Guild Wars 2

Hi, Gaile, and other community members.

This request may at first appear far-fetched, but I’ve given it thought. Please, give it a read through. Thank you!  

So from the get-go I understand the complexity this entails with the personal story, so I have suggestions for how to handle it.

1. Changing races remain locked as a Gem Store purchase until players reach Chapter 8 – Victory or Death. This limitation would not be an account unlock, rather character unlocks. The reason for this is the personal story begins as a complex branching diagram of choices up until Chapter 8. As far as I know, once players reach Chapter 8 – Victory or Death, this becomes the same linear experience for all players. I thought by this point changing races would be feasible because this would not impede the final personal story episode.

2. As far as how to handle Chapters 1-7, they can remain locked entries much like Season 1 of the Living Story. While the wording may apply to the player character’s previous race, it only becomes a foot note going forward.

So in quick summary, the option to purchase racial changes:
1. Remain locked until a player’s character reaches Chapter 8. Huge incentive to do the content.
2. After changing races, Chapters 1-7 of the personal story will not change, and remain the original race’s progress.
3. Bonus: There is a 72-hour waiting period after changing races. (Inspired by WOW’s race changes)

Does this sound doable?

I doubt they’ll answer the question …again. It’s already been explained that the reason the change is programmatically complex has to do with the various “flags” set as you start, level, and run stories with your character. There are all sorts of effects these hidden elements have on the game and regardless of when you change race, there will be some that need to be disentangled. Even if this was restricted until the Personal Story was completed, this would be true — I can’t tell from dev quotes whether it would reduce the effort or not, but it wouldn’t put it at zero.

It’s definitely the most creative suggestion I’ve seen posted on the forums. I just doubt it will come close to making things simple enough to change this from being difficult to do poorly to straightforward to do well enough.

If there’s money in it it’s doable. I’d even consider paying for it and I’m cheap.

Good idea Korval

YarrCaptainJuan.7248:

If there’s money in it it’s doable. I’d even consider paying for it and I’m cheap.

Good idea Korval

There’s money in everything. The question is: what does it cost to make this available in the first place? I think we underestimate that cost substantially, because we can’t see the bits that make this difficult.

Why not just have the gemstore sell a level 80 boost with a map completion gizmo for vanilla Tyria (where using this gizmo disqualifies that char from getting a Gift of Exploration).

You’ll get a char of your desired race, level 80 and the vanilla map completely explored. (You’ll have to get any other maps on your own) without ANet having to muck around with your Hero Panel and all the bugs that can come from that.

I feel like the main issue has been mentioned, so I’ll quote is so that people can see it standing out:

It’s already been explained that the reason the change is programmatically complex has to do with the various “flags” set as you start, level, and run stories with your character.

They still use these flags, which can’t just be carried over to other characters. I heard that human characters of common birth make a comment about being imprisoned in the Bastion of the Penitent raid. No other race really spends a period imprisoned. And we don’t know if it’s a specific flag formed (HumanCommon=True) or something more simplistic (Story1Branch3). Either way, this could cause serious problems if we start mucking about in their structure.

I hate to say it, but either stick with the character(s) you already created if you want the birthday swag, or create a new one if you want certain flags raised. This shouldn’t be a horribly complex choice, either.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Good idea Korval

Thanks

YarrCaptainJuan.7248:

There’s money in everything. The question is: what does it cost to make this available in the first place? I think we underestimate that cost substantially, because we can’t see the bits that make this difficult.

If I had to venture a guess for how GW2’s Database is setup, they likely segmented different aspects of player’s character into several tables. So, for example, you have class, class_attributes, build_attributes, armor_race, personal_story_choices, inventory, currency and so forth. Most of the fields in these tables would likely be simple bit types (meaning true or false).

So it would not be impossible to believe the programmers created “Creation” methods (also known as functions) that turn these bits true based on the player’s choice. These same methods could be repurposed (the process of copying methods for a different albeit similar purpose) to handle Race Changing. So going from Norn to Human would only involve setting the Norn bits from true to false, and setting the Human bits from false to true. Yes, I understand this is basic, but the idea just implies cloning these methods to set the appropriate bits.

Hope that wasn’t too technical. I’m a professional web developer and programmer, so I looked at it purely from that perspective. Obviously, an MMO is a ton different than an e-commerce website, but the principle of both submitting, storing, and retrieving data from tables within a database is the same.

just resetting the personal story would be the easiest way.

Korval.3751:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Good idea Korval

Thanks

YarrCaptainJuan.7248:

There’s money in everything. The question is: what does it cost to make this available in the first place? I think we underestimate that cost substantially, because we can’t see the bits that make this difficult.

If I had to venture a guess for how GW2’s Database is setup, they likely segmented different aspects of player’s character into several tables. So, for example, you have class, class_attributes, build_attributes, armor_race, personal_story_choices, inventory, currency and so forth. Most of the fields in these tables would likely be simple bit types (meaning true or false).

