personal story is not an issue if item/service is restricted to use only if no PS completion, or not currently in a race specific chapter of the personal story (final PS mission for example)

It’s more an issue of the processes behind it.

Vayne.8563:

As for race change, unlike most games, there is a personal story in this game that is linked to race. There isn’t going to be a race change for that reason.

which is a bullkitten reason as I kinda of stated there are restrictions to Races in other games as well armor and probably your race being question in quest or story. and when those games allowed race change they’ve basically given completed version of said choices but nothing extra out of them.
and personal story was just really just a story that give you a bit of info on where you were playing up till the pact then everyone experiences the same kitten

Aidan Savage.2078:

Akikaze.1307:

I would assume the problem lies to the racial locking of specific features to that character. This would include your bounded racial elite/utility skills, home instance, culture armour and personal story. These things will inevitably bug the transition when shifting a character from one race to another. To avoid such incidents would mean the resetting of armour remodels, soulbound armour, entire personal story progression, and/or geodata location bounds.

Other games may allow the transition between races simply because they have less of racial bound features. Changing appearance is usually the easiest part of the race change transition.

-Racial skills would simply be ‘forgotten’ in the process
-Home instance has no bearing on race (a norn can use a sylvari home district, etc)
-Unequip armor as a requirement for item/service use
-Personal story is not an issue if item/service is restricted to use only if no PS completion, or not currently in a race specific chapter of the personal story (final PS mission for example)

It’s more an issue of the processes behind it.

The process behind it could sometimes be as simple as a command to set the character’s race.

In AION, there were 2 enemy race factions of Asmodians and Elyos, with a command you could go changing between them. It was only if you had game master access, not a service for the game due to population balance issues.

However that’s when the problem occurs, you would get double stacked quests for both races (could happen to personal story), your character’s appearance might be slightly off (appearance settings default to the other race’s equivalent which might not exist) and actually obtain the racial locked skills for both races.

If I recall correctly (and I may not), a dev once said that the problem is that race and profession are hard-coded attributes of each character, so they basically can’t be changed, without re-writing fundamental parts of the game. Whereas names, appearance, gender (which is just appearance mostly anyway), etc, are not.

I doubt we will ever see race change. Here is the reason whys (at least, from what I see)

1. The first quarter or so of the story is based on what race you chose. On later chapters, some NPCs are race lock. So in order to have race change: are you willing to have your PS restarted? Will you want it to simply be deleted and act as if nothing happened? They will also have to make you re-do the story customization from the character creator.

2. Cultural armor: They will have to do all logical steps to change one armor race lock to another. But do they have to lock the previous skins and unlock the new ones in automatic? Since in theory your Norn would never buy Asuran armor. Things might get complicated if you have the skin on top account bound armors. Do they change it to the basic skin? Change to the new race armor looks but risk that it might affect any other character you have that might use the same armor?

Pretty sure there are more things I’m missing or over seeing, but those come to me right now.

About the rest of the rant:

GW2 != GW1. Would recommend you to look it as 2 different games, since that is what they are. It’s like ranting why Witcher or Dragon Age don’t act the same as the very first on the series.

About having new skills, it was a nightmare to balance. Remember how every other week a new update had to be implemented to keep balancing. Every week or so I had to check if I had to change all my builds.

Guild Halls, even though it was something I also wanted, don’t remember them being a big core part of the game. It was a nice hub to organize events, meet guildies and had conveniently all needed merchants in arms reach. Aside of that, it was more of a commodity rather than a absolute need feature. Of course, I wasn’t in a guild that did GvG that much, so not sure how much I could’ve missed.

About the xpack price, well, they will set the price according to what they think is worth it. Also, why is too late? What is too late about the xpac?

About gem store: they have to earn money some way. So I wouldn’t really complaint about being greedy. You can get all gem store items without spending a single cent, so I’m not sure why it is a greedy gem store. I’ve played games where there version of cash shop was literally that. No way to get those items, besides spending some money, and they were needed to craft high level weapons and armors. Luckily, our cash(gem) store is cosmetic only.

Olvendred.3027:

If I recall correctly (and I may not), a dev once said that the problem is that race and profession are hard-coded attributes of each character, so they basically can’t be changed, without re-writing fundamental parts of the game. Whereas names, appearance, gender (which is just appearance mostly anyway), etc, are not.

If they’re hardcoded, then the method would more or less be like it is for existing character modifications. Except for this, you’re modifying the race and look of the character (presets dont carry over well), and you’d be locked out of the profession choice (carried over), and the name (carried over). With the other difference being you’re creating a new character that would take the place of your old one.

would be nice to be able to change races though. I made a human ranger as an alt but ended up being my main. Everyone plays human… I would rather be Charr.

Nope. It’s still not a thing. And the reasons it’s not a thing haven’t changed.

I don’t understand what the big fuss is all about…other than the World Completion star and professions, what exactly isn’t account bound if you just reroll the race you want? Leveling in this game is stupid fast… and the vast majority of anything relevant is account bound.

azzy.6485:

I don’t understand what the big fuss is all about…other than the World Completion star and professions, what exactly isn’t account bound if you just reroll the race you want? Leveling in this game is stupid fast… and the vast majority of anything relevant is account bound.

