Gender change service

[Aurgon]

Dear Turbine,

You have the ability to change my character's gender. I have money. Let's make an exchange!

But seriously, this is a very common cosmetic service available in many MMOs. I would be happy to pay anywhere from $10 - 20 for it. I made a female human Hunter and 50 levels later regret not making a male, but there's simply no way I'm going to start over now. Please consider adding this essentially industry standard service to the store. It has absolutely no negative impact on the game while potentially being a nice source of income for you.

[SjsharksBoy]

I think the reason Turbine didn't add this is because of lore reasons. No sex change in Middle-Earth, no sex change in LOTRO.

[Aurgon]

I think the reason Turbine didn't add this is because of lore reasons. No sex change in Middle-Earth, no sex change in LOTRO.

With respect, I find that pretty bizarre and hard to believe. To me it's obviously a "meta-game" type service, that lore has no bearing on as it's not really an "in-game" event. It's just another chance at the character selection screen.

Especially considering all the liberties taken with lore already, this seems like a weird reason to hold back a profitable service that really has no impact on lore whatsoever.

[SjsharksBoy]

It does though. Also why there is no option to change race. Didn't exist in Middle-Earth, doesn't exist in LOTRO.

[Ithrien]

@OP: You're right.

This (gender change) is a feature that is an industry standard, and Turbine are making less money by not offering it - period.

[Aurgon]

It does though. Also why there is no option to change race. Didn't exist in Middle-Earth, doesn't exist in LOTRO.

Don't you see that it's completely a meta-game feature though? It's like saying there was no option to buy quests packs and experience boosts in Middle Earth.

It just baffles me that this is an issue, so many other MMOs I play have this feature and lore never comes up as even a minor concern.

[Takekaze]

We already have name change, which isn't really something that existed in ME either.

Name, gender and race changes (within the limits of the class of course) are industry standards. I'm pretty sure Turbine will eventually roll out gender and race changes. It's inevitable.

[Yula_the_Mighty]

With respect, I find that pretty bizarre and hard to believe. To me it's obviously a "meta-game" type service, that lore has no bearing on as it's not really an "in-game" event. It's just another chance at the character selection screen.

Especially considering all the liberties taken with lore already, this seems like a weird reason to hold back a profitable service that really has no impact on lore whatsoever.

There is more to it than a simple flip the gender bit. You change a male human that way to a female human. You still are linked to the male human assets that you picked during creation. You are not going to be pleased with the look.

Turbine would need to implementation at unknown cost the ability to access the character creator to completely redesign the look of your character. Or give us a full character creator within the game software like what Swtor does with its appearance changer.

I have no doubt Turbine could develop:
1) Gender changer
2) Race changer
3) Class changer

features. It may there well be like the NA <--> EU character transfer service. Never happen because the total estimated revenue for these features is not high enough to justify developing the feature. Lotro is not like Worlds of Warcraft. It does not generate hundred of millions of dollars in revenue a year. It does not have millions of paying customers some of whom will be willing to use these kind of services.

You are making the same mistake many folks do. Since Turbine can sell a gender change for 25 dollars, they can make a profit. In reality this equation has balance:

(Price of a gender change) x (number of units sold) = (cost of developing the gender change feature) + (number of units sold x cost of each unit)

The left side has to be larger than the right side. Otherwise, a company is foolish to develop the feature. If the you end up with something like

($25 price per unit) x (1,000 units per year) = ($250,000 to develop the feature) + (1000 units x 5 dollars a unit)
$25,000 = $255,000
It is isn't going to happen. It has to be something like

($25 price per unit) x (1,000 units per year) = ($10,000 to develop the feature) + (1,000 units x 5 dollars a unit)
$25,000 = $15,000
for the feature to go forward. 10 thousand dollars does not pay from much development effort because of the need to change so many systems, testing effort, training ...

[yafga]

I think the reason Turbine didn't add this is because of lore reasons. No sex change in Middle-Earth, no sex change in LOTRO.

OMG.. can people stop blame Everything turbine dont implement in the game is because of the "lore restrictions" ? Open your mailbox anywhere in the land and not even Close to one, wasnt possible in middle-Earth either!

I Think they should make it possible to change race/gender.

[Polymachos]

You didn't see the message crows which are waiting beside the mailboxes, did you? They are the carrier pidgeons of Middle-Earth. Although it is a wonder how they can transport even such big things as heavy armor breastplates in their claws.


Greetings, Polymachos

[Aurgon]

You are making the same mistake many folks do. Since Turbine can sell a gender change for 25 dollars, they can make a profit.

I appreciate that there are development costs associated with creating a new service, but I personally feel it would make a profit. Clearly most other MMO studios felt like it justified costs considering how common it is.

[Rapunzel666]

Turbine should offer multiple options:

- name change

- cosmetic change: like in the char creation, allowing a change of all appearance options, opposed to the limited visit to the barber (= cosmetic surgeon)

- gender change: either including a free name change plus visit to the cosmetic surgeon, or simply setting your appearance to the corresponding other gender (so if you chose lips #5 as male, you get lips #5 as a female, and if no opposite value exists, you get set to #1)

- race change: if you all of a sudden have a need for chest hair and want to be a dwarf, why not (as long as class/race-Limits remain valid). Any racial virtue slots get mapped to their counterpart, and you either need to choose a gender, or lose your gender when the race change involves dwarfs).

