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Race change option would be sweet
joey300
Member Posts: 3 Arc User
Im trying to get feedback from players if the idea of being able to change your race to faction specific like other MMORPGs have. WoW offers a service at the cost of $$$. I think it would be a good idea not just for us players but also as an option for cryptic to make more money.
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This doesn't have to be just a race change option. Just think about being able to change your characters original career path *tactical, engineering, science*
yep been talked about tirelessly in the past, and agreed on with what you have said. I think at one point Mike and a few devs discussed it in a live stream and it was agreed the game isn't going to implement it because they can't.
Nope, not a fan. I do not see the point in this. Just create a new toon rather than the risk that after hours and hours of wasted Dev time, this will just mess things up, as usual. The cost would not make this a win for Cryptic.
Careers are mattering ever less, it mostly mattered on the ground in the past. But with healing abilities coming available for tacs, drones and turrets for everyone etc. it doesn't really matter that much anymore whether you're a tac or a sci.
Besides, with the FC- exp boosts and Doff assignments, it's very easy to level a new toon nowadays. Just create another one if you want to swap careers. Same goes for sex, imo.
I do wish they'd make careers a bit more important and perhaps create additional ones too. Sometimes it feels like none of these choices really matter anymore and that's disappointing. What's the point of having such a large diversity in terms of species, careers (and combinations thereof) if they can all do the same thing just as well anyway?
Race change is the second best option, cause the races that can't be recreated as aliens (e.g. Gorn) would still be weaker for no reason.
Disagree. It would just make everything even more generic and bland.
We need each species and career to stand out more, not have every(thing) being interchangable. If, say, an Andorian could have the Vulcan traits and vice versa, it diminishes both these species, because it takes away everything that makes either one unique and stand out from the other.
What's even the point of having Vulcans and Andorians at all then? Might as well start calling them Alien #1, #2, #3 etc. And even that denomination would be more distinct than they'd deserve at that point.
Some players might not care much about this, but for those who do, these choices and the stuff that makes them unique, matter.
I'm all for a paid-for token that lets players make changes if they really want to start over without having to actually recreate, level and gear up a toon. Everyone's preferences can change over time and maybe there's some new type of gear being released that makes you want to change things around your character choices or whatever.
But there should remain some barrier. Putting some thought in advance into what you want to do with your new toon, should be encouraged too.
Bingo!
With these things never say never. Cryptic said KDF and FED flying each other's ships was a hard no given IP considerations. Then it wasn't. A modicum of reason is needed to parse out what truly isn't going to happen with what's unlikely to at any given moment. But it's best to keep an asterisk next to answers given: "as of the time of interview" even if you feel VERY certain about the answer given.
Also, with the tease for next season (as of the DECA transition interview) being a new token...I'd put reasonable odds of that being gender or species change. Given that its' 1) doable per the software team now, 2) a frequently requested feature, 3) fits within the ethos of flexible customization and character rebuilding STO practices, and 4) the only other frequent token suggestion I can think of ATM (rebundle an owned lock box ship to transfer to another character) is much more fraught with *business* considerations.
You can repeat this statement ad infinitum with any QoL suggestion. Why bother improving inventory search features? Just do the work yourself and stop bothering the devs. Why bother improving Elite Queue accessibility? Just accept the glacial queuing speed and leave Cryptic to more important work. It adds nothing new to the game. Implementing or fixing loadouts? It's not *that* much work to manually equip gear to a ship. Auto-claim admiralty cards for owned ships? Exactly how many dollars did Cryptic make there. Auto-apply reputation XP boosts to your account? How lazy can players be? Do it the long way and stop asking things of developers.
And so on and so on in laborious fashion through every conceivable feature suggestion that doesn't have your personal stamp of approval on it as "worthwhile" (the subjective crux of the matter). With these things it's best to let folks make the ask and let the devs come to their own conclusions. Just saying "no it's a waste of time" is stamping on the process of creative suggestion, eg. enthusiasm for the game. No matter what you feel about this thread, you don't want the takeaway for users being "the STO community isn't worth spitballing with." Frame opinions accordingly.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
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Not just "some" limitations, but rather crippling limitations that make the tokens unable to do much (if anything) for the majority of problems the players were asking for them for in the first place. Still, it is better than nothing I suppose, even if it is only good for a few edge cases.
What are you talking about?
"Want to change your character but keep your hard earned rewards? Now you can, with the Captain Alteration Token. This new token will allow you to change your Captain's species and/or gender, within your chosen faction."
It's species/gender change on a token basis. The ONLY limitation stated is that it's within faction. In no conceivable way is that crippling to what folks have been asking for. I have never seen any player ever ask for gender/species changes as a way to change their faction. Folks interested in faction changes used language like "faction change" instead of species/gender, which mean separate things, to communicate said interest.
Edit: see comment in other thread for a more direct reply to your ideas here...
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Exactly, a big part of why I said the restrictions severely hamper the effectiveness of those tokens is that they are only a simple race/gender change, which works for the edge cases but not so much for the majority if you take into account why a lot of people asked for them in the first place. And yes, I know a lot of those requests are for things that are not technically feasible, but that is beside the point.
Some were asking for stuff that those tokens would work for, true, like switching a basic Trill to a joined one, or faux-race characters into the cstore version of what they were simulating (Cardassians mainly) in the few races where there is a free basic version and an improved premium version. Also, a few people apparently don't want to bother having more than one or two characters but are bored with their current one.
