I’m a role-player at heart. I use the game mechanics like size, weight, gender, race, side, profession etc as an important part in creating and playing my characters. With the planned change to make items like Bracers of Shrinking Flesh and Gardener’s Gloves not reduce a characters size a big part of the life on Rubi-Ka is suddenly taken away from us. No one can run around as a child, a teenager, a young leet or a tiny atrox. Rubi-Ka will be populated by only adults..
I understand that size is simply a visual to enhance the storytelling, however this seemingly small change has a big effect for me at least. It broke the game for me as some would say. I’ll tell you why – one of my favorite characters to play is a 9 year old orphaned Asian boy called Jason. He more or less saved the game for me, and is part of the reason I am still around. Yes, he’s an agent. Yes, I rolled him as that because of the ruse 1 nanoprogram, so I could run around actually looking the part too. I don’t do PvM or PvP on him, much at any rate. He’s not even being role-played as an agent, actually he’s a wanna-be soldier. When the ruse size change is removed, he could have still been the approximately the same size if he could wear the Bracer of Shrinking Flesh, but they don’t work either. This leaves me no other option than to kill off my character, and I really would have liked to be able to make that decision on my own.
Would it be possible to look into other ways of shrinking your character? Maybe make the Bracers of Shrinking Flesh non-combat flagged? Perhaps even remove the title level requirement on them, so one could choose the one with the reduction that suits your character? Purely social changes. Personally I wouldn’t care if I couldn’t do combat on my short character, but if it was still possible, then that would also be nice. RP is not always just social, it can be combat related too…