[Suggestion] Paid Race Change Program.

I personally find no benefit to race change in a game where our characters are our avatars especially when you invest time into them (sometimes years or more)... I would be interested in maybe alternate colors for hair that you can change like via new linkshell color or customizing chat colors and haircuts that you don't get to pick from, from the start. Perhaps a quest that allows me to change the size of your character and quests that give you different hairstyles.

I won't be quiet because SE needs to know the opinions of people who are neutral or against such topics, otherwise they would think every idea is a great idea because everyone in the community (who were present and speaking) voiced positive comments thus showing a very biased opinion which is not good for any gaming community.

The arguements about "Reality" are moot. If SE wishes it they can and will make it happen regardless what the player base thinks about how they execute it.

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Originally Posted by Stompa

Additionally, ten paragraphs in a post, is not difficult reading, unless your normal books are called things like "Henry the happy pig finds a balloon."

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It wasn't difficult in the sense that I couldn't comprehend the words and or feelings that you were attempting to convey. It was difficult because I could understand and there are huge gaps in your logic. You're whole argument that race changes would break some weird reality that you have created in your head makes no sense.

People / things that should not even exist do things like leveling up (WTF is that in reality?), live, die, get resurrected, get possessed by gods, live in alternate realities, go from being immortal blue mages to mystical ninjas to pirates all in the blink of an eye by talking to fat little happy slaves that they keep in their one bedroom magical warpy houses (Which have no bathrooms or showers ewwww...). Reality went out the window a long time ago.

Anyone who has played this game knows that. Anyone who can read above a "Henry the happy pig finds a balloon." level could discern that your entire argument was wrong from the get go and skip the entire post.

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Originally Posted by Stompa

If its a mob you kill then it is an NM not an NPC. Also the "living breathing" part made me laugh, coz mobs and NM's are also living and breathing.

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Some are undead, some story characters are undead or immortal, this character was not, he was a story character, we killed him, and boom, dead, didn't come back. I picked him because he is a NPC who does not come back except in a ghost like form for another battle, but not a normal living form like we do. The point of that which seems to go over your head, is that story characters can die, and they do not return like we do, at best they become ghosts, or something similar, this is because for the sake of gameplay, they bent the rules. We are allowed to come back because we are players, thus, a distinction between a player and a NPC is formed, where the two follow a different set of rules, we have the ability to do that which they can not, changing race/gender is another option we could have.

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Well obviously, you are really stretching this out. You are either not reading my posts or you don't understand the difference between altering the basic rules of an RPG, and the fundamental rules of all videogames which is that if you die you can play again, in FFXI is called KO and because it is a progressive evolving online world (as opposed to a platformer) you don't die and go to level 1 again, you just KO. That is a "GAME DEVICE" it has nothing to do with the actual roleplaying world itself, including races.

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Yes, its a game device to allow players to change their race/gender too. If people roleplaying with you have as much a problem with it, they wont do it either. I doubt you are going to see some guy running around who is a Hume one day, Galka the next, and then a week later hes an Elvaan, and in the end your going to be broken because, oh no, 1 random guy changed it multiple times! Its something you would not really notice unless its people you know probably, would not effect your roleplaying at all unless you specifically let it, or they let it.

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Re; powerful magic can change your genetic race DNA. No it cannot. Magic ingame is healing, nuking, supporting, and transportation magic such as warp and teleport rely on the inherent power of crystals in the case of telepoints and homepoint crystals, and the power of your moghouse security-option in the case of door-homepointing. Again you are completely ignoring what I have said before.

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As I said, there are forbidden magics, these magics can do many different things I am sure, spells like this often have a terrible cost for their use, or do something horrible. Now, if this spell took the life of the user, boom, lore preserved. Its a forbidden spell, we find someone willing to cast it, the penalty for it is that no normal person can survive it, we are special because of how strong we have become on top of how much we have done, we can survive it. The strain such a spell would have on our body prevents its use for a long time, a month in real life, but it lets us do such a thing. I have said this same kind of thing again and again, you apparently are the one who ignored me. You are placing limits on magic based only on what we see, why is it impossible for there to be magic we do not see that exists all the same? Oh wait, its not, that's how new spells come out, they always existed in lore, we just could not access them, and this is just the same.

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IF Vanadiel had magic spells that could change your racial origins, then A) NPC's such as Star Sybil could turn into a galka, this would devalue her current existence as the person she is. I personally like the game NPC's the way they are, and the permanence of their existance over many years, this would be devalued if the world had power to transform into other races overnight and entirely change the NPC in question. And more importantly, B) orcs goblins etc. could change to humes etc., travel to Jeuno and kill all the citizens there without having to storm the city first. That would COMPLETELY kill the WOTG storyline instantly, as the story revolves around this whole defending all the cities from beastmen. If beastmen could change race magically, WOTG story would cease to exist, everyone in your home nation would be dead because armies of Orcs disguised as Elvaans etc. would just lay waste to everything from the inside, all NPC citizens in the whole of Vanadiel would live in constant terror because the person standing next to them could be a Troll who changed into a taru magically. As you know, beastmen have very powerful magic already, so in your hypothesis they would also have the change race magic too.

