Guild Wars 2

How can racial change be impossible?
Sure you have your personal story but restarting from lvl 1 to level up the same class you have done is just something that brings the game down. especially when all the other mmorpg games have it.

I could redo the whole personal story but not restart from level 1 is just such a let down. to loose all your gear and just simply be bound to that race when they all are so different in apperance just doesnt seem fair at all!

To choose the race from the start with no way of changing is so hard..

Surely there must be SOME way of changing the race. There is a reason pretty much all of the other mmorpg games have this and to me this just seems crazy..

Why don’t you choose a different race AND class?

I don’t think it’s a matter of “impossible” as it is “impossible with the current system in place.”

They’d have to change the character system to make it possible, and it sounds like they don’t find it worth the time and resource investment.

Because maybe you just want to change race and stay the same class?

@chemi It sucks thou..
might not be a big deal for most of the players.

it is super important for me atm…

Then create a new character, if that is so important, tomes of knowledge and EotM trains makes hitting lvl 80 really fast and ascended gear are acc bound, exotics are really easy to get anyway, and skins are also acc bound, so you lose virtually nothing recreating a new toon.

rawesome.9628:

@chemi It sucks thou..
might not be a big deal for most of the players.

it is super important for me atm…

There’s a lot of “super important” things for everyone. And everyone has something “super important.”

Much like RP concessions or instanced raids, I’m wagering people who want race changes represent a very, very small segment of the player base, and the revenue they would get from it (because let’s be perfectly honest, it WOULD be a gem store item), wouldn’t be worth it.

Either (1) the item would be reasonably priced, but wouldn’t garner enough purchases to make up for the time, money, and work hours spent to radically redesign the character creation and progression systems; or (2) have it so highly priced that few would purchase it, and instead grumble angrily that it costs too much.

Neither helps Arena.net, and one of them actively fosters even more ill will.

yeeah i guess.. i will stop whine about it and just get to work.. it’s just so boring..

@chemic there are ALOT of these posts about race change so i don’t think they’re a very, very small segment of the player base.

As i said there is a reason to have it in other games have it otherwise they would not have bothered to do it.

• I don’t think ArenaNet wants to offer an item that makes you reset the Personal Story.

• People who want to play as a different race are already rolling a new character to do so.

• A race change option will require more work (and potential bugs) than are probably worth the trouble. There is the afforementioned Personal Story, as well as cultural armor that is unusable by other races, and racial skills. It’s not just a cosmetic change, it requires a real overhaul of your character and progress.

Simply delete your character and start over. I think that’s the best solution to your problem.

how about if i hit 80 i get a lvl 80 scroll. this will let me delete my character and create a new one with the right class?

still a class change, but simple to implement

Belzebu.3912:

Then create a new character, if that is so important, tomes of knowledge and EotM trains makes hitting lvl 80 really fast and ascended gear are acc bound, exotics are really easy to get anyway, and skins are also acc bound, so you lose virtually nothing recreating a new toon.

World completion, soulbound equipment, trait and skill unlocks, and leveled crafting disciplines are “virtually nothing”?

darkace.8925:

World completion, soulbound equipment, trait and skill unlocks, and leveled crafting disciplines are “virtually nothing”?

• Levels: As people have suggested, EotM or champ trains will get you there quickly. I personally also have 60+ tomes of knowledge (from PvP, mostly, and living story rewards) and a level 20 scroll stacked up. Crafting is another option. A combination of all 4 would give you a level 80 in no time.
• World completion: Running to all the waypoints doesn’t take very long. Nobody forces you to get hearts, vistas and skill challenges on every single character; in fact, if you don’t, that won’t impact the gameplay at all.
• Soulbound equipment: ANet has taken several steps to make this step easier for players – a number of item types (such as legendaries, unlimited gathering tools) have retroactively become account bound. Skins as well, which means that you will be able to re-use your cultural armor looks you purchased for another character.
• Trait and skill unlocks: yes, that really is virtually nothing. You should have loads of skill points in your bank from regular play, and the new trait unlocks are a) very few, b) mostly insignificant and c) easy to get.
• Crafting: It doesn’t matter which one of your characters has the crafting disciplines, as anything you craft will be account bound until you use it on a character. You can easily park your old character in Rata Sum, halfway between the personal bank and the crafting station, and craft items for your new character.

The only thing I can think of that would suck would be if you had purchased character-bound additional bag slots, but really who does that? And that’s a problem we ALL have, and has nothing to do with rerolling a character of the same class.

I don’t understand why some people level one character to 80 and then feel entitled to get free additional level 80 characters… in other games I played the characters couldn’t even share money or a bank. Don’t be so greedy, GW2 already makes it super duper easy.

I think they should just implement a reincarnation system like Disgaea.

Seven Star Stalker.1740:

I think they should just implement a reincarnation system like Disgaea.

Or children to carry on your legacy.

I mean would it be fun for say an Asuran Engineer to raise a Charr Warrior “pet” from cub to adult and then when the Engineer “die” (probably because they where sleeping next to each other and the Charr rolled over the Asura in his sleep and suffocated him), the Warrior take over everything except racial gear which become account bound/bind on equip. Regular exotic gear just become bind on equip.

Voila, now your Asuran Engineer is a Charr Warrior. And he even got the same story as he remembers everything his parent told him of his adventures.

Lol.

At the moment I don’t think it’s that high on the priority list, but I’d imagine it certainly would be should they introduce a new race. They’d stand to gain way more from it in that instance.

