Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[Lauront]

What this really comes down to is time, money and how much SE is willing to invest in them...nothing
more.

Which could, in turn, be why Yoshi-P has to give it this particular spin. Saying SE isn't willing to invest more in the game would not make his bosses seem too great. I do have faith though, that if they see the possibility for increased earnings through adding the missing genders (and also updating the graphics), it will ultimately happen, but for now using resources as an argument is more difficult to dispute than lore-based objections, in addition to probably being true, just not to the degree he states, so it's an effective statement on the matter. At least it's not a hard "no", I suppose. He's in a very difficult position as the mediator between the senior management and the consumer, as one group wants increased profits at minimal cost (and sometimes forgets this requires providing something of value to your end consumer), and the other wants increased features at higher speed at a high level of quality at the lowest possible cost. They're not really compatible notions and so he's left trying to juggle those priorities.

At this point I will just continue reminding them I would like to see the genderlock gone and the graphics updated, even if it takes till 6.0.

I'd like to believe that's true, but I'm losing faith in SE....I am 100% positive that Yoshi and his team truly want to implement all of these great things, but his hands are tied by SE and he has to operate within the times and budgets he's been allocated....there're only so many hours in a day and right now those hours are filled with polishing up 5.0 and working on content for the 5.x patch cycle and beyond.

This is why I advocate for them to stop the 3.5 month patch cycle and give themselves more time to develop quality content and requested content!

They could feasibly do it by dropping a patch and, say, work on a 4 month model but say 4 patches in total, giving them more time to focus on the polish of them. The real issue is how much content they're striving to both add and maintain. Raids, trials and dungeons are non-negotiables for them, understandably, and perhaps they would feel a stronger need to stick to 3.5 month release cycles for those, however an extra 2 weeks won't kill anyone, so the real question is more the sacrifice of the one final patch if they want to keep it on a 2 year fiscal cycle. Eureka has actually given them a way to keep people playing, provided they design it correctly.