As i player, I wouldn’t use those suggested templates at all, but I’m an experienced gamer. Newer gamers would definitely benefit from the templates. It’s a little touchy, though, because it seems like these are the recommended specs from the designers, and any other choices could be inferior. I think most players are intelligent enough to recognize that they probably aren’t the optimal template for any given playstyle, though.

Anyway, offering default templates for players would also allow designers to give more options without them being overwhelming, which is a good thing (it doesn’t eliminate that it makes it more difficult to balance, but it still fixes one issue).

I’ve never heard any players complain that character classes weren’t cookie-cutter enough (unless you count demands for “respec” as a symptom of that problem), but the lack of freedom in determining character progression is a common complaint.

Basically, keep it simple and gradually introduce your player into the more complex aspects of the game. Good: Having a low-level pet-based class have a few damage abilities, a pet heal, maybe a couple buffs/debuffs. As they get higher in level give them more utility and abilities, maybe adding some crowd control abilities like stuns and roots, different AE abilities, new ways to customize their pet. Bad: Giving them all of that from that get-go. People need to be eased into the system. WoW does a good job of this IMHO, but partly because they’ve managed to keep choices meaningful without overloading the system with tons of random crap.

And for the love of god, don’t ask for important decisions to be made at character creation that a newbie won’t understand the consequences of until 50 levels and 70+ hours of gameplay in.

Even for the people like me, there’s a point that there are just too many options, and I become gun-shy about making bad choices.

Could it be that the game has a poor design if there are choices that can be made that are seen as worthless to the players class? You’ll also have to look at the fact that the ‘game’ might be trying to give multiple choices to better fit the different play styles of gamers they are trying to attract.

But I do feel that a fundamental design philosophy should be that of making sure each skill / attribute / spell in a game has multiplayer instances of need in the game.

- Make sure to design chunkable game mechanics.

Too many options becomes a failure in this regard. Becomes “Kosterian Noise”…

http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun04/toomany.html

If it were fairly simple to re-spec your points as you went through the game and learned how you wanted to play would you still keep them in your pocket till the end?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

Segregating options into trees/classes etc is fine….that just organizes choices, it doesn’t reduce them. Unless you restrict choices so that only an X can do Y….

Why is difficulty finding the “perfect profile” a problem and why is reducing choices a good solution?

If it takes too much time and money to have lots of choices, fine just say say so. But the ‘it’s too haaarrd to make up my mind’ justification doesn’t seem persuasive to me. Case in point: when is the last time you heard someone criticize City of Heros for having too many character creation choices?