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Yes, at the cost of every single one of these people mentioned, dying in the process. Maybe you forgot that whole death penalty unless your strong enough thing that I added in? Yeah... so Star Sybil, would be dead, a dead Galka, but still, dead, shes not stupid enough to just die like that for no reason she knows the magic would kill her in the first place. Goblins, Orcs, Quadavs, Yagudos, and all of the other Beastmen, they are not strong enough. The only ones in that list which meet my original requirement, being level 99, are the newest of the Beastmen, that's it. Some Beastmen in the past might be that high too, not 100% sure, but we have so many other special things about us which could be made into part of why we can do it as well. Like I said before, we killed gods, we went to Provenance, we went to the lost city of Al'Taieu, we traveled to multiple other dimensions and planes of existence, I think its safe to say our bodies could have built a resistance to some special kinds of magic. In the end this all would give reasons as to why we can go through this change. Others can not because it would cost them their life, but we have been through so much, we can withstand such a thing every so often if we choose.

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Then the RPG argument I put forward, which you have completely avoided answering. I have good friends in game who are Elvaan (and very happy with their ears etc.) and don't want to change race, but if I logged in tomorrow and they were taru, it would actually be very strange to me, as a role-player, that my Elvaan friend I partied with for 9 years is now a taru. Especially as they were a patriotic Sandorian knight (traditionally Elvaan), who had played the cultural aspect of that race/city for years in countless quests etc.

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So your afraid someone who roleplays like you do is going to just instantly change their race for the hell of it, breaking the exact same feel that you yourself are afraid of being broken? Do you understand how little sense that makes? If they were going to do that, maybe its not such a big issue, after all, the people around you who are similar to you in the aspect of roleplaying apparently are fine with it. In the end, I have no idea why someone would change their race if they are that kind of person, really, no idea, but whatever.

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Next is just repeating the fact that when you create a character (in Windurst) you are given a boot-up scene in which it says "and now a new star of hope is born into this world, etc." and you get your intro welcoming CS from an NPC. This signifies the beginning of that character's adventures. And it is the race/gender you begin with, which is the fundamental start of your individual storyline. Really you can not change the 'birth' stage of your character without bypassing every single RPG element in the game. Your suggestion would change FFxi from a realistic and immersive RPG world, into a sort of cartoon arcade game, where anybody can morph races with a few $ and totally ignore the entire storyline of your rpg character from stage 1 onwards.

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Except that startup CS you are talking about I believe is the same one you get if you change nations, and the fact that I gave a story reason why this would be allowed, and the fact that I never asked to go back to the birth stage of my character, and the fact there is apparently magic which for a minor fee of gil, will make every story related NPC in the world which is related to a story mission in the 3 main cities forget my existence while reviving people from the dead, all for the sake of letting me go back through the story again for a different nation. Yes, you are completely correct. By the way, that super magic, costs a minor fee of gil, and completely changes the world, I guess they should take that out too, since you choose your home nation when you start the game, and if you really~ wanted to change it, you would have known when you started playing, right?

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Fundamentally it is you personally who made a big mistake if you built 1,500 or more levels and a REM on a character that you actually hate the race of. SE did not make that mistake for you, and neither did the other players like me who you called an "idiot" and "retard" earlier in this thread just because I love Vanadiel the way it is with its progressive rpg storyline system. We didn't make that mistake for you, but you are blaming SE for your mistake and how you can't undo what is a very easy-to-avoid mistake, and you call other players idiots because they like the way the game already operates.

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As I keep saying, you will not always know you want to change something in the first few days, weeks, or even a month. Originally I did not care what I was, I picked to main RDM, which was the 'everything' job, so I picked Hume, the perfect middle. If I had a choice now, when I see all of the differences in stats, Elvaan being Stronger with more MND, Galka with more HP, and so on, I might change, if I knew the stats mattered very little, I might have picked something else, for more of a fun race, than a strategic race. This goes on forever, not everyone picks for roleplaying, and you can not expect everyone to know these things when they first start. As for not addressing certain things in someones argument. I would like you to answer my question about the person wanting to marry their partner, just because one is a Mithra and the other a Female Hume, they are screwed, which means either Altana has to change her views on Gay marriage, or we need race/gender change to fix that issue, that, or you ask 2 people who want to marry to go out and make brand new characters, or at least one of them, just so they can marry in this game.

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The other reason SE might feel reluctant to change this core game rule, aside from the sabotaging of the realistic rpg atmosphere that they carefully created, is that 1000s of players over the years have deleted chars(some with HQ gear) to begin a new character of a different race. To suddenly alter the core game rules would be a huge slap in the face for people who have already done the extra work of building a new character.

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They added new weapons which had double the DMG rating and crushed the damage of every other weapon in the game by far, even though a great deal of players had spent months and years making RME weapons. They originally had no plans to enhance these weapons, but rather, let us learn the WS from them and that was it. I think they are ok with slapping people in the face no matter the work the person puts in, that argument, not a very good one, sorry.

