I'm not going to vote on the poll for extremely obvious reasons, but I'll state some points for both arguements.
1. Races
Having races (and race outfits) locks the player into what appearances they can be in game.
Appearances aren't everything, but they ARE something. People want to feel good when they look at their character, call it neat, badass, whatever, they want to like what they are.
The race system allows people to have a wide variety of outfits they can choose from, and I think personally, it is nice to move away from the norm, and be able to choose to be things you normally wouldn't be allowed to in other games. Example: Plenty of people, for kicks, have roleplayed as magical talking chairs in DnD and games like that, and people can have fun with it, but still be in a serious manner as well. This can go hand and hand with more "serious" races such as a gyrognome, or a talking pony, because it is just a game, and just because someone picks something more "normal/typical" doesn't mean the other player isn't having as much fun. Games are serious, but in the end they are also about fun, and giving players options to go outside of the norm with some things keeps things way more lively and less boring, than the typical western RPG world sets.
Furthermore, the race system gives the ability to give special traits based on what race they are. This alone is a very nice mechanic, and I don't think I need to explain how this makes things more indepth.
The reasoning for not using standard "human" race as we see on tibia, and their outfits, as they have been used time and time again, and are a bit worn out in my mind. Also, there are way more standard human outfits than there are any other race on Tibia, which would give one race WAY more options on how they appear.
I'd rather use a few of the standard outfits on some races, and try to keep the outfit choices close to one another.
Also, with outfits being so connected with race, visually people can look at the screen (not using the look command) and know RIGHT AWAY what the other person is, which is a great mechanic.
The biggest draw back here is that it limits greatly the ability to make quests/missions for different oufits/addons, and this limits what we can give out as rewards for missions.
2. Standard Tibia Outfits
The strongest point(s) here is that people are used to it, and we can give out outfits/addons as rewards to missions.
If you think this is a small point, you're dead wrong.
How many of real tibia quests end with you getting a new outfit, or an addon, or even a mount?
What about WoW? How long do people spend playing that God awful game just to get some mount?
This can be a very big cornerstone for an online mmo, and it's mission system, and completely make a game in some senses (got to collect them all!)
The problem here is that you can't have racial traits, and visual instant recognization of what a player is.
Also, some "feel" of the game is taken away too.
When you have a race system, you better believe there will be some a-hole that says "I'm best Orc Warrior ever"
People in general like to have a feel of who there character is/they are, and having a race system allows to enhance that feeling
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Unless you have actual statistics, i wouldn't go assuming that there are a large portion of idiots playing OTs just for outfits, now i say "idiots" because if you're playing a server purely dependent on what "Outfits" you can have, well.. i think the rest is self explanatory.
People care about who they are playing, and if they see something looks "stupid" right away, they might just fuck off and not give the game a chance at all.
You know how many douchebags said League of Legends looks cartoony years ago, and wouldn't play it, because they had some sort of graphical superiority complex associated to HoN or Dota?
Obviously, we see that LoL won that battle, but there were still tons of people who went "BLAH BLAH, I WON'T PLAY THAT IT LOOKS CHILDISH BLAH BLAH BLAH"
Or hell, there are plenty of other games that had weird art styles, that lost A-LOT of playerbase because of their art style choice. They could have simply went with something more mainstream, and hooked in alot more buyers, but didn't because of personal opinion.
Personal opinions really do drive people, and what outfits/how they look/how the game looks do matter.
It doesn't have to be the best graphics of all time, but it has to be appealing and not turn people away.
Last point, how many people can take Katamari Damacy serious?
Not many, because it looks like a hyper colour rainbow on lsd, doesn't matter how fun and unique the game is, people will simply turn away because of it's apperance and approach