Option to Grandfather Older Characters

[Xersaoth]

Changes to classes can be very disruptive for many people, as they may negatively affect their main or even multiple, if not all, characters. A lot of effort may have been put into optimizing their gear for older builds, making any changes heartbreaking for some players we all know and love.

Additionally, some older classes and races have been grandfathered, even though they are no longer playable.

So, instead of forcing older characters to relevel, why not just let them be and provide it as an option instead?

P.S. I understand that some mechanics are being reworked at the code level, but would it not be cool to save and have some "old-school" characters running around as well?

[Kalopsia]

This would be quite problematic for three reasons:

1. It would be very tricky to implement, as a fair chunk of class mechanics is configured via global lookup tables (so-called 2DAs). Changing their values would inevitably affect older characters, and maintaining a separate version of them for each class iteration is unrealistic.
2. This limitation extends to scripts as well. You're asking us to introduce a lot of duplication in our code base, which not only makes development slower (longer compile times), but also leads to a lot of legacy code that needs to be maintained. We don't have the developer capacity to support that.
3. Updates happen for a reason. We wouldn't want "monk summer" katana monks with inflated numbers running around just because they hit a "-grandfather" command in time.

I understand the intention behind this request and sympathise with it, but for the above reasons this is not going to happen in the foreseeable future.