Just a thought from a returning player

I know this has probably been brought up a ton in the past but, seeing as how FFXI is 11 years old and for instance ive had my character since 2004 it would be nice if we could receive in the mail a bottle a fantasia like players in FFXIV have.

It could breathe at least a little breath of fresh air into people whom have grown bored with looking at the same toon all of this years....*mainly when they wish they picked the blonde one* and save for swapping the .dat file.

just a thought while I download the 28,368 update files....

Good idea. I just resubbed and am waiting for the update to complete. I would love to re-roll my main character whilst keeping levels etc. or even just change hairstyle. :)

Just changing the hairstyle would be marvelous, I support this, even if it was a pay to use system

Hairstyle changes make sense, you could even have an NPC hairdressing-shop where you go and get it, as a once per character / per year option.

I do not agree with what some people have said over the years about race-change options though. I feel that would harm the RPG integrity of the game, where you are a living person who was born a certain race and goes through life in the normal way after that. But hairstyle changes make sense 100%.

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Originally Posted by Stompa

I do not agree with what some people have said over the years about race-change options though. I feel that would harm the RPG integrity of the game, where you are a living person who was born a certain race and goes through life in the normal way after that.

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Well, so far as I understand Monstrosity is basically us removing our souls from our bodies and inhabiting monsters, if that's accurate then a race change option really wouldn't be that outlandish.

Its kinda weird that a 11 years old game game don't have those basic features yet, no new races as well.

I would also be fine with just changing my hair as others have suggested.....which is a service in FFXIV.......cant be that hard to place an npc in town that will do this

oh and another idea.....give me a search feature for my inventory ;_;......stop the endless where the heck did I put this searches

Hairstyles are locked to face in FFXI. You get two colors for each of the 8 faces. They could let you change a face, but as you don't have the variability of facial settings that you do in FFXIV, due to FFXI having to fit in 128 MB of RAM on PS2, and every one of the 16 face/color combinations for each race having a separate DAT file for every piece of head armor, they won't be adding different hairstyles. Having only 16 choices for face for each race and gender means they don't expcet people to change their mind often. I suppose they could do it, but new hairstyles aren't going to happen because of the limitations of the engine.

FFXIV puts gear over your character model, it doesn't replace body components, so facial details don't require thousands of DATs per armor piece because of the various face combinations. FFXI would have to be reprogrammed to work the same way, and they have shown refusal to reprogram the game for a newer console release, or even a newer DirectX standard.

If you changed gender or race your RSE set you got from the quests would become useless. I would be for the face hairstyle change npc. Oh yeah forgot about all of the event armor items would be unwearable if you changed genders too. Course it would then give you a reason to redo them.

Then add a RSE-swapper NPC. I bring this up every time someone says "but but but rse and stuff".

Actually, the dev. team has been discussing internally about a feature such as this. While we can't promise anything right now, and developers are concerned about preventing harassment or misuse by allowing this, we'll continue to carefully look into it.

The only sort of harassment I can think of that could come from this is if you also allowed people to change their names along with their race/gender. If that is the problem, force characters whose names have been changed keep the previous name as a 4th line in their search comments for a specified amount of time, for example 6 months.

If the dev team is discussing this on a moral scale, I assume it's possible to add system wise then. The only abuse factor I see is that someone can get married in FFXI (dunno who still does that) and change to same sex which is something SE specifically doesn't want. Don't want to start that downhill snowball and get this thread locked debating on the justification of such. If that is a concern, have them forfeit their rings. I like being hume myself, but I wouldn't want something so small to affect the whole community from being able to switch races/genders if they want. Monitize it and lock it out for a period of time like server swaps if they are concerned about constant changing. Not that I see the harm in it, but I can see the annoyance to some.

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Originally Posted by Stompa

Well its interesting, on Earth, witchcraft and shamanism have for thousands of years also had masters who would go to sleep and their soul would take control of animals. In witchcraft it was called 'borrowing'. They claimed to have so much affinity with the natural world, they could take over minds of birds and fly through the sky seeing the world from the birds points of view, all while their body is sleeping at home on the bed.
So that sounds more like your monstrosity there. Or beastmaster, taking control of a wild animal and making it attack far stronger mobs, which is suicidal and the pet only does it because you control its heart. So we already have affinity-magics in the game, in Bst and Mon.
But in none of those cases does your own physical body go through a permanent change. When you exit the Mon system you are the same person. You have only used some affinity magics.
It is not the same as you changing your own race, DNA, whole entire skeleton, brain size etc. which you would do if you permanently changed from galka to tarutaru overnight. Its totally absurd to me. And has nothing to do with affinity-magics, which millions of people on Earth have claimed to use since the dawn of time.

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Honestly, if we want to get literal to Earth, body augmentation, transplanting and sex change is a very real thing so it really isn't that absurd. Compared to witchcraft and shamanism, which isn't a commonly believed in and proven thing. A world filled in magic, filled with avatars, an elvaan who can shapeshift into a dragon which is her real form, gods, traveling in time and alternate dimensions. There's a way to get around anything. Visit one of the 5 mothercrystals of another race and the power of that crystal changes you permanently altering your form or tons of other story-related outs.

I Will be happy with the facial/hair change. :)

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Originally Posted by Hvinire

Actually, the dev. team has been discussing internally about a feature such as this. While we can't promise anything right now, and developers are concerned about preventing harassment or misuse by allowing this, we'll continue to carefully look into it.

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There's like 2 players in the entire game that would care about harassment cases enough to prevent this feature.
Honestly the abuse cases aren't even worth worrying about.

If harassment is an issue, it should be reported to GMs, they is what they are here for afterall, and I am sure the name of the character would not change anything to do with the account for which it is attached, meaning that if people are abusing it to harass others it should be easy enough to take note of, and punish those who are using it in such a way.

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Originally Posted by Hvinire

Actually, the dev. team has been discussing internally about a feature such as this. While we can't promise anything right now, and developers are concerned about preventing harassment or misuse by allowing this, we'll continue to carefully look into it.

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I can't think of any right, privilege, ability, tool, etc. that can't be abused or misused somehow. We still have those things. Just put a time and monetary limit on it and be prepared for the occasional GM call. I think the devs are making things more complicated than they really need to be.