-class change: if you find your lvl 95 champion lacking, you could switch to a lvl95 guardian, without the need to grind levels. Any completed class-specific quests etc. would need to be switched to their counterparts, and if uncompleted, get cancelled and reassigned.

some of this could even be managed by requiring you to create a new character as a template, then copying over the required parameters and deleting the template, if they want to use existing modules for the re-speccing. All in all I would guess isn't rocket science, consisting of good groundwork about the requirements, resulting in simply database manipulations.

I would guess there is a market for this, combined with a nice price tag, so people may think twice, but still do it if they really feel the need.

[Frisco]

I appreciate that there are development costs associated with creating a new service, but I personally feel it would make a profit. Clearly most other MMO studios felt like it justified costs considering how common it is.

It may have been built-in to their original character creation, in which case it wouldn't have been much extra work. I imagine, since they haven't done it yet, that Turbine didn't include that functionality in theirs, so it would take work to create that function. And since I don't imagine that the number of people willing and wanting to pay money to change genders is very high, I doubt they'll waste resources on the option. I've seen this thread maybe once a year for 7 years. $175 isn't going to get them to do very much.

Incidentally, what makes someone change their mind about character gender far enough into its progression that it would be worth paying $25 instead of just creating a new character?

[Aurgon]

Incidentally, what makes someone change their mind about character gender far enough into its progression that it would be worth paying $25 instead of just creating a new character?

Don't underestimate the power of convenience and the freshness of change. Seriously, look at Blizzard's financials. Extra services like Faction change, race change, and character customization make up a whopping 25% of their income. That is incredible. People eat it up. Turbine is missing an opportunity here.

[infinitewhimsy]

I would buy a service that allowed you to redo existing characters. I've been hoping for it to be implemented for years now and for several toons.

[Frisco]

Don't underestimate the power of convenience and the freshness of change. Seriously, look at Blizzard's financials. Extra services like Faction change, race change, and character customization make up a whopping 25% of their income. That is incredible. People eat it up. Turbine is missing an opportunity here.

Extra services make up 25%, or character customization alone makes up 25%? Does that mean "extra services *including* character customization", and character customization makes up a smaller percentage, and gender change an even smaller percentage?

WoW can do a lot of things because of the much larger player base. If they implement something that 1% of people will use, that's 80,000 people buying something. In LOTRO, that would be closer to 2,500 people. So while it may make sense to do the work of selling something 80,000 times, it may not make the same financial sense to create it for 2,500 sales.

Also, I think race/faction changes in WoW mean a lot more than here, no? I've never played WoW, but don't different factions or races have different quests and areas? Here, it's almost entirely a cosmetic choice.

[Yula_the_Mighty]

Don't underestimate the power of convenience and the freshness of change. Seriously, look at Blizzard's financials. Extra services like Faction change, race change, and character customization make up a whopping 25% of their income. That is incredible. People eat it up. Turbine is missing an opportunity here.

One of the benefits that Blizzard is the luxury of scale. At one point Blizzard was generating a billion dollars a year in revenue from their game. If you use a reasonable percentage such as 10% to fund development of new features for your game, that gives Blizzard a hundred million dollars a year. Blizzard makes a gender change feature releases it back when they had 10 million subscribers. Lets say 1 customer in a 1,000 buys a gender change in a year that is 10,000 gender changes.

Move to Lotro has maybe 100,000 customers that is 100 gender changes in a year. The 100 per year makes the feature not economically viable for a mature game that is getting ready to enter the maintenance phase of the product where the amount of feature additions to the product start going down because the product isn't generating enough revenue.

Any company that is in this situation where products age. Sales and revenue go down. These companies have to create entirely new products from scratch in order to survive. Or the company slowly gets smaller and smaller until the company finally goes out of business and disappears.

2014 is going to be an interesting year for Lotro and some of the other mature products. Turbine has decided that what they have been doing in the past isn't working. We are getting all kinds of new features that were previously never a possibility. Who knows - maybe they will do some other premium services. Given that Turbine has stated that character transfers between EU <--> NA servers is never going to happen, there is clearly a money restriction for developing premium features.

[Thurallor]

I wonder if this service were offered, if a bunch of guys would make female characters just to get more help from male players, then switch genders at level cap.

[Nymphonic]

I don't think anything like this is going to happen this late in the game. That stuff takes money and time. It seems to me that not enough people would buy the feature to offset the cost.

[Widoch]

I don't think this is what some people are making it out to be. There's no reason for it to become Lord of the Rings: Visit Bangkok. If people want to change their character's gender, the only reason I can see for not being able to is that it would be extremely time consuming on the mechanical end. Someone would need to write code that goes through your entire character's data base and replaces all the values with another. The amount of debugging that goes into something like that would be huge. Thus, while doable, I can't imagine it's very high on the list of priorities.

Still, not a bad idea if people are willing to pay for it.