Would you have chosen a starting area where you could join the Empire?

[Lyth]

I think even from a Legacy player standpoint it simply wouldn't make sense. You'd have to retcon a lot of plot elements to make it work out the way that you wanted.

I think factions only really are worthwhile if they are so diverse that you can't ever build trenches around them. That's one of the reasons why it's so good that the story is finally moving away from Amaurot. The world's a big place, and there are definitely more factions out there than 'them and us'.

[MikkoAkure]

Maybe it's because I never played WoW beyond a day on the free trial, but I never got a sense of creating "factions" from this idea, just an alternate start that would take place at the same time as the starts of the other city-states and eventually sync up with them and force you to choose one of the existing grand companies as normal. I remembered from my brief time in the free trial that the pandas started on their own separate from everyone else but still had to choose a faction once their starter zone was done.

It was only after my initial reply that I remembered the trouble of the class guilds in ARR and that's what determines where new players start. A new player starting in say Garlemald as an artificer would lose out on the hunt log mobs native to Vylbrand in the early levels as well as the first few class quests not to mention access to the market board.

[Cleretic]

Maybe it's because I never played WoW beyond a day on the free trial, but I never got a sense of creating "factions" from this idea, just an alternate start that would take place at the same time as the starts of the other city-states and eventually sync up with them and force you to choose one of the existing grand companies as normal. I remembered from my brief time in the free trial that the pandas started on their own separate from everyone else but still had to choose a faction once their starter zone was done.

It was only after my initial reply that I remembered the trouble of the class guilds in ARR and that's what determines where new players start. A new player starting in say Garlemald as an artificer would lose out on the hunt log mobs native to Vylbrand in the early levels as well as the first few class quests not to mention access to the market board.

I've sort of assumed that people want a whole faction thing going, or at least something much more significant than 'spend your first twelve levels here'. Partly because the comparisons people keep pulling up are more factional (Star Wars, WoW), and partly because I bet the people who immediately go 'oh yeah I wanna be born in the Garlean Empire' want that to be a reasonably large part of their story, moreso than the fact my character happens to be from Ul'dah and that occasionally I get to mention that in conversation.

There's also sort of a practical angle to it. The required work for adding a whole fourth starting city would be kinda severe; from a game dev perspective they'd probably want to big it up both to make the problems you bring up easier to handle, and to make it worth doing in the first place. If you're making a whole new starting zone, you might as well make the most of the result, right?

[SentioftheHoukai]

Maybe I'm reading too much into this but this sounds a lot like you're superimposing IRL politics onto a video game.

Buddy, you're talking to Cleretic. They superimpose IRL politicking onto FFXIV all the time and use it promote logic like "If you like to roleplay the Darth Vader archetype in a video game you must be a bigoted genocide apologist IRL as well!"
It won't end well, even if all you'll lose is a little face and a few minutes of your time.

Possibility A: Garlemald is made playable while also being explicitly villainous; basically, we get 'a bad guy faction'. I can't speak to Star Wars Galaxies, but I think the problems here are more akin to what you saw from some eras of World of Warcraft, and what I saw back in The Day on City of Heroes/Villains; people generally don't enjoy playing the bad guy, but that hits weird problems when the writers either listen to that and soften them, or make them the bad guy anyway. People have very different tolerances for how evil they want 'a playable bad guy' to be (I remember that two of City of Villains' least popular story arcs were because they were too heroic and too evil, respectively), and it's really hard to walk that tightrope. Again, for the most part people don't want to play that sort of character in full, and the people who do... well, look to the post below yours for why I generally worry about those people and don't much enjoy sharing a game with them.

Naturally you decide to nearly immediately prove my point. Maybe make it clearer that you speak for yourself and your perspective alone when airing what you think of "how many people legitimately enjoy playing the villain". I bolded and italicized the points I disagreed with in particular so you'd know what I was disputing. SWTOR has faction-based roleplaying and an evil empire that you can fully be a part of, with the ability to be goody goody lord of evil (somehow) or literally Darth Vader's long lost cousin. You literally get a separate ruler title based on your morality. I'm rather tired of the passive aggressive guilt by association accusations some of those on this forum seem so fond of. Not every topic that crops up here that offends you or you simply disagree with is an "anti-Venat", "anti-Scion", or even "anti-good guy" theorem thinly veiled in a disguise as innocuous. Nor is any of it necessarily political or secretly a ploy by those dastardly evil IRL hate mongers that wanna safely act out their homicidal tendencies in your MMO. Is it truly not possible that maybe, just maybe some people out there enjoy roleplaying as a true bad guy every now and then and aren't secretly Emet-Selch veiled in prettier clothes?

