Show the developers that you would like to reroll.

[Dreadnought]

It seems to me like there is an underlying issue about ethics or other strange personal views that is going over my head culturally. A reroll is a reroll. The point is, everything we based our starting decisions off of is changing because the game itself is fundamentally changing, so if the game is changing that drastically then people should be able to change their characters as well.

this is exactly my opinion.

How feeble minded are you if you find it gamebreakingly "shocking" if your buddy decided to change from female lalafel to male miqote.
Again, the game is fundamentally changing so why not our characters?

[Teia]

How feeble minded are you if you find it gamebreakingly "shocking" if your buddy decided to change from female lalafel to male miqote.

Eh, it's not a simple case of being feeble minded so much as it is social conditioning to see male and female as two immutable, non-overlapping categories. The game world follows many of the same aspects of social interaction that the real one does, and the player character presents an online identity just as much as their real-life presentation reflects a real-life identity. So when people get used to, say, someone playing as a male hume and suddenly that player switches to a female hume (i.e. leaving a race change totally out of it), it's given a similar reaction people have in the real world to that sort of thing happening. Usually this is just uneasiness and aversion, but, very unfortunately, sometimes the reaction involves an element of hostility (verbal or otherwise). This is, actually, very likely the reason why I've seen a sentiment in this thread that a race change would make more sense or whatever than a gender change: There's nothing in real life to use as a heuristic to evaluate an online reaction to a race change, but there is for a gender change.

Now, I could say all kinds of choice words about how that's an unfortunate mindset and how I wish society would let go of cissexism and oppositional sexism, you can't really say someone's "feeble minded" if they've had those things indoctrinated into them by society from a young age and have a bit of trouble when they find these notions being challenged—in all likelihood, they've never had a reason to examine these beliefs in the context of someone who breaks their expectations. The feeble mindedness is when someone refuses to update their world view. I can tell you from experience that most people do actually get over their uneasiness towards gender fluidity after a bit of time adjusting to the concept.

[Sylvari]

Eh, it's not a simple case of being feeble minded so much as it is social conditioning to see male and female as two immutable, non-overlapping categories. The game world follows many of the same aspects of social interaction that the real one does, and the player character presents an online identity just as much as their real-life presentation reflects a real-life identity. So when people get used to, say, someone playing as a male hume and suddenly that player switches to a female hume (i.e. leaving a race change totally out of it), it's given a similar reaction people have in the real world to that sort of thing happening. Usually this is just uneasiness and aversion, but, very unfortunately, sometimes the reaction involves an element of hostility (verbal or otherwise). This is, actually, very likely the reason why I've seen a sentiment in this thread that a race change would make more sense or whatever than a gender change: There's nothing in real life to use as a heuristic to evaluate an online reaction to a race change, but there is for a gender change.

Now, I could say all kinds of choice words about how that's an unfortunate mindset and how I wish society would let go of cissexism and oppositional sexism, you can't really say someone's "feeble minded" if they've had those things indoctrinated into them by society from a young age and have a bit of trouble when they find these notions being challenged—in all likelihood, they've never had a reason to examine these beliefs in the context of someone who breaks their expectations. The feeble mindedness is when someone refuses to update their world view. I can tell you from experience that most people do actually get over their uneasiness towards gender fluidity after a bit of time adjusting to the concept.

There are a lot of long words in there, Miss; we're naught but humble pirates. What is it that you want?

[Teia]

There are a lot of long words in there, Miss; we're naught but humble pirates. What is it that you want?

The tl;dr version is basically that people have a knee-jerk freak-out reaction to gender fluidity (or at the very least don't have much respect for it) because they're raised to see gender as something you can't change, but for the most part get over it after a while when they can't otherwise avoid it. Also that the negative way society sees trans people affects how an in-game gender change would be seen.

[Sylvari]

The tl;dr version is basically that people have a knee-jerk freak-out reaction to gender fluidity (or at the very least don't have much respect for it) because they're raised to see gender as something you can't change, but for the most part get over it after a while when they can't otherwise avoid it. Also that the negative way society sees trans people affects how an in-game gender change would be seen.

I see..... My view in life is "Who gives a damn what that guys doing.. I am me, I do what I do."