The thing is, those are just a few of the things people have asked for in the way of change tokens, more often those requests are for wilder stuff like Orions (in their skimpy uniforms no less) and Klingons in the Federation (often as part a whole-ship-and-crew level exchange program, though sometimes as full Starfleet members) and similar things that would require a faction change of some sort as well. And yes, a lot of that can be done with the background text and simply roleplayed (which is what I usually do, btw) but it is rather emersion-breaking having the wrong transporter effect, hud (for those who don't know it can be changed already), and the wrong boffs and doffs, the wrong ships available at the shipyard, etc.
And some people do just want the gender change to flip a character to change the available wardrobe or whatever, or are people who prefer only having single-character but are bored with the one they have, or simply don't want to bother with (or just cannot take the thought of) having to level another character or whatever. On the other hand, it seems more people want the option for a gender change for races which don't have both represented (most often Gorn, and at least one person wanted a female Nausican) in a normal faction.
Even worse yet, there is a faction in the game where there is no choice at all when it comes to race and gender. Many find that lack of choice itself annoying, some find the genderlocking to be the most annoying part, and some find the fact that it is impossible to play a show-canon-correct character in that faction the worst annoyance of all. A token obviously could not do anything about it on its own since there is apparently no support for anything but the one genderlocked species, but a faction-change token would work to migrate the 'faux' type characters over to it if the devs ever opened up the faction to the various other species from the quadrant, or barring that, a gender-change token would provide some partial mitigation of the problem while only requiring linking the female basic meshes (and hopefully a less hornytoad-like skin), albeit in a way that is not any more (or any less) canon friendly than the current situation is for that faction.
I simply pointed out that the tokens as described are not a panacea, that they are very limited and can only change a very small part of the rather wide spectrum of problems people were asking for them to solve.
I am honestly confused by the argument that the long requested race/gender change token is flawed as... its basically what players were asking for years.
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Only limitation I see is using it with a Dominion character, seeing as regular Jem'hadar and vanguard Jem'hadar, are the same race with one slight difference, where Vanguards get the extra bonus of being good at space too,
Also some species are unlocked through Z-Store purchases - I'm guessing I'll be unable to change to a Caitian, Ferasan or Cardassian unless I've purchased access to the species?
Should honestly be no different than starting a new character with what options are available. So yea it should have the same options that are currently available to your account, including unlocked species.
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colored text = mod mode
The point I was trying to make (and never quite got around to) was that STO's character system is so open and flexible already that most changes can already be made just by going to the tailor and/or juggling around traits and whatnot. About the only thing that cannot be changed or simulated at all already is gender, and those tokens will be handy for those probably rare cases.
Also, faux-whatever characters are not that difficult to make, and a lot of them are quite good as expats or cross-universe refugees or whatever, and many (possibly most) of them would not benefit significantly if simply changing from one basic f2p species to another basic f2p species within the same faction they were created in.
The fact is that STO (with one exception) does not lock much in the way of content away behind race and/or gender walls the way a lot of other games do, so the value of the tokens is nowhere near as high in STO as it would be in WoW or many other games where race and (sometimes) gender determine what the player has access to for a particular character, or even ESO where character slots are limited and the level grind long so people tend to change existing characters instead of making new ones. How successful the tokens are and how many players would find their purchase worth it would depend on price, with such a low value ceiling it will be tricky not to overprice them.
And people have been asking for faction-change tokens at least as often as race and gender change (not necessarily all three in one). Some of them want to completely change the character to something in the target faction while just keeping their XP and things they bought and whatnot, while others want the character to stay the same but transfer to a different faction for various reasons I am not going to reiterate in this comment. Unfortunately, that kind of thing would be way outside the range of a simple token since it would require possibly extensive support in the way of character and uniform models being copied or otherwise standardized and other features being added to the factions.
If you read chat much (and even some of the threads in this forum) people wanting female Gorn is really a thing (I don't really get why, but whatever floats their boat), especially since that LD episode indirectly showing some came out.
As for gender and Jem'Hadar, DS9 made it clear enough that they are not hermaphrodites (those have both genders at once) but rather are completely genderless and simply look like males. For all practical purposes they are biological droids and have nothing that does not contribute to their primary purpose as what we would term today Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, especially not any way of reproducing themselves and possibly becoming a danger to the Dominion. Another good analogy would be early model Terminators but with improved wetware instead of internal hardware chassis.
Suggestions for female-appearing Jem'Hadar are just a worst-case kludge to make the faction more than a boring one-trick pony with the absolute least expenditure of time and effort from the devs. I don't think anyone actually likes the idea for itself, it probably wouldn't even be suggested if the current setup didn't put the Gamma Recruit event and some nice ships behind a Race/gender lock.
Something like that worked in other games, WoW was one iirc, which feature a few male monster races with less monstrous females that actually work for the kind of "Barbie" stuff that is so popular in STO. And it is not like that faction actually follows Trek canon anyway, in DS9 the Founders were paranoid and would never allow the hyper-aggressive-natured Jem'Hadar unrestricted command privileges any more than one of today's nations would allow LAWS units to run around in public completely unsupervised.
I totally would have used one of these Token back in the day for that.
My Main since Day 1 is a Joined Trill. I played her as Unjoined Trill who was a moron that had her Bestie help her cheat her way through Starfleet Academy. To simulate that, I spent zero Skill Points all of the way until she reached Level Cap. Then I played her having going through the Joining process (by virtue of being the only free Trill on hand) with the Symbiote actually knowing things the that allowed her to use her Skill Points.
If the Token had been available back then, I would have used a regular Trill for her until Level Cap and then switched over.
W T F is a Mirwast