I have a tendency to create characters over and over, as well. However, I do not feel this is ADD or OCD and by saying that, you detract from your argument and demonize your own post. Everyone has things they are passionate and perfectionist about. I was in school for illustration and character design for animation and games, so this is simply what I like to do. I would spend up to 4 hours working on the design of a character in City of Heroes because it was fun. I especially liked the randomize button. Sometimes the random characters would give me a jump-start on a whole character idea. Me and my husband joked that we would pay the monthly fee just to play with the character designer program — which, by the way, never kicked you off if you were taking too long. >_<
Let me reiterate that. I get really POd at GW2’s character creation time limit. What the heck is that thing for anyway? Please stop shoving me out of character creation just because I’m trying to decide what colors would look good on the newbie armor! I feel insulted by the game kicking me off simply because I’m taking a long time fine tuning everything and making sure I didn’t miss any of the options, going back through them all three or four times, cause if I change the face, then everything else could be out of proportion and requires adjustment. Can’t the game detect that the mouse is still moving? At the very least, a pop-up window asking if you are still working on your character and if there is no answer for like 15-30 seconds, then it boots you back to the character selection screen. That would be peachy, in fact.
And then to not know what freaking height my character is going to be, compared to other species and even their own species! There’s a vague scale between the shortest and tallest of your own species, but there’s no foot/inches/meters/centimeters. It’d be nice to see a size chart comparing your character to, say, the average human??? There’s no indication at all of how short or tall anyone is compared to each other. Drives me absolutely bonkers. I’ve seen new people make norns for the first time and after they see the few NPCs in the norn village that aren’t norn, they exclaim over map chat something to the effect of: “Holy crap, norns are TALL!” Not everyone knows that they are titan/giant type humanoids. I was warned by my husband before I made one, and I was like “Cool! But, where does it show that…?” Currently, I want to make a human who is really small for a woman (like myself), but if I slider her all the way down, is that shorter than myself? I don’t know!
And once I finally get everything how I want it — as far as I know until I get in the game and go “Well, crap!” at some minor thing that isn’t so minor to me — I have to recreate them. Now, let’s hope I remember what color I used for skin and hair and such, and deal with the timeouts all over again. Ugh.
And one more thing. Accessories. You can’t dye them and you can’t remove them, the former being more important to me. You get basic colors to choose from and bam, you’re stuck with those basic colors for the rest of the character’s life, trying to make sure you get armor dyes that match or complement your headband/hat/ribbon… etc.
So, yeah, an in-game editor would be awesome, along with the other things I mentioned.