So it would not be impossible to believe the programmers created “Creation” methods (also known as functions) that turn these bits true based on the player’s choice. These same methods could be repurposed (the process of copying methods for a different albeit similar purpose) to handle Race Changing. So going from Norn to Human would only involve setting the Norn bits from true to false, and setting the Human bits from false to true. Yes, I understand this is basic, but the idea just implies cloning these methods to set the appropriate bits.

Hope that wasn’t too technical. I’m a professional web developer and programmer, so I looked at it purely from that perspective. Obviously, an MMO is a ton different than an e-commerce website, but the principle of both submitting, storing, and retrieving data from tables within a database is the same.

I don’t mean to make light of your typo, but it’s an ironic example of how tricky stuff like this is: you attributed the quotes wrong. Capt Yuan wrote “good idea” and I wrote about how the cost of doing something like this is largely hidden.

Regarding the salient points in your reply, I’m sure you’re right about some of how the structured. But you’re missing that the devs have told us there are additional dependencies (perhaps a certain table isn’t created until Flag X is set and that table would have to be removed & replaced). And you’re also missing that they tried to do something similar, when they “simply” reordered some of the story instances and some people’s personal stories suffered as a result. The bugs took ages to track down.

So again, it’s not that this is impossible or even horribly difficult. It just requires a huge amount of attention to detail, there’s a known risk of error, and it’s tricky to account for all cases that are likely to show up when there’s a million people playing the game.

Since ANet’s resources are limited, should they choose to work on something risky like this, with limited benefits or other quality-of-life issues/features that folks want just as much, but that have fewer “moving parts” to get wrong?

Yes, yes as a web developer you think it should be relatively easy to make this happen because you know how all the bits work for a web page. This (the game) isn’t a web page.

Now I’m no web developer or programmer so feel free to criticize my lack of experience if you like, however as someone who has had to make instructional books outlining how to do a job for new hires I can see how this would be essentially impossible. Not based on actual ability to get it done but the sheer volume of changes that would be necessary. You refer to the table which has the selections for each race and think it should be easy to just go through and change bits….but imagine that they do this for you changing from human to norn…which story selections would it get replaced with instead of the “Street rat, no parents, Balthazar alignment”? It’s not as though there are equivalent paths in the Norn story. The easiest answer is to reset them and let the player choose again, because players would not want Anet to make those choices for them. Then all progress on the PS would have to be reset as they may make choices that impact how they arrive at “Victory or Death”.

If they are just resetting the PS then why go to so much trouble, just remake your character. But of course you don’t want to lose all those valuable items and progress that you made while getting to level 70 ish.

Seriously, just get over it and make a new character. Buy another slot or save all of the things you want to keep and delete the old one. This is the price you pay for having so many options with your character, how much it cost you is entirely up to you, as in what value you place on having to redo all of it.

After all, is it worth it to spend all of that time redoing everything to end up with a character you will actually enjoy playing? Only you can decide.

YarrCaptainJuan.7248:

If there’s money in it it’s doable.

The time and resources it would take to make it possible for your character to change race is enormous. You have no idea how much code would have to be reworked and added to make this work. You would have to create a whole new backstory for the character in restrospect once you change the race, which would affect dozens of database tables.

The money they would earn from it could never make up for the cost of resources this would require.

P.S. I’d rather see those resources put into more personalized content, more “personal story” so to speak, than into this. Besides, creating a new character isn’t that difficult, plus the money they make out of sold character slots is worth more than they would make from your idea. Also, furtunately, achievements are account-bound too, so a new char won’t ruin your overall game progress, either.

A possible mechanic I think could work to do this:

1- Copy Character Name, Proffesion, Level, Map Completion and other similar, not story-related elements. Save them.
2- Delete Character. This would imply to lose all soulbound and story originated stuff.
3- Create a New Character.
4- Give the new Character the saved elements.
5- Fill a “Quick Story” Form: you only select the choices each chapter gives you until the current level and it doesn’t give you any of the rewards you’ll originally get.
6- Release the new character for use.

I’m not saying this should be something. I’d rather see people bond with their characters thanks to a meaningful play though their story than change the character past on a whim. But IMO it CAN be done.

I’m 100% for an idea like this is… I’d love to change my race without losing soul bound items, birthday status, map completion, and bag slot purchases.

When I clicked on this thread I thought it was going to be about making Norn more distinguishable from humans….

Kormeg.2469:

When I clicked on this thread I thought it was going to be about making Norn more distinguishable from humans….

THIS. +100000000

Kormeg.2469:

When I clicked on this thread I thought it was going to be about making Norn more distinguishable from humans….

I’d also like that (and, as with the actual OP, I strongly suspect the costs far outweigh the potential benefits to both ANet and the community).