#1) Everyone knows that Henry was a hippo, not a pig.

#2) In a magical world of time-travel, alternate realities, Gods and so-forth; the only argument for or against being able to change race is that the balance is completely wrong now, and everyone that's not a Galka feels cheated.

When I gear up my SMN and stand next to a Galka SMN, only to see that he has 100 MP less than me, but 500 HP more, it's clear to see the imbalance. The minuscule amount of extra MP gained by other jobs does nothing to compensate the massive extra HP gained by a Galka.

Having the best WHM in the world means nothing if you don't have enough HP to avoid getting 1-shotted. Therefore, Galka > all. And we'd all like to join the elite club, tyvm.

pfft I prefer to be a mana tank IDK about you..... and Being taru has its benifits to subbing mage jobs compared to galkas doing it.... Drg for example.... I have 400mp as a taru drg/whm... I'd like to see a galka have that much.

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Originally Posted by Umichi

pfft I prefer to be a mana tank IDK about you..... and Being taru has its benifits to subbing mage jobs compared to galkas doing it.... Drg for example.... I have 400mp as a taru drg/whm... I'd like to see a galka have that much.

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As a taru drg myself, I can honestly say that when I go drg/rdm, I only need MP for the initial buffing. After that I only need enough MP for those occasional bar-spells, and to keep re-casting refresh. About 60 MP total should do it after you're buffed.

Stompa, if you have to go through Olympic-level mental gymnastics to justify your case then I don't think you have much of one. You don't like the idea of race or appearance changes which is fine, but the realism angle just isn't going to fly. I think people have already given you plenty of examples of FFXI's copious amounts of completely unrealistic things.

The "omg if we can change race NPCs can change too" idea is also rather weak. What about the ability to change jobs? That already exists, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen an NPC do it. That ability could certainly bork up a few storylines, or at least make things confusing. Imagine if Zeid was suddenly a WHM yet still started you off on the DRK job. Imagine if Lilisette showed up as anything other than DNC. Changing her race would screw up her storyline irreparably, but so too would changing her job.

Oh, but wait they're NPCs. They don't get a say in what they show up as. They are what SE makes them

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Originally Posted by Babekeke

#1) Everyone knows that Henry was a hippo, not a pig.

#2) In a magical world of time-travel, alternate realities, Gods and so-forth; the only argument for or against being able to change race is that the balance is completely wrong now, and everyone that's not a Galka feels cheated.

When I gear up my SMN and stand next to a Galka SMN, only to see that he has 100 MP less than me, but 500 HP more, it's clear to see the imbalance. The minuscule amount of extra MP gained by other jobs does nothing to compensate the massive extra HP gained by a Galka.

Having the best WHM in the world means nothing if you don't have enough HP to avoid getting 1-shotted. Therefore, Galka > all. And we'd all like to join the elite club, tyvm.

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Hmm. I saw a Taru with over 1,500 MP and HP in Adoulin, not Abyssea, although I do support your comment incredibly however I'm still trying to figure out how he did it because I did not see him wearing impossible to obtain gear. Was awhile back that caught my eye therefore I cannot give you precise details. Sorry if my statement is quite vague however knowing SE, they may have implemented certain gear to achieve this and most likely will ignore us based on "Go explore and figure it out" mentality.

As for 1 shot death, all jobs can cap 50% -PDT gear and have some DEF+VIT items plus boost/gain and protect/Shell with phalanx. Not to forget Stonekin with full enhance gear.

Earthcry Earring
Haven Hose
Shedir Seraweels
Siegel Sash
Stone Gorget
Stone Mufflers

There is also Def food..
Just my opinion though.

WHM would survive pretty well compare to most jobs.

Barspells, shell, Magavan pieces with merman, dark rings for MDT which can be further increased with Geomancer fend, bar carols or Rune knight abilities.

Also having Brachyura earring or shelter ring is a small detail meant for greater outcomes.

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Originally Posted by Stompa

> Time Travel : Without wanting to add spoilers, WOTG doesn't have time-travel, the maws are mirror images of a certain NM seen near the end of the story. It is his power that distorts time. Not the power of adventurers. See below for why gods such as that NM are realistic not fantasy.

>Gods : Earth has Gods too. People in Greece still worship the Ancient Greek gods. People in Scandinavia still worship their ancient gods. See also Native Americans, Mexicans, Amazons, Australian Abo's, and of course the mainstream Churches/Mosques etc. You might not believe in those gods, but other people on Earth do, ergo gods in Vanadiel is realism not fantasy, it mirrors Earth.

>Alternate realities ; many people on Earth claim to have experienced these on psychedelics or on hospital medications, under hypnosis, through dance and meditation. Ergo, realism not fantasy.

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Lol this was in the news yesterday .... http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/...universe-real/

What humans perceive as reality may be no more than an illusion.

And I'm still wondering when we are going to the learn the same Meteor Spell King Behemoth and other monsters cast, because the one my black mage learned is pathetic..