Possible Ideas to Address Hrothgar/Viera Hat Disparity?

[Reyketi]

Delete both races.

Honestly this is the third thread today about hats for races that were announced to not have hats.

Your best option is to roll a proper race and they shouldn’t pander to people making new ones in the future because the people that beg them for stuff are never happy and will keep demanding more and more.

How DARE paying customers ask for hats just because they aren't there now?!

Stop pretending like SE is a meager indie game developer.

Stop referring to giving PAYING customers what they want as "pandering" as if that's a bad thing.

This isn't a charity, it's a game for profit, if they want to continue to profit, they will meet their customer's demands.

Grow up.

Best Wishes

-Reyketi

[Yencat]

Oh wow... Didn't realize that the hairstyles actually had no hat adaptible option at all! good point... Though, if it's mostly about that, then it's even lamer, because Viera and Hroth doesn't even have a lot of hairstyles to begin with. It's literally just a matter of work, to adapt the hairstyles, and not just some crazy tinkering holding them back.

It's obviously not the only reason, but it's a pretty big one I imagine.

And because it seems they decided pretty early on that mostly no headgear was the way to go they went a bit nuts designing some of the hairstyles for Viera, several of them have so much volume on the sides and in the back I'm not even sure you can properly cull them or squish them down to even look nice under something as simple as a bandana without ruining the hairstyle itself or causing the headgear texture to stretch to a ridiculous degree.

Hrothgar has the horned face which could cause problems (Do you remove it temporarily? Let it clip through the front like Au Ra horns?) but otherwise look much more hopeful for some wearable hats than Viera honestly, but they're in their own unique predicament with the Fantasia hair change situation and really only 2 hairstyles per face.

They made a big mess creating these races to a very narrow, specific vision seemingly without taking into account how players would take being left on the sidelines for every future hairstyle or headgear piece, at least until people kept being vocal about it and they gave a vague "it isn't the best situation and we will continue to work towards alleviating these issues and making them better in the future and finding ways to make things work".

I'm somewhat hopeful they'll do what they said they would but it feels more like PR speak and we'll get thrown a few scraps at some point but no major changes. They really designed themselves into a corner here so it'll be difficult to try and make these races equal to the others (and I don't think that was ever their intent either) without fundamentally reworking them. It seems like they think the "uniqueness" makes up for the lack of everything else.

But after one and a half year I've become pretty cynical so I'd love for them to make me eat my words and prove me wrong.

[SturmChurro]

Namely, the fact that no in game rewards/ mog station purchases have warnings that specific items (hair & hat/helm) cannot be visually seen with Viera/ Hrothgar. If for nothing more, to allow players to make more informed decisions before buying mog station items they cannot use as intended, therefore wasting gil & much worse actual cash.

Mogstation did get updated. It does say when items can't be used by viera and hrothgar. It also looks like they updated to include a clipping warning:

Gear appears differently depending on the character's race. Certain combinations of gear and character type may cause clipping issues.
This head gear will not be displayed when equipped by Hrothgar or Viera characters.

Good thing they added this, but at launch it definitely wasn't there. As for in-game rewards, yeah, I don't think you really know unless you attempt to try it on as that race(?).

Oh wow... Didn't realize that the hairstyles actually had no hat adaptible option at all! good point... Though, if it's mostly about that, then it's even lamer, because Viera and Hroth doesn't even have a lot of hairstyles to begin with. It's literally just a matter of work, to adapt the hairstyles, and not just some crazy tinkering holding them back.

Right? I'm still holding out hope that Viera will get a ton of new hairs or something 6.0, hrothgar with the whole fantasia thing sucks the most.

It's obviously not the only reason, but it's a pretty big one I imagine.

And because it seems they decided pretty early on that mostly no headgear was the way to go they went a bit nuts designing some of the hairstyles for Viera, several of them have so much volume on the sides and in the back I'm not even sure you can properly cull them or squish them down to even look nice under something as simple as a bandana without ruining the hairstyle itself or causing the headgear texture to stretch to a ridiculous degree.

Hrothgar has the horned face which could cause problems (Do you remove it temporarily? Let it clip through the front like Au Ra horns?) but otherwise look much more hopeful for some wearable hats than Viera honestly, but they're in their own unique predicament with the Fantasia hair change situation and really only 2 hairstyles per face.

They made a big mess creating these races to a very narrow, specific vision seemingly without taking into account how players would take being left on the sidelines for every future hairstyle or headgear piece, at least until people kept being vocal about it and they gave a vague "it isn't the best situation and we will continue to work towards alleviating these issues and making them better in the future and finding ways to make things work".

