So housing issues get addressed by Yoshi-P immediately, but Hrothgar...?

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Originally Posted by Raim

And what about the modding community that implemented ears onto the new hair(s) in a single day? Or the dozen+ hairs from other races they added to Hrothgar already? Not that I condone such things, but one has to question why its easy for them but nigh impossible for the XIV staff.

It probably has to do with the workflow and that it has to be approved by multiple people at different stage of development. A modder can lift premade assets, they don't need to limit themselves on polygon count, shading, if it needs to fit with the lore (which probably doesn't happen too often), if it doesn't infrige on another product from a different company (even if it it looks even remotely similar, it might cause issues -> it gets the axe), and they don't need to ask someone to do some preliminary sketches in different colors,on different humans to see how it would look like. Then when everything is done, QC and QA's feedback and requests comes around (that probably nobody listen to because everyone is pressed for time). However, they should need to implement atleast a few fixes. If you remember pre-release hrothgar hair clipping, that's probably what caused all the wait -- as in, that could've pushed them to try and release a proper, done product rather than half-baked. Tuns out it was still half-baked,so I think we can all agree they failed on that.. ;)

Atleast, that would be to add new hairstyles. However, if it's the same team that deal with the new hairstyles that have to implement the older ones on new models.. If they have to do both at the same time, I can see how, and why it took that long.

Plus.. they aren't necessarily well paid. Most small/mid modders do that for free, on their own time. Bigger modders got patreons and way to gate their mods behind paywalls, but they're also at constant risk of legal threat for selling things that they don't (necessarily) own.

That being said, none of this should've been a problem in the first place. The team in charge of it should've been allocated more people to help with the workload since the very beginning, considering how challenging it has been. It was forseen by someone working there somewhere, and they should've been listened to. It doesn't make the situation acceptable one bit, and they should 100% get to work on it posthaste. I do get it though, from an human point of view. Game dev isn't that easy, especially for a corporation that does not care about you as a worker and a human being one bit, but cares about your skills as an asset for them to use. You kinda don't have to deal with that, and deadlines as a modder, I guess. That's a reasonable obstacle to me.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the other race-locked hairstyles are definitely coded and set in-game. Maybe they want to keep exclusive hairstyles to faces? I'm not sure why NPCs do not respect this rule though, if they don't.. why would the player have this restriction on them? It's very strange. I hope they will change their minds.

tl;dr = A lot more people are involved in the process. Mod creators just bypass these restrictions entirely, and they have a lot more (creative?) freedom. They can also lift assets of other games or the internet, have no proper limit to what they can add to the game, which skip all the barriers that the game devs have to go through within the company.