The race change kit can be a insane Asuran scientist. He has discovered how to transfer souls from one body to another with his Soul Transmutation system.

He has a selection of NPCs who have agreed, for the small sum of 1000 gems, to undergo this Soul Transmutation. After looking them over, you select the NPC of your choice, pay him, and the 2 of you go into the Transmutation chambers. With a press of a button, the 2 souls exchange. The NPC with your old look goes through a portal and disappears. You leave with his appearance (and his generic armor appearance and weapons). (Or it could require both of you to strip and the gear is not changed).

This Transmutation is only allowed for characters who have either finished their personal story or have got it to the level where the stories merge together.

After that you can use a gem store kit to get the appearance you want.

Edit: it will still be a problem with cultural armor as people will remove it beforehand without transmutating it first and then realize it’s unwearable on another race. Perhaps it can be set up so that the game checks your personal inventory and bank to look for cultural armor and if found, change the appearance to a generic starting armor.

I am confident that it is possible, and that Anet would profit greatly by introducing the race-change service.

The common arguments seem to be:

But it interferes with the personal story! So reset the player’s story to level 1 of their new race. If we are being honest, the story is not very personal anyway.

What about the cultural armor? Just convert the player’s equipped cultural armor to a common armor skin which they have unlocked on their wardrobe (or one of the starter skins). The player would have already wardrobe-unlocked the purchased cultural skins, and would have received Emperor title credit. So there is no real investment loss and nothing to complain about.

“Well they could simply pay the same real money to unlock a new character slot/craft-level/gear the character up.” This becomes very expensive (though we haven’t established an agreeable price for a race change), and requires a lot of effort and time. Additionally the player would then need to take their new character through map completion, skill unlocks, etc. While this is often fun for many people (myself included), it is simply too much of an inconvenience for most people that they won’t bother. The player with $10 or $20 or whatever amount to spare, but without the patience to go through with this whole ordeal, would likely spend his money on a race change but not on the former process described.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a way to change race implemented. I am now at the point where I don’t want one for myself anymore but it would’ve saved me a lot of time if I could’ve had one to use.

Personally, I don’t want to see a race change feature implemented. I don’t see this as not being done because it’s ‘impossible’ either. More likely it would take a significant chunk of work, would complicate an already complex code base further (opening the door to so many more bugs), may require overhauls to existing systems, and would go back on yet another thing they said they didn’t want to do before launch.

Before launch the devs stated that they wouldn’t make that type of item because they wanted people to think about their race/class combos, and they wanted them to have some meaning. Obviously part of that started with having separate racial stories, and I’d love to see them build upon that as the game progresses. Make it meaningful to be a Charr or a Sylvari or an Asura (something I went into more in depth a different thread a while back). Don’t trivialize it further by allowing people to race swap willy nilly. After that it really is just one slippery step to allowing us to change class willy nilly as well. At which point, there becomes no point to leveling alts. Just swap as needed. It completely trivializes the game as a whole.

darkace.8925:

Belzebu.3912:

Then create a new character, if that is so important, tomes of knowledge and EotM trains makes hitting lvl 80 really fast and ascended gear are acc bound, exotics are really easy to get anyway, and skins are also acc bound, so you lose virtually nothing recreating a new toon.

World completion, soulbound equipment, trait and skill unlocks, and leveled crafting disciplines are “virtually nothing”?

Yes, in my opinion it is.
I can’t think of a soulbound item that would be hard to get again, if needed at all.
Get the WPs again would be the only downside of make a new toon, and the skills … meh just a price to change your race, with a gem store item you would need to pay a good amount anyway.

So basically give players another way to be lazy? as if players don’t have enough to help them power through most content anyway?

I really think they haven’t done this yet because they screwed something up like they did with the old sigil system and it would need a lot of rework @codes to add race change. Personal story isn’t even a strong argument, could always change race and rework your personal story through some comic like Mass Effect did with Genesis.

Anyway OP, I’m afraid you will have to just suck it up like I did in the past and level another toon if you really want it.
If you haven’t leveled a toon in a while remember that now you must unlock traits doing whatever or really rackup on those skillspoints and buy everything.

Just because you can sum up a solution in a few words (“just reset personal story” or “just remove old racial skills & cultural armor”), that does not mean it will be a simple matter for ArenaNet to implement in the actual game. GW2 was not created with the ability to change race factored in. There is no interface for it, and no built-in way to seek out every single line of code that references your race and then amend it accordingly. There is no method to refund skills in any way, let alone find just the racial skills and delete/replace them. There is no current way to revoke access to your Order’s special vendor after the fact, and no process by which a character wearing cultural armor can have it auto-removed before switching to another race. There is no tag already in the game that will adjust your character’s gear size/proportions, animations, and voice clips, after a “simple” race change.

It’s not impossible to develop a way to change character race, but it is a big job. Do not make the mistake of thinking it will just take a couple clicks and an extra line of code saying “make race change okay.”

Marauding Scum.6728:

Personal story isn’t even a strong argument, could always change race and rework your personal story through some comic like Mass Effect did with Genesis.

So it will be even more work to develop a special interface for that feature. But regardless, I don’t think ArenaNet wants to treat the Personal Story as something to be so easily thrown out. They want players to complete it. And they want players to roll a new character, maybe buy a new character slot, and spend time playing the game, if they want a new race. Everyone’s already doing that anyway, have been since launch. There is nothing in it for ArenaNet to develop this feature.