Race Heights

[Lusavari]

It has the option to be sorted by height, and 5'7" is really not terribly more prevalent than any other value and definitely quite correlated with countries in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. North America and Europe are very clearly higher at about 5'9" or more... I'd hardly call 5'7" universal.

Keep in mind there's also a few entries such as multiple ones for the US where they've singled out sub-populations like Mexican Americans or Black Americans, or there's factors like the percent of the whole national population sampled in that study, the age ranges included, etc. All the columns need to be taken into account to get the full picture.

You are right... But you also have to keep in mind populations. China and India are going to skew the over all statistics to the left. That draws the world average down, because you have 2 populations accounting for nearly 3/7ths of the over all population (With China around 1.4b and India being around 1.2b). European nations account for far less. The whole of Europe + the US accounts for 1 billion. People's Republic of China is right at 5'7", which "China" listed at 5'8", but I presume by China, it means The Republic of China... or Taiwan as we call it, which is a lot less populous. A lot of the South American nations don't report in for males on the list, but extrapolating from the female scores listed... a lot of them are going to have smaller than average males too, pulling the world population down.

[Myranda]

You are right... But you also have to keep in mind populations. China and India are going to skew the over all statistics to the left. That draws the world average down, because you have 2 populations accounting for nearly 3/7ths of the over all population (With China around 1.4b and India being around 1.2b). European nations account for far less. The whole of Europe + the US accounts for 1 billion. People's Republic of China is right at 5'7", which "China" listed at 5'8", but I presume by China, it means The Republic of China... or Taiwan as we call it, which is a lot less populous. A lot of the South American nations don't report in for males on the list, but extrapolating from the female scores listed... a lot of them are going to have smaller than average males too, pulling the world population down.

As true as that may be, I don't see a full global average as a relevant statistic here. It would wash away the entire point of this exercise, which is comparing different races/clans. This is all about the sub-populations, not a single global average.

Besides, what would you compare that to? The average of just all hyurs combined? Do lalafells count in the Eorzean global average too? What weights do you assign the Eorzean populations in the averaging? (e.g. do you follow the lore when it says miqo'te males are not very populous and thus rarely seen, or do you follow how many players actually make male miqo'te for their characters?) There's just not much in the way of meaningful comparisons with a single global value.

It still also doesn't support the idea in your original reply that Highlanders would correspond to America while Midlanders would be European, because regardless of what's going on in Asia or Africa or what total populations are, Europe is still on average slightly taller than America so it makes no sense to associate the taller clan with the shorter RL population...

Anyways, I stand by my assessment I've done so far, and it still won't change what the relative heights between the races are, miqo'te will always be smaller than hyurs, etc. Everything will scale up/down together, there's no increasing just one race while decreasing the other ones. Others are free to change the 170cm standard height in their own copy of the spreadsheet if they want to, but I'm keeping it at that unless we hear otherwise from Ferne or another loremaster.