Race does make a difference in the end, but that can be compensated for and balanced if need be. As a thief if you don't wanna go Mithra (the cat girls), TaruTaru have good agi, and if you don't like little people go Hume. Galka and Elvaan are the lowest primary stat wise, but have other advantages like good str and vit. The thieves main role later will be to control aggro by using trick attack to pin his major damage attack's on the warrior.
Consider also what other jobs you may want to play, if you like damaging melee, you may also want to look into shadowknight later, in which case any race can be good.
If you aren't sure what job to play, definantly look into hume, they are wide balanced and I suspect they do any job pretty well.
Picking your nation isn't a diffult decision, picking the home city of your race will get you a decent ring for the first 15-20 levels, but the area layout here is pretty standard between nations, so you won't find the problem where you are trapped or can't find a good place to hunt. Windurst might be slightly harded since not many people stick around that area after 15, but once you need to leave to find people, it won't be that much of a problem. You can always switch to another nation, there are penalties, but it isn't to bad. There are a few quests that might sway you, Windurst has a really funny multi-quest with lots of character integrated animation sequences involving a gang of kids and the cat burglar, there is also an abundance of so-cute-you'll-puke characters. Bastok has alot of interesting quests involving the stressed galka/hume relationship. San d'Oria has some interesting quests with dramatic sequences and really creepy church people, I am not sure how the PS2 works, but unless you have a powerful computer, you may wanna stay away from San d'Oria, the forest can give horrible fps rates.
On roleplaying I don't think people will get annoyed unless you take role playing to the extreme and start talking like Shakespere, or refuse to play with someone because they aren't playing their role or spam them with inane messages about the might and power of whatever nation.
There aren't any 'official' roleplaying servers, but there are role-playing linkshells (guilds) about. I saw one post and I think Seraph server has alot of rolplayers and a big roleplay linkshell, maybe look into finding a World Pass there, if you can find the post, contact the guy and I am sure he will hook you up or you can just make/delete chars until you hit seraph (if you have two char slots, just spam make a char with default options until you hit the server, then leave it on there and use the second slot to make your real char and he will automatically go to that server, world pass is easier).
Like I said, the PS2 American release may change things, but there aren't that many l33t h4x0rs in game, most people chat normally as though in a civil internet chatroom, you know, typos and no capitals (even on sentence starts and names, heh)
PS. I just noticed after posting you fould the RP guild I was talking about...
Edited, Thu Jan 29 20:02:39 2004 by Ralluwen