[Zero-ELEC]

Maybe I'm reading too much into this but this sounds a lot like you're superimposing IRL politics onto a video game. It would be fine. Star Wars Galaxies let you join the Galactic Empire (a power notorious for mass genocide, eugenics, enslavement, and egregious mistreatment of all non-human races.) Roleplay servers tapped into these elements quite frequently and players got along just fine. Because it was a video game.

What's so bad about wanting to play (or roleplay as) the "bad guys?" It's fun and a refreshing change of pace from the sterile perfectly goodie two-shoes hero arcs. Or hell, it would be interesting playing AS the WoL hero despite being a believer in Garlemald. It would serve to humanize an otherwise very one dimensional faction. I find it hard to believe you'd have never played this game just because it was an option available to people.

I mean, to be fair, there's some real criticism that can be levied against the Star Wars franchise as a whole about the fetishisation of the fascist aesthetic, especially in later works more divorced from the original trilogy that emphasise "choose your side" and "light side vs. dark" as cool aesthetic choices in like parks and stuff; "come take photos with the first order stormtroopers as they goose step through the city street in a show of power" is... weird optics, at the very least.

Naturally you decide to nearly immediately prove my point. Maybe make it clearer that you speak for yourself and your perspective alone when airing what you think of "how many people legitimately enjoy playing the villain". I bolded and italicized the points I disagreed with in particular so you'd know what I was disputing. SWTOR has faction-based roleplaying and an evil empire that you can fully be a part of, with the ability to be goody goody lord of evil (somehow) or literally Darth Vader's long lost cousin. You literally get a separate ruler title based on your morality. I'm rather tired of the passive aggressive guilt by association accusations some of those on this forum seem so fond of. Not every topic that crops up here that offends you or you simply disagree with is an "anti-Venat", "anti-Scion", or even "anti-good guy" theorem thinly veiled in a disguise as innocuous. Nor is any of it necessarily political or secretly a ploy by those dastardly evil IRL hate mongers that wanna safely act out their homicidal tendencies in your MMO. Is it truly not possible that maybe, just maybe some people out there enjoy roleplaying as a true bad guy every now and then and aren't secretly Emet-Selch veiled in prettier clothes?

Friend, they are literally talking about a post calling for genocide of a (fictional) category of people.

[Theodric]

One of the kindest individuals I ever met back in World of Warcraft role-played an undead cannibal who stitched corpses together into monstrosities and led campaigns that allowed interested players to fight against her creations.

What people like and enjoy in a fictional setting is not equal to what they like and support happening in reality. It's make believe. It isn't real.

[Zero-ELEC]

I think there's a fair difference between a community member that served a vital role in their roleplaying community as foil while also coming up with imaginative ways to fulfil that chosen role and a post that calls (ironic or not) for the genocide of fictional peoples.

I completely understand the separation of fiction and reality. I also understand that the media we consume and the communities we are parts of shape our beliefs and the beliefs of others as much as anything else, and the importance of critically analysing media and how it deals with heavier topics.

I am also painfully aware that there are people that take roleplaying as empires in games real serious. In, like, an unhealthy way. And how easy it is for people to take satire as played straight, especially when things are muddied with multiple cooks in the kitchen and the varying degrees of critical engagement from said cooks.

[Cleretic]

Naturally you decide to nearly immediately prove my point. Maybe make it clearer that you speak for yourself and your perspective alone when airing what you think of "how many people legitimately enjoy playing the villain". I bolded and italicized the points I disagreed with in particular so you'd know what I was disputing. SWTOR has faction-based roleplaying and an evil empire that you can fully be a part of, with the ability to be goody goody lord of evil (somehow) or literally Darth Vader's long lost cousin. You literally get a separate ruler title based on your morality. I'm rather tired of the passive aggressive guilt by association accusations some of those on this forum seem so fond of. Not every topic that crops up here that offends you or you simply disagree with is an "anti-Venat", "anti-Scion", or even "anti-good guy" theorem thinly veiled in a disguise as innocuous. Nor is any of it necessarily political or secretly a ploy by those dastardly evil IRL hate mongers that wanna safely act out their homicidal tendencies in your MMO. Is it truly not possible that maybe, just maybe some people out there enjoy roleplaying as a true bad guy every now and then and aren't secretly Emet-Selch veiled in prettier clothes?

