Too Much Choice?

With too many options there's an awful amount of room to make bad choices:


On PSOBB you'd come across melee FOmarls and FOmars - not quite built for purpose, but they made do even though their ATP was poor.

On PSU you'd get CAST's dabbling with magic even though their MST was over 50% less than a Newman.


You get the same occurances on PSO2 and it does leave me wondering why people do it. To be different? To relish the challenge of having character with awful stats? I can't say that I get it. Perhaps it gets a little boring seeing every force being a Newman or every ranger being a CAST.

Yes you can make it work, and still enjoy the game. But I'd liken it to entering a donkey in the grand national. Yes you'd finish the race, but you'd be going up against purpose bred thoroughbreds who will leave you for dust.

Tifa

I might be really late to this, but I can offer some reasons. (inb4 I prattled on about a topic that the OP doesn't even care about anymore.)

1.) Pigeonholing races into specific classes is boring. It stifles potential lore/story/RP opportunities.

I come from World of Warcraft, a game whose races have lore behind most if not all of their playable classes (which had a diverse selection but never included every single class.) Final Fantasy XIV is kind of the inverse; the classes themselves come from specific traditions, but their respective guilds are open to anyone willing and able to learn the craft.

Couldn't, for example, PSU Newman society have had some lore behind their own take on striking and shooting classes instead of being just the Tech race? (Maybe Newman Hunters et al. would be more like monks who mix the spiritual with the physical? Or Cast Forces would view the field more like a science than magic? That could've led to some downright nasty religious(-ish?) feuds with the Newmans. Just imagine: "Your 'Holy Light' is fake. We have thoroughly analyzed what your feeble minds mistake for a mystic force." The Beasts, meanwhile, wouldn't care either way as long as it's useful.)

In short, I like having more customization, more options for creating something that is my own but still viable in endgame. That's why I'm interested in a certain private server. If they change stat bonuses for race/class combos, Newmans could be good at more than just Masterforce on there...

2.) From a lore perspective, it can reek of Unfortunate Implications (the idea that certain "races" are inherently better or worse at things because individual variation doesn't exist.) Having multiple legitimately viable options for each race (especially things outside their "hat," like Newmans being legitimately good at Ranger in PSP2) would have better supported PSU's commentary on racism instead of accidentally contributing to a weird form of meta in-universe racism.

3.) You really can make it work in PSO2. My main is a male Human Force (and I've played a Newman Fighter.) People still want me for content and trust that I can be competent at it. Nobody really cares.

pso2 suxx

As a Technique-oriented CAST, yes, I do it to be different. I like a sense of absurdiness on my characters, a sense of trying to accomplish something that I was not designed for but still performing to the best I can do.

In WoW I was a Draenei Shaman because it was support-oriented healer (back then). Then I created a gnome warrior tank named "Splat" because I find the idea of something tiny trying to tank a whole dragon both funny and absurd.
In offline PSU (I didn't have access to the internet then) I was Force CAST.
In Aion I was some support-oriented Bard (I forgot what it was called) because noone played that.
In Rift I was Chloromancer because nearly noone played that.
In Dungeons and Dragons Online I was support-oriented Spellsinger Bard because virtually noone played that.
In PSO2 now I am Technique-oriented TEcher CAST.
And in general in every game that I play where I design my character, I go for something support-oriented with a sense of absurdiness

The fact that I perform at 50% or less than what others do doesn't affect me. It's a video game. I play to have fun. I don't care about ladders, I don't care about optimal performance, about exp/min, about meseta/min and I certainly do not care if killing a boss takes 10 seconds more because I do not play some FotM spec. The analogy with the donkey entering a race doesn't even work: I am not playing to win a race, just like people who join many sport events do not join because they want to win; they do it for the experience and the fun behind it.

In PSO2, the racial stat differences are negligible unless you are min-maxing; in general, the difference between the highest and lowest stats for any race/gender combo for the same class is under 100.
Here is a comparison of lv80 Hero as an example (without lv75 title bonus stats or Mag):
https://i.imgur.com/tu2Ig16.png

You'll maybe lose out on a couple percent damage, but it is nowhere near as crippling as it was in PSU.

Going with your analogy, PSO2 is a race where the pack is fairly close and the difference between the front and back is a slightly better lung capacity.

Best ranger in PSU are Beast, since any weapon damage is based in power, and the ranger/gunmaster class gives them enough accuracy, but then, CAST SUV was OP in any class so... And yep, as anduril pointed, stats are so similar in pso2 race-gender combo is only a matter of aesthetics, only in episode 1 could you have problems if you were a newman and wanted to equip an elyseon, for example.