No. A great game is characterised by the rules, aka limitations and abilities, it gives the player.
If you want this to stop you either have to drop it from in high by imposing the rules that existed in the first place, or players have to basically take over a realm and self-organise around it. Including organising thousands of players and keeping more people still out by whatever means necessary isn’t going to work.
Your maybe right that it was part of a race change. I used a race change once many years ago but I seriously can’t remember the gender part ever being an option on its own.
They may be referring to Appearance Change:
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Appearance_Change
Isn’t the system already in place for that, though? You’re asking a lot of stuff to be done for something they are making money off. I don’t see them doing it, great as it might be.
Race change is changing more than mere appearance, it’s changing racial, titles, heritage armour, etc. You don’t do that with a simple click.
No. A great game is characterised by the rules, aka limitations and abilities, it gives the player.
I think a great game gives players decisions to make, and makes the decisions fun to make.
Anyway I would certainly prefer for race changes to be a barbershop customization (or throw in the allied races first, at least).
It’s a separate point but the likelihood of them doing that seems low. Both because they make money currently (why would they ask for less money when players are clearly willing to spend) and probably because it kind of doesn’t make a lot of sense to waltz into a barbershop, look the hairdresser straight in the eye and say: “Trans? Boy do I have a doozy for you. I know I’m a worgen but man I’ve got some REALLY serious body dysmorphia. Aren’t you guys basically surgeons in this world? Yeah. Make me into a Gnome. And I’ll have a side of spiky green hair with that please.”
IMHO You can easily make it lore friendly by placing a separate mage NPC who would (for a price) cast a illusion on You. Such an illusion could be permanent, temporary or in a form of permanent buff that can be clicked off. If it were to only change Your appearance and nothing else (like racials etc.), then there should be little problem with implementing that.
There are several quests in the game that involve casting illusions which change both Your appearance and gear, so I’d say it’s pretty lore friendly.
Oh it most certainly does, but the choices have to be restricted somehow. For example, WoW wouldn’t be very good if you could type /kill on people, or /setspeed 100000, or give yourself every item.
Because what’s inevitably going to happen is someone realises this and abuses it and everybody else gets bullied and now everybody is using these things and the game basically goes up in smoke.
So you get different abilities, and you get choices to make between those abiliies because the abilities have been crafted within a set of limitations to give compelling decisions.
So, how does all that related to this? Well, it’s simple: Races have racials. If you can change your race as often as you want for a little gold, then people are always going to change race whenever they want to do anything, and the result of that is that our characters will all look more or less the same as one another’s at any given time, but every one of our characters never stays the same.
This removes the sense of personal identity and does severe damage to the community perception because, ironically, making everybody more able to express themselves from moment to moment has caused a situation where noone can.
“Remove racials!” I hear. Okay, what’s next? Free class changes? Remove class abilities?
Nono. I like having my character perceived as a Pandaren permanently, and I like having one of my friend’s characters always being a Night Elf, and another still always being a Dwarf, and so on. It makes the world feel more real.
But yes, the game’s social systems have basically collapsed making this less important than ever, but my answer to that is don’t break it further - find a way to correct it.
Being able to do something and wanting to do something are different pairs of shoes.
Could Blizzard add race change to the Barber? Yes.
Will they ever do it? No.
Giving stuff away for free doesn’t earn you money. And Blizzard is still company first, game studio second.
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