I'm somewhat hopeful they'll do what they said they would but it feels more like PR speak and we'll get thrown a few scraps at some point but no major changes. They really designed themselves into a corner here so it'll be difficult to try and make these races equal to the others (and I don't think that was ever their intent either) without fundamentally reworking them. It seems like they think the "uniqueness" makes up for the lack of everything else.

But after one and a half year I've become pretty cynical so I'd love for them to make me eat my words and prove me wrong.

They could always do what other games do and like use a universal hat "hair". I like how creative they were with the viera hairs, but because of this it looks like we have gotten a complete lack of options, and no access to purchased hairstyles - not even the promised racial specific at this point.

I've gotta say, I don't really think the limitations were worth this whole unique vision or whatever for viera/hrothgar. Not being limited, and having access to what the other races have would have been better..

If we don't get anything by 6.0, at best I will be pleasantly surprised if these races receive any updates, but I won't hope or even expect them at that point. So many years with nothing by then..

[reivaxe]

Delete both races.

Honestly this is the third thread today about hats for races that were announced to not have hats.

Your best option is to roll a proper race and they shouldn’t pander to people making new ones in the future because the people that beg them for stuff are never happy and will keep demanding more and more.

I agree that they shouldn't make pander races, if they didn't want to make Viera they shoulda just did full Hrothgar as much like with Draggos it was a thing they wanted to make.

But the genie is outta the bottle now so "delete em" isn't a constructive stance. They won't even fix Elezen's crap run cycle cause "what if people who play it LIKE it???" and they know that's a massive part of why they're not popular.

There's already a setting to turn ears completely off they could use for hats that are large enough to feasibly fit the ears inside them, they wouldn't need to worry about them coming out the sides or top of the hat.



They can't just let the ears clip through more items because the ears aren't really the problem in most cases, it's the hair. The only reason the hood models work on us is because they make you bald underneath, a select few helmets that completely replace the head and hair also work, and small items that sit on top of the hair like a hairpin and don't require any further modification to the hair itself.

The bigger reason we don't have more (but definitely not all) working headgear isn't the ears clipping through or Hrothgar's face proportions at all, but the fact that they didn't make 2 models of the same hairstyle like they normally do that hide parts of the hair where the hat would sit when you equip it. Because this second, partially culled 'hat-hairstyle' doesn't exist for Viera and Hrothgar, if you were to force certain hats to show like in the image I posted earlier then the Hrothgar simply goes bald and Viera's ears and hair clips straight through it.

If they made partially culled 'hat-versions' of our hairstyles like they normally do then a lot more items would be able to be used while either hiding the ears or letting them clip through where appropriate.

Unless you're talking about a small number of hats I think you're getting your order mixed up.

It's not a case of "They just didn't make the hat hair model :v".
It's more like "They didn't intend for these races to wear hats so they didn't make a hat hair model".

No matter how you toss it Viera ears are a problem. They would NOT turn them invisible as that legit defeats the whole purpose of the race and they already look like straight cheap trash clipping through the few hoods/ bucket helms they are allowed to wear. (I mean, I can't speak for them but it's how they treat tails in that unless something is meant to cover/ replace it it just stays there)
The best option IMO for Viera (Hrothgar having to give up the mane for hats is kinda a problem to seeing as that's linked to CC but they're willing to take away that mane so ehh) would be to make a hat hair model with the ears poking out through the bottom. Because remodeling holes into every hat and making the "floppy ears" work for anything would just be far harder.

But again, you would have to have 4 different "Hat hair models" or "hat models" that have the 4 different ear models sticking outta the bottom that may also have to relate to the size selected for the ears as well as hair and highlights colors. No other race gets that amount of effort to accommodate their racial CC options.

So yeah ... they decided to give Viera the freedom to customize their ears at the cost of head gear as ear customization on that scale would make it hard af to make head gear, so that's why they didn't bother making the hat hair models in the first place.

[Nihility]

Seems like some people are forgetting that what they really said was "they won't have headgear on release and will be added in batches at a later date"

In my opinion, all they would have to do to appease me is 'anything' even if it was every patch only got 1 or 2 headgears. Show me your putting any level of thought into it and I would be happy.
As it is a ton of brand new stuff doesn't even work so it's literally the opposite. They're slowly digging the hole deeper every patch instead of slowly fixing it

[Jojoya]

Stop pretending like SE is a meager indie game developer.

Stop acting like any game developer is capable of doing anything you demand.

Stop referring to giving PAYING customers what they want as "pandering" as if that's a bad thing.

Except that's exactly what it is. Companies specialize in the product they want to be making. Changing the product to pacify a very vocal few is in fact pandering.

This isn't a charity, it's a game for profit, if they want to continue to profit, they will meet their customer's demands.

They've been profiting all along without meeting your, or anyone else's, demands. They don't need to meet your demands to continue to profit.