My constant claim with this whole thing is that I don't want to play a factional game, because I have had bad experiences with them. If you want to play one, go ahead, I hear SWTOR is quite good for playing an evil empire you can fully be a part of. But I don't want to play that game, which is why I don't, and am instead playing this game, which isn't that.

And for what it's worth (which is very little), I mained a villain in City of Heroes and the Illuminati in The Secret World. If given the choice in an MMO I often have played the 'bad guy', I've gotten tired of the dynamic from personal experience. I don't think I'd have ever played a Garlean even in the stage of my life when I did like that angle, though; 'member of totalitarian supremacist empire' just isn't a kind of villain I enjoy playing.

[Jagick]

*Big ol' snip so my post box/reply thing isn't unnecessarily long!*

First of all, nice to see a fellow CoX player!

Anyway, from a mechanics perspective as FFXIV now, I definitely get it! It would be a massive headache and the game itself would need a massive overhaul / redevelopment entirely. But I wouldn't be opposed to a Garlemald start having been an option. The introduction to ARR is somewhat different depending on the city you start in anyhow and it could have gone from there I suppose. From an RP perspective though, I absolutely never take what a person's character does or what they enjoy RPing and impose that onto them as a person. My main character for instance is an absolute kupo of a bandit that regularly steals from and victimizes innocent folk. Another character of mine is a blatantly racist (especially towards Au'ra) and very aggressive Ishgardian inquisitor, a fundamentalist who wants to return to how Ishgard was before the "heretics" got their way who's very set in his ways and believes in instant "justice" by way of flintlock pistol.

Despite these characters certainly being on the darker end of the spectrum, it says nothing about me as a person. I'm a complete softy IRL and try to be kind to an actual fault. These sorts of things writing concepts a person wants to tap into should never be used to judge a person as first glance and IC actions should never be taken OOC. It's an extremely unhealthy mindset. Last year there was a massive thread in which an OP actually posed a somewhat similar question to this thread. They asked about playing a die-hard Pro-Garlean character and the amount of venom and rudeness this person suffered just for daring to ask about playing such a character was insane. People were treating them like a monster just for even wanting to have such a character and quite frankly anyone who can't separate IC from OOC has no business role-playing in general.

It is one thing to be uncomfortable with certain concepts and to prefer not to interact with it, that's perfectly fine and everyone is entitled to play as they're most comfortable! It's another to begin questioning, hating, or avoiding a person and taking it personally because of what they want to play. That post below me talking about genociding beastmen? I do not immediately see a terrible person, an extremist wanting to act out a fantasy. I am not concerned about them at all. They want to roleplay a particularly dark concept and there is nothing wrong with that any more than a person who enjoys playing Grand Theft Auto or playing as Principality of Zeon (literal space nazis) in the old PS2 Gundam games.

In any case, I think it would be cool if we could join the Empire but it will never happen as the game is now, nor should it without the necessary rework to accompany it. But if it did I don't see a problem with it, nor do I think we should actively fight against it being an option.

[Jaquan]

I don't think it would really be feasible to add more starting zones without some seriously major reworks of the early ARR plot. Even if we go "easy route" and have our character defect there are still issues that need to be addressed. Someone already posted it but basically first 20 levels serve as the vehicle that allows Scions to scout are character and it's specifically mentioned that Y'shtola, Thancred and Papalymo/Yda duo were there specifically to scout for potential talents among adventurers. Since there's no Scions presence in Garlemaid that's kinda impossible for them to scout our would be defector. We're also brought up to the attention of our city state leader through resolving a relatively minor but important enough issue which results in us becoming our city state ambassador, which in turn introduces us to all three of them. Again something hard to achieve if we spend this time in Garlemaid/Ishgard/Doma/Whetever. And that's just from story perspective. Balancing all of this so that whatever you chose you don't get "inferior" experience is another thing...