Trial Head Limitations.
 

Door and I tried out a new game today, and after the long install we were psyched to start it off. There was an excitement in seeing how our characters could look, how we could represent ourselves in this new game, but when the selection screen opened up we were met with extreme disappointment. There was a limit of around 4 different hairstyles with no color choice, per the very small amount of races that they had. I couldn't look like anything that I've ever envisioned my character to look like, and at this point I lost my motivation to play the game.

When asked, only 15 out of 250 players on Graal felt that their characters appearance wasn't important to them at all. That alone should show you how character appearance is of the utmost importance and shouldn't be limited so harshly. If you can't even make a compromise in how you want to look when you're first starting out, you're not going to feel inclined to upgrade because of it, you're just going to end up feeling uncomfortable about playing the game. With this in mind, the trial head limitations do more damage than good.

Trials are limited to 10 heads: only 2 of them are passable as female, 1 of them doesn't even exist, and you don't really get a very diverse range. One of Graal's greatest features is the ability to customize your character, the ability to change your look and represent yourself uniquely. I don't feel like this limitation should exist at all, it could be placed on limiting players to only wearing globally uploaded heads. However if you're going to keep it, change the head limit from 1-10 to 1-500; it will give both male and female players the opportunity to feel comfortable and welcomed to the game. They will feel more encouraged to try the game out, and even more inclined to pay to play it.

yeah heads 1-10 all look very masculine

Would be crazy for them to disregard this thread.

another deeper seeded issue is the difficulty of customizing a character the first time you play Graal.

picking and choosing file names just doesn't seem intuitive for a game.

pure brilliance, amen ftw.

Graal graphics are not that great in the first place, and using that as a limitation doesn't seem very reassuring.

I think they should be able to use all numbered heads, and only be able to use custom heads if they have an upgraded account.

this seems like a good compromise.

Something slightly off topic; there really needs to be a global tailor system that you can access from the login screen which allows you to customize your player's appearance for all servers before you even login (I vaguely remember a tool years ago sort of like this but it was third party and was discontinued as Graal's security grew). It would really help players trying new servers. Instead of wasting minutes/hours trying to figure out each server's tailor system, they can instead jump right into the content of the server.

It should just be removed or Atrius will keep overwriting them.

Punishments should be issued for those who do that. It is quite irritating, or a system that wont allow global heads to be over written.

I'm wondering why GDT hasn't stepped in and actually enforced such a thing yet, when people have been complaining for a while.

We can't even get our own sub-forum, why would we be able to enforce such things? It sucks.

What is wrong with the forum we were given access to?

http://up2.podbean.com/image-logos/44997_logo.gif

I hope you're excluding Gold servers when you say this.

Anyone who wants it can pretty much get it.

So is anything actually going to be done about this? I personally don't even see the logic behind the 10 head limitation. It's so extreme that, as Rufus said, it is more likely to drive new players away than encourage them to subscribe. This is obviously not a 'complaint' coming from the players; we already have whatever heads we want. We can see what it is like to be a new player, however, and if the game doesn't give them a break, they won't give the game one!

Continuing the fight for trials.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but that's a more of a Stefan/PWA thing. GDT in my eyes is mostly just a recognition guild for people nice development talent. Only difference from "#gscript" and those guilds is that PWA is in charge. I only say this because i haven't seen a great contribution development wise from the GDT, yet. Not to be rude, i was just expecting a lot more.

As far as access to the Global Staff Connection, i think it'd be best if it's limited to at least Admins of public playerworlds (Gold,Classic,Hosted/Preview) only.

Corrected.

Some trial asked me for 20 EP and being the good person that I am, I decided to give her it, knowing that they would be gone once she logs off anyways. I took a look at her profile and read her personal quote.

Above it said something along the lines of "hanging whit friends and killing my enemys"

Well, I spoke to Stefan and he doesn't seem to think that raising the limit or restricting to global heads only is a good idea. I don't think that people are going to stick around, especially girls, if they're limited to such a tiny selection of the heads we have, but there's not much else that can be done.

Why...-_-

I highly doubt the quality of the default heads, that are restricted, are going to put any person in a position to upgrade. Any head for that matter.

Said the wise, took his gun and shot his kitten.

Poor trials will never live their fantasy of having a goku or cloud outfit.

I miss when I started playing UN and there were a ton of trials dressed like inuyasha/alien vs predator characters. Stefan sucked the soul out of UN when he ruined trial accounts.

It's 2009, its all about Naruto and ****. :noob::noob::noob:

How disappointing.

Any limitation can be seen as too limited, but you can't have everything for free. Previously people were reset at each login, now it is saving their stuff but they have less choice in character customization, which should motivate more to upgrade.

Being limited to 9 crappy heads is not going to encourage them to try out the game, never mind upgrade to play it. I do not see why you can't understand that.

Very disappointing. x_x