My suggestion is for your nation affiliation (and thus your text colour) really should be controlled dynamically by your standings. Having it as an indicator of your original nation is completely meaningless and really only determines what background you see in the training sector.

If someone has POS Itani, they should be blue. If they have POS Serco, they should be red. That way we have no meaningless race discrimination.

If you are aligned with blue, you talk as blue etc.. etc.. Corvus should be black or grey if possible and even the minor factions could potentially have people who choose to have them as their chosen affiliation. I realise this would make the chat log kinda rainbow, but imagine the roleplay possibilities. You could actually have members of Axia and Valent fighting it out in corporate wars etc.. etc..

We already have players that play this way. I know Thor Ree considers himself to be from Tunguska mining co. Don't tell me he wouldn't love that light green coloured name to go with it.

While this has some merit with the actual nations with grey there is some issue.

-Tungska isn't a nation it's a company that's like saying "I'm from Coca Cola"
-All grey factions are corporations not nations.

Yer nationality is the Race you were born as. It never changes no matter what your standing is....

Sorry but you were born that way.

Actually, nationality can change. I could immigrate, or apply for dual citizenship.

To illustrate my point, suppose a black person is born in Japan, moves to Russia, then the US, and finally immigrates to Australia with full citizenship. Are they african? They've never been to Africa. They are Australian now. Not a japanese african or some such nonsense. Serco/Itani are nationalities more than they are races. They just make different lifestyle choices.

I would suggest a similar option as the faction recovery system. Unlimited, expensive, but not outrageously so. Currently upon request the devs will change a characters nationality (or at least they used to). I think this might make a nice addition.

I do agree with CrazySpence on the UIT subfactions.

They are races, actually. The two groups have been separated for about two thousand years now, more than half of which was an actual literally no-contact period of separation. Plus on the Serco side there has also been significant genetic tinkering so the drift will be even more than you might expect.

Also, they have been at war for hundreds of years, ever since they resumed contact. An Itani can't just wander over into Serco territory, say a few oaths, pass a literacy test, and become a citizen. I'm sure the occasional member does switch over, but I highly doubt that it happens frequently. For that matter, at least when it comes to the freshly toasted ex-Itani, I'd wager they don't have much life expectancy. Most Itani immigrants are going to suffer through violent harassment and discrimination. After all, look at how the UIT were treated before we took to the skies, and we never even did anything to them. And the average Serco will have the advantage in a physical confrontation against the average Itani, due to the Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards effect.

And don't forget that the animosity is thousands of years old. Even more if you extend it to include all the wrongs committed against science by religions and politicians - though the Serco aren't really fighting that war anymore. They kind of lost any claim to be fighting for science when we UIT left them to wallow on their mudball.

Anyway, this is well beyond a matter of lifestyle choices.

Okay. I didn't read some of the above. You are all missing the point as far as I can tell.

I sit in sector and press K on a UIT who is KOS with UIT, and it says "Alignment: Union of Independent Territory"

He is clearly not "aligned" with the UIT, it should change and the text colour should change to reflect it. It solves a lot of confusing issues and adds new depth to the game.

"You were born that way" is a semantic argument, especially in a world where you can magically rebirth yourself somewhere else.

While I agree there should be something I do not like the OP. Sorry, but race is race.

As for this...

"I would suggest a similar option as the faction recovery system. Unlimited, expensive, but not outrageously so."

Can people at least wait for the faction fix before trying to cheat it?

Part of the problem is conflicting interpretations of what name color means. At the moment, name color reflects your physical body, not your allegiance. In a universe like Vendetta, you actually can look at somebody's face and know where they are from. It is not a universe with a high amount of diversity.

Your name is your face and tells people where you are from. Your faction screen tells them who you are with.

If the character screen incorrectly labels a player's heritage as his alignment, then that should be altered.

As far as not being able to tell in chat who a person is aligned to, so what? When you communicate with a person you do not automatically know who his allies and enemies are. When you go into a chat room you don't automatically know if the guy you're chatting with is a Nazi, a member of PETA, or a member of the IRA. So why should you automatically know whether somebody is a trader or a pirate or a nationalist? All you know is that he's named "Rin Ganborro" and was born a UIT, which is like seeing a guy named "Tanaka" who looks Japanese. You don't know what his motives are until you listen to his words, observe his actions, or otherwise investigate.

If that means I can trick people in chat because they mistakenly interpret my face to be my alignment, then that is a good thing. Anybody who believes a complete stranger in a violent video game deserves what they get. They will learn a valuable life lesson which works just as well in the real world, namely: when the charming stranger asks you to follow him down the dark ally, you should probably say "no" and leave the vicinity.

The pirates in VO are saving people's lives in the real world by teaching them this stuff.

Yes rin but not everybody in game who is POS itani is necessarily working towards the benefit of the itani nation. That level of subterfuge exists in game anyway. My point is that given that the chat colour indicator currently only displays your original race (a relatively meaningless indicator) we should change it to display something more useful.

I can walk around draped in the stars and stripes and at first glance you can all think I'm an all-American patriot, but when the "g'day wazza that dingo was some bloody strewthful yakka" comes out you're gonna think twice. Same thing can still happen in vo regardless of what the chat colour is, I'm just saying let's make it more interesting and more dynamic and more controllable what those colours are.

Re: Ryan. Yes race IS race but no reason it has to also be chat text colour.

I vote that they just let people select whatever arbitrary color they want from the whole palette.

I think it would just be freaking nice when th efation redux (soon TM) is done and just enjoy the game for what it is, not how tyou want it or think it should be. make your own the way you want.

lmao!!! Do you really think so? The only thing the redux will accomplish will be to give us new things to pick apart, bitch about and make suggestions on.

Do you not understand the concept behind the 'Suggestions' header on this forum Minen?

A lot of good changes have come about because of what people have posted here regarding the way they 'think it should be'.

My suggestion is essentially that anyway Rin, but that players should at least have to do something in-game for it to change. Otherwise it's completely meaningless like it is now. It's no trouble at all for someone to play under a character of a different race. It just means newbies who decide down the track they made the wrong choice at the start are more likely to make an alt purely to get the text colour. I'm just saying lets make it meaningful rather than A), B) or C).

But you can have a 1+ anyway.

I defer to Death Fluffy's response to Minen's poorly thought out and articulated "suggestion".

There would be some pretty significant physical differences between the Serco, Itani, and UIT if you want to get into it. The people of the UIT and grey space have lived exclusively on space stations for what, ~900 years? They're probably boneless blobs like in Wall-E by now. Just because you take a job escorting convoys for some Serco mining station doesn't mean you were born on Serco Prime and have all the augmentations and whatnot of someone who was. They'd pick you out as UIT from across the station walkway. Likewise for Serco and Itani.

Anyways, it's not "meaningless race discrimination". There's an enormous war going on with thousands of "casualties" every day and 2000 years of Vendetta behind it... This game is a sandbox. If you want nationality to matter, you have to make it matter.

My suggestion is essentially that anyway Rin

You are mistaken. Go look up the definition of "arbitrary".