Businesses that spend too much time meeting "demands" tend to quickly go out of business because those who make the demands rarely know what it is that made the product successful in the first place.

SE would have been far better off never adding Viera and Hrothgar because then time wouldn't be getting wasted reacting to your demands.

Grow up.

Hope you were looking at yourself in the mirror when you wrote that.

[reivaxe]

Seems like some people are forgetting that what they really said was "they won't have headgear on release and will be added in batches at a later date"

In my opinion, all they would have to do to appease me is 'anything' even if it was every patch only got 1 or 2 headgears. Show me your putting any level of thought into it and I would be happy.
As it is a ton of brand new stuff doesn't even work so it's literally the opposite. They're slowly digging the hole deeper every patch instead of slowly fixing it

My goodness ...

They said that line when the races were getting ZERO head gear other than Mascot heads upon release.

The stuff they got on release, the glasses and mask and blindfolds and all that stuff they could wear? Yeah, that was what they intended on "adding bit by bit" post release. But he said that when he didn't know that the devs snuck behind his back and did all that work anyway to have it done for release.

[SturmChurro]

My goodness ...

They said that line when the races were getting ZERO head gear other than Mascot heads.

The stuff they got on release, the glasses and mask and blindfolds and all that stuff they could wear? Yeah, that was what they intended on "adding bit by bit" post release. But the devs snuck behind his back and did it anyway to have it done for release.

Yes, the thing we were supposedly supposed to get over time was hair.. They haven't given us any in a year and a half..

[Lumivyory]

Here's the thing ... people asked for Viera. Fran is what you think of when you think Viera. They are an established races in FF lore/ games with a canon look. They can't really know that people would sploosh over "Updated Miqote with longer ears (their ears are NOT in the same position as Viera as is so this would legit just be kitty head with upscaled and altered ears) and a bunny tail!" even though that would likely be more popular than the Viera are now.

I see what you mean. But I feel like they could have done FFXIV Viera design slightly different from Fran but not so different as to make them Miqo'te with bunny ears.
Like, if the fact that the ears stand straight up and would clip too much through most of big hats is one of the problems - put them slightly to the sides but not as far as Miqo ears. And if the shape of the head is something preventing us from using old hairstyles - make it somewhere in between. Different but not so different that old hairstyles would be hard to fit on them.

Though judging by what was shown in this thread I'm pretty sure the devs can already put other hairstyles on them but they don't because other hairstyles have the "hat versions" and Viera hair don't. Hopefully that will change in the future.

Changing the product to pacify a very vocal few is in fact pandering.

So is it "very vocal few" or is it "there are too many threads about this"? Because that is pretty contradictory. A lot of people want changes and updates.
But you know why else there are "very few" people? Because nobody wants to play Viera and Hroth anymore other than some dedicated players. I barely see anyone playing them, instead just a million cats and a thousand lizards. Hell, there are more hyurs and roe right now.

[reivaxe]

Except that's exactly what it is. Companies specialize in the product they want to be making. Changing the product to pacify a very vocal few is in fact pandering.

This is true, they legit made it clear that they only added Viera to please people who have been begging for them since before HW revealed the Draggos cause this was likely the last chance to please them.
It's a choice to pander to people who just wanted to play dress up with a bun.

IMO it's clear that most times a MMO adds a new race it's more so to fill a gap in their line up and add visual diversity to their product as to attract a larger audience than they currently have. If all they wanted to do was pander to please people already playing the game all they would have to do would be ... make a 3rd Miqote clan with new faces and/ or make a Half Elezen Human that's just a Meddie with Elezen ears, new faces and emotes. It's super easy to pander to the wants of people who just want different pretty spins on basic human design for their anime waifu/ hubs, but it's not really worth the effort or room that it takes up. That's where the problem with Viera come in at, it feels like an addition that doesn't add anything new and now we have to hear everyone wanting more effort tossed their way cause they're a limited race that a ton of people converted to.

Yes, the thing we were supposedly supposed to get over time was hair.. They haven't given us any in a year and a half..

This is true, but at least it's a thing that they said and reaffirmed more than once (that they would add new hair to Viera and new manes and faces to Hrothgar). At this rate I think it may just be a 6.0 thing really, but Bozja Hroths have me thinking that it's at least closer than that.

I see what you mean. But I feel like they could have done FFXIV Viera design slightly different from Fran but not so different as to make them Miqo'te with bunny ears.

It's not really a matter of half stepping it. Miqote are the only race in this game with non-traditional ear placement and full funtional head stuff and they were in this game from the start.

In order to use the Miqote head system for gear they would have to be in the same spot on the head (YP outright said that). They would also have to not have customization so that they could act like Miqote ears. They could likely make Miqote ears that are up scaled and altered some and translate that into easy to do upscales to a number of hats/ helms but they wouldn't look like what he have.