I actually didn't know that my character would have this name / race forever. I created it during the xbox 360 beta fully expecting the thing to be deleted when it went live. I had stock piled all sorts of items that were expensive on the live servers at the time and leveled whm, red, blm and thf to 30+ (I can't remember the exact levels), gotten an airship pass and set my hp in jeuno and leveled a few crafts into the 30s as well which was no small feat in that environment.

So when I found out that I could keep the character data, I of course kept it despite the fact that it had been named something silly by my drunk friend. Knowing now that this character would spend the bulk of it's time on red mage and black mage for the first several years, I would have loved to have been able to change to a taru and name it something awesome like "Mrkillface" instead of the random group of letters my friend picked which were intended to spell out "Mister F--- you man" but instead made so little sense that everyone just assume I was Chinese.

I finally caught a break when my server merged with Cerberus and I was able to create a character on Cerb ahead of the transfer with my same name which forced a name change on this character. Apparently you can also get your name changed if you can get people to complain to the GM that it is offensive. My friend was forced to change his from "Mexicant" (A name he earned by being super lazy at work and wore with pride) to the more socially acceptable(?) "sixmillionpesoman".


So in short, not everyone treats character creation like it was planning for their kids college fund. If I had to guess, I would expect that most people didn't / don't plan on playing the same character for 10 years. They just end up doing it because they are too invested in that character to quit or make a new one. And for us, it's worth a few bucks to change things up.

OFF TOPIC: When they shut down the servers, people had a big party at the auction houses in all the towns and counted down. It was actually kinda cool.