The only downside, right now, for rerolling is the trait acquisition system. Other than that, I totally agree. If you’re not satisfied with your character remake it. Though I really don’t understand how you get anywhere with a character without realizing you’re not satisfied with it.

I really don’t think this game needs a race change feature, because they have rapid leveling instead. With tomes of knowledge, you can get a character to 80 instantly, or rather: as quickly as you can click on the tomes. So it’s really not a big deal to re-roll your character if you aren’t happy about it’s race. Add to that the fact that all currency and ascended gear is account bound means that you don’t have to grind out to get gear for your new character either. The only real part that would kinda suck is getting world completion again, but even this is pretty easy on a character that is level 80 with full ascended gear, or even just full exotics.

I understand why people become dissatisfied with a character over time, but there are existing alternatives:

• 800 gems: add a character slot and start the new race there
• 1,600 gems: name change contract + character slot → rename the old character, start the new one (new race) and name it to the original (names remain reserved to your account for 24 hrs)

In order to enable race changes, they’d have to find a way to restore the character back to start for the personal story and racial skills; regardless of whether that is ‘easy’ or not (and I don’t think it is easy), that takes planning, development, and testing. That would result in those resources not being deployed to other features or fixes.

I’m not against the idea of changing race, I just greatly prefer that ANet devote its energies to other things.

I’d reroll my stupid human warrior in a heartbeat if it weren’t for the fact she has 500 in armorsmithing. Really don’t want to throw that away :/

The thing is that the personal story is also tied to race, as well as skills and armor. But tbh there isnt much in game that is character bound and worth much. Only thing that would suck is losing crafting levels, but you should have thought of that before investing the time and money into a race you dont like

Race change will likely never happen, simply due to the amount of coding and effort to properly implement it. (I love all those people going "oh this is easy, just change A, B, C and D and it will work. If programming an MMO was only this easy. Reminds me of the guy who wanted to develope WoW2 via Java.)

Second it goes completely against their central game design that you are playing a personal story with decisions and consequences (though most are cosmetic and narative in nature, they are final and mutually exclusive). Like it or not, your discomfort will not change this.

Accept this or reroll. There are battles one can pick to fight, this is not one of them.

Considering how popular styling kits are, race change would probably sell well. But we already know Anet’s programming practices are quite often pretty poor so the change might be more work than Anet’s willing to bother with.

And it still won’t be a thing, even if you keep on crying for it like a kid for another million times!!

Seriously …Get over it!

Other people go even so far to DELETE ALL THEIR CHARACTERS, just to be able to change their HOME WORLD SERVER for free

And then theres always again over the past years some people, which friggin can’t delete one single stupid character to get what they want, when the thing is, they should know what they want either already at the moment of creation of the character, or if you seriously can’t delete your character to get a new chance to make, what you want – get a new character slot and then make yourself what you want.

That are your options and these two things will stay your options most likely forever.
How many times must be said, that everything you choose out at Character Creation is linked to your Personal Story and that changing somethign in that line of decisions means automatically alot of consequences for your whole Personal Story.
Not just only all of that, which we currently know, but also all of what we will see in the future will be affected by what kind of decisions you have made in the past of your personal story, which race you place, which order you belogn to and so on.

ANet offers already everything needed to get what you want, that they are willing to give us to make changes on our Characters, which don’t affect in any heavy way the personal story, like Name Change, Style/ Gender Change and the possibility to have up to a maximum of as far as I know 64 Characters per Account!!!

People need to learn to live with their consequences of their decisions and stop trying to bribe Anet to give them just everything that they want out of laziness, only because they think, it can’t be bad because they just give ANet money …
Some people seriously need to learn the lesson, that you just can’t buy everything in life with money and that you need to stand towards your own made mistakes and wrong decisions, which mystiriously ALWAYS seem to occur only, once players have reached with Characters first already Max Level at least, weird, not ???

One should believe, that people should recognize in the early levels if you don’t like a race seriously enough to play with it through the whole game and get a Character to Max Level and super high end equipment firts, before they realize

oh wait, I hate this race out of a sudden >.> /endsarcasm

Sorry, when I’m aggressive here, but I have personally absolutely zero understanding for something like this.

I tell you why alot of people surely want this Feature so badly:

It is, because alot of players are like SKRITT.
Once they see something, that is in their personal view of taste more shiny, than what they have now currently, then hey instantly do absolutely dislike and hate what they have NOW – find it not shiny and good enough at all anymore and are all kitteny and whiny, as long they can’t get that shinier thing they desire so much more out of a sudden since the moment they saw something, what they personally found alot prettier and shinier, than what they made themself before.

