So Long, and thanks for eating all my fish!! (Race Bonus thread)

[Elexia]

It does raise the point though: People seem hardpressed against racial bonuses yet almost every other MMO out there have a Racial Bonus or Class Bonus of some kind and no one complains unless it's utterly overpowered.

[Ruisu]

It does raise the point though: People seem hardpressed against racial bonuses yet almost every other MMO out there have a Racial Bonus or Class Bonus of some kind and no one complains unless it's utterly overpowered.

I actually stopped playing World of Warcraft, mostly because I was bored with it, but also because I couldn't play an undead hunter/tauren warlock/etc.

I don't mind minor stat changes, honestly. It's going to be 3 points or so extra on one stat or something. So long as something like a Roegadyn WHM isn't taboo, like it was when FFXI first came out.

[Raymeo]

It does raise the point though: People seem hardpressed against racial bonuses yet almost every other MMO out there have a Racial Bonus or Class Bonus of some kind and no one complains unless it's utterly overpowered.

The majority of those MMOs, if not all of them, have vertical character scaling and expect your character to be locked into one class for the majority, if not the entirety, of its existence. This game is different, in that it uses horizontal character scaling. Rather than providing us with an endless rat race of improvement for one class, this game wants players to improve by broadening their capabilities through the leveling and use of multiple classes. Abilities by nature are used by certain roles -- caster, dps, tank, etc. Giving each race a unique ability is pretty much allowing them an additional edge in one of the combat roles compared to other races, and in a situation where different races begin to fill different roles better than others, players start feeling like different races are locked into filling certain roles, which goes against the game's core focus on encouraging players to level and play multiple classes.

I'm not saying that you don't have a point -- people may still accept racial bonuses in this game if they were to be implemented. However, I have a hard time imagining the devs ever implementing them because of the potential for it to go against their game's foundations. If they were to implement racial bonuses, I see them being more along the lines of non-combat bonuses in order to preserve the encouragement of combat flexibility. Perhaps bonuses for DoH and DoL would work, and those could even be tuned in such a way that they could help balance out the different areas of supply in the market if they took the most popular races and gave them abilities for the least popular DoH and DoL classes, as well as the reverse. Or the bonuses could be passives that don't relate to any classes at all, with things like 10% faster anima recharge rate or 10% more crystals from mobs. A situation where abilities contribute to any sort of combat proficiency though, which is when players start getting concerned about balance and fear of "overpower" as you pointed out, I think is very unlikely to be added into this game.