I’m copying here a message I wrote where I try to defend the last changes to World of Warcraft about the racial traits system that they finally completed and patched into the servers.

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Olaf:
I think its another example of the game being made worse by trying to balance PvE and PvP under one ruleset.

PvE? Where exactly the new changes impact the PvE? It was a PvP-only mechanic before and the change is again about PvP only.

From the system point of view they “healed” a not cohesive mechanic. The previous behaviour of the undead race was an exception inside the system. It was unbalanced already in the design level.

What they did is complete the design and remove the exceptions in the previous system to make it more stable and understandable. Now not only the undead have their “perks” but each race provides differences. In this case the undeads can:

Will of the Forsaken: Activate to become immune to fear, sleep, and charm effects
Cannibalize: Increase health regeneration while consuming a corpse
Underwater Breathing: Underwater breath increased
Shadow Resistance: Increase Shadow Resistance

This is what makes them undead. Along with their shape and the role they have into the game (the classes they can access and being part of the Horde). Undead have their specific equipment graphically and still have specific animations.

Both graphically and from the gameplay point of view, they have specific traits that make sense and are part of the lore and the roleplay layer of the game.

Each other race follows this path and what is built is a coherent system.

Look instead to SWG. They recently added two new races and these races simply add *zero* to the game. From the gameplay point of view they are still exactly the same aside minor changes to the stats (and we have this in WoW too). They don’t behave in the game in a different way, there aren’t race-specific gameplay elements. They are simply “shapes”. And from the graphical point of view? Even worst. Sure, they look different. But they still wear the same pieces of clothes (aside exceptions) and their animations are generic and shared between *all* the races (and this brings to frequent clipping issues and bad animations).

A wookie run in the same way of an Ithorian and the Ithorian run the same way as a human.

This while in WoW a race has a meaning and a specific identity BOTH in the gameplay (faction, access to classes, racial traits) and in its graphic (shape, animations, equipment).

So where the style has relevance? In WoW or in SWG?

What you are doing, instead, is the common whining when a beta REALLY behaves as a beta. Presenting an unfinished game that WILL change as the development goes on. The undeads were like you saw them exactly because the system about the racial traits was INCOMPLETE. Now each race has its own perks and the undeads have been tweaked to fit in the new, complete system.

What makes sense, instead, is the fact that priests and paladins now have spells that don’t have anymore an use. This is why something will change because this will bring up again a problem with the balance.

It’s not perfect but it is going in the right direction. Since this is a game what is important is how these changes will PLAY. And I really don’t believe that the change makes the game less fun. The design is about how the game PLAYS. Nothing else. It’s a translation of a myth into a game. The design is an adaptation process, like transforming a book into a movie.