This analogy comes down to things like fashion and fashion that looks on Race X in their view a ton times better, than when used with Race Y that they have now and everytime they look onto their Race Y from that moment on that they out of a sudden despise so much, because it won’t look so pretty and shiny in Fashion Z, like Race X, or because it doesn’t clip or have any other issues of design perhaps like missing details…

That’s why people want so much to get a Race Change feature, so that they can at the moment their get their hands on that shiny thing to look “pretty” again in their view and much finer, than with that “ugly” race they had chosen before first and played through the game, hundreds over thousands of hours with to the point of having max equipment, that they NATURALLY don’t want to “waste their time they spent with their characters” which they suddenly throw because of new fashion into the garbage bin and don’t like anymore, like old Barbie Dolls, that get thrown away and sorted out, because there has been brought out a new Barbie Doll Version by Martel, that looks alot prettier than the first version…

and until daddy buys them the new Barbie Look, they cry the whole shop full over years until everyones ears bleed!!!!

bleh… seriously have enough of this behaviour…

There are a tons of far more important things for Anet to do, than to waste time, money and ressources on something so unimportant, unneeded and obsolete, like a Race Change Feature, that adds absolutely nothing useful to the overall game at all.

Making a ton of extra characters by buying more slots was worth it (20+ now). Take a chance, or as suggested above, delete an already existing toon.
You obviously don’t want to lose progress on your current class, and I can understand if you are 80 and wanted to change races, but most of us just do as already mentioned or re-roll.
I normally plan ahead before making my characters now, especially with the wardrobe feature making it easier.
Not that I wouldn’t buy a race change scroll if they existed.

I just wouldn’t expect it to make an appearance. It would involve so many changes to your character and their story lines, Racial armor/skills. They’d probably need you to log off while they alter it themselves threw a ticket service (kinda reminds me of something that Aeria Games used to do).

ElBuenDavs.3689:

I doubt we will ever see race change. Here is the reason whys (at least, from what I see)

1. The first quarter or so of the story is based on what race you chose. On later chapters, some NPCs are race lock. So in order to have race change: are you willing to have your PS restarted? Will you want it to simply be deleted and act as if nothing happened? They will also have to make you re-do the story customization from the character creator.

More like half the story – chapters 1, 2, 3, and 5 are rooted in your race (of the five lesser races to assist, each race gets three choices).

As for what Aidan says about “norn could always go into sylvari home instance”? The thing is, your character’s racial home instance is customized by their personal story. NPCs get added, some buildings even change (humans who clear chapter 1 know what I’m talking about), all based on your story.

The choice of race carries many gameplay AND story ramifications. From racial armor and skills, to your storyline and the growth of your home instance. It is as core to your experience as your class is. In comparison, gender is a completely cosmetic change. No skills are gained or lost, nothing happens to your story or your home instance, and there is no chance in what armors you are/aren’t allowed to wear (only how they look on you).

Race change: unequip gear from char>log out to char select>delete char>make new different race>use tomes (or level up)>equip gear… done

The thing with races here is that they each have their own unique stories to them on the first 30 levels. Imagine how wrong it would be to have a human having to save his Flame Legion charr father. >.>

One of the biggest obstacles to just deleting characters is all the crafting recipes your toon may have accumulated.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Akikaze.1307:

I would assume the problem lies to the racial locking of specific features to that character. This would include your bounded racial elite/utility skills, home instance, culture armour and personal story. These things will inevitably bug the transition when shifting a character from one race to another. To avoid such incidents would mean the resetting of armour remodels, soulbound armour, entire personal story progression, and/or geodata location bounds.

Other games may allow the transition between races simply because they have less of racial bound features. Changing appearance is usually the easiest part of the race change transition.

-Racial skills would simply be ‘forgotten’ in the process
-Home instance has no bearing on race (a norn can use a sylvari home district, etc)
-Unequip armor as a requirement for item/service use
-Personal story is not an issue if item/service is restricted to use only if no PS completion, or not currently in a race specific chapter of the personal story (final PS mission for example)

It’s more an issue of the processes behind it.

Actually for PS it’s the opposite. They could allow race change only after you finished the PS first.

Or you could decide which race you want to play upon character creation and then play it.

Still Waiting For a Thread Merge Here.

Whilst I’m waiting, I’ll point you all towards a post I found by Astral Projections made a couple of months ago. Astral has some excellent evidence that suggests that Race change will never be a thing (posts by devs). Check the links out, and then reroll your character or make a new one instead of waiting for something that probably won’t happen.

Astral Projections.7320:

ANet so far has said no.

Race changes:
1) I am afraid that the team does contemplate different possibilities and new features for the future but this one is not among those. Source
2) 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. Source
3) Thanks for asking. To change the race in the Gem store will not be an option in Guild Wars 2. Source

Conclusion:

Race change will not be in the game. ArenaNet does not want to have it in their game.
(This makes all the technical difficulties irrelevant.)

Crimson Clouds.4853:

Still Waiting For a Thread Merge Here.

So, i’m not the only one having deja vu, here. Especially since I’m pretty sure I posted some of the same points I made here in the other thread.

ok though I somewhat agree with the rational to change races at times (I wish my human ele was Sylvari (I just didn’t want to be a plant when I first started playing) BUT it forced me to buy a character slot and start a new ele..

it helped them to make a little money for development of the game