New hrothgar hairstyles are really bad.

[Pip_Chick]

Imagine handing over a clearly half-assed work -- that doesn't even look good; to your superior.
And still be accepted or considered OK to be shown on a live broadcast.

I wish I could do that in real life without jeopardizing my job.

This! If it were ANY OTHER RACE than Hrothgar, this wouldn't even be in the discussion. But because it was Hrothgar they saw it as being perfectly acceptable! Cause what are the Hrothgar players gonna do? Complain about it? They are less than 3% of the player base and the JP players don't care about Hrothgar, it's just those westerners and F them, am I right?

Lo and behold, no one was happy with this change. Not even the JP players, who I have heard that they started some threads on their forums, it is not only ugly for the Hrothgar players but everyone that has to see them. Everyone saw this as a massive slap in the face for the Hrothgar community. They are getting backlash for it as they should!
When you promise something for more than 3+ years, don't be surprised that people will get rightfully angry about it when it's done poorly.

The thing that hurts ME the most is that everything else they showed was amazing and it is clear that the dev team put a lot of care into it, EVEN the PARASOLS got more care than a playable race, an item you can only use when you are out of battle and in idle animation! That was on their priority list, not the players that have to pay real-life money to do something that every other race would pay 2k Gill.

[Nethereal]

So who gets to pick the hairstyles that get converted? Is it the same person who decided which Female Viera hairs got ported? If so fire them.

[Shibi]

Imagine handing over a clearly half-assed work -- that doesn't even look good; to your superior.
And still be accepted or considered OK to be shown on a live broadcast.

Yoshida-san as the producer and presenter seemed to have high standards in the past, to the point he did the apology at 6.0 delay. But he waved this through, without care, when it's such amateur "artwork" that it's shocked people over all ff races, and in multiple real world countries to boot. It's rare the NA forums agree, and it's rare the JP forums come out and say something's outright horrible as well.

Honestly, he should have said "no!" and not shown it. He could have just talked about it and said they couldn't show pictures as they were WIP.

These earless hair-styles make me fear Yoshida-san is spending too much time on XVI now. I am starting to wonder after that showing if he's actually stopped caring about XIV.

[Pip_Chick]

I'm not a Hroth player, but man! I have no idea why they can't just do this correctly!? It doesn't seem like that difficult of a job. I believe 3rd Party Creators have better results than the official team! And those are just fans doing it in their spare time!

(I do not advocate using anything against the ToS!)

As a 3D modeller for games, I know what they did. And it is so baffling to me! I hate to hear people that in this regard is the 3D modeller's fault for this when no... it isn't! If it was then the problem would have been resolved in less than a few months! Cause then the easy solution would be: Rework the models! It's not rocket science! If my boss says that a model is acting weird, I will try and fix it, but if it gets too complicated and hard to work with, I put forward to my boss that this needs a rework. And I rework it with the team!
What they did was push the blame. And frankly, I won't swallow that pill, especially since they deem it necessary to create a male Viera model, why couldn't they just remake the Hrothgar model instead? And push back the Male Viera with the Female Hrothgar. Let's fix the foundation before we paint the walls, is all I say!
And I want to be clear I am not saying that male Viera was a bad addition, quite the contrary, I really like them. But you can't be telling the players that the reason for Hrothgar's limitation is because of the model and then instead of creating a less-restricting model for them, you add the counterpart for the other race. And don't get me started on the Female Hrothgar cause I can write a thesis on the 2 designs bull! Like you have made an entire model for one of them, but didn't even start on the other? At least a concept art? Yeah, good job on that one. BTW the design stage is the easiest part and the less time consuming of them all, since you put your artists to doodle on a page their interpretation, you could give them a time frame, but that is if you want them to make a mood board. Do not expect for them to come until 7.0 and even then I wouldn't put my hopes up and would keep it to a 7.5 patch folks with how little of a priority this race is that even a parasol accessory was more important and cared for!

[Pip_Chick]

So who gets to pick the hairstyles that get converted? Is it the same person who decided which Female Viera hairs got ported? If so fire them.

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a dartboard and put the number of the hairstyle on it and while blindfolded they throw the darts at the board and on the hair number it lends that one it is! I feel really bad for the blindfolded person though, they seem to be awfully unlucky.

[alsiniz]

At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a dartboard and put the number of the hairstyle on it and while blindfolded they throw the darts at the board and on the hair number it lends that one it is! I feel really bad for the blindfolded person though, they seem to be awfully unlucky.

At least with the dart board you're statistically going to pick random styles both good and bad fits, not the 6 worst possible fits.

I keep waiting for any sort of communication from the devs; an apology, a promise to rectify, or even just acknowledge the players being disappointed after 3 years of promises only to get mouldy bread crumbs.

The FFXIV team shot themselves in the foot with their own strict polygon count they imposed on themselves in ARR (and have not updated despite no longer supporting the PS3). To get around this self-imposed limitation they're offloading Hrothgar ear models from the body to the hair since the beastly Hrothgar details require more polygons than humanoids to look decent. This is why the only communications we get are "it's technically very challenging."

They already have a system for hiding/showing ears via metadata. That's why Miqo ears will show with some gear and hide with others. The structure is all there. But instead of using their existing systems and revising their own restrictions and guidelines on polygon counts, they run around like headless chickens screaming in agony about "technical difficulties."

It's extremely unprofessional and frustrating for the players who have gotten empty promise after empty promise for years.

Even with this Hrothgar crisis aside, let's look at an actual model from the game. (Lord's Clogs)



Tell me we aren't long overdue for an overhaul of 3D asset restrictions. I know MMOs are designed around having potentially over a hundred players rendered on screen at once, but it's 2022 now and the PS3 is no longer supported. The average gamer these days plays on a GTX 1060 or equivalent card according to Steam's survey.

[Larirawiel]

This is why the only communications we get are "it's technically very challenging."

It is an answer for the masses. You get the reasons behind it, i get it and some people in the forums get it too. But the average player does not care because he does not read the forums. Those "technical challenges" would be solved very quickly if the playerbase would drop due this. But as long as the players accept it, they will put their game developer/designer ressources into new shop items.



Cheers

[Laerune]

Are the Japanese players as disappointed as us?

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

Are the Japanese players as disappointed as us?

From what I recall, Hrothgar is even less played over there than they are here. So if anyone is upset about it, it's likely to be a very small subset of players.

I genuinely love Hrothgar as an addition to the game, but I constantly wonder whether they should have just benched the idea for it - or, y'know, not imposed that "this is the last race we'll ever do, probably™" limitation on themselves which made them feel forced to deliver both a race they wanted to make, and a race the playerbase had been asking for, for actual years.

Pushing out one race is challenging enough at times, especially with their limited character creator and how many 'slots' it has to work with for customization. Attempting to push two, knowing it won't work well, then putting incredibly poor limitations on them via gender choice and hairstyles was probably the biggest blunder I've ever seen them make with this game. Even with their steps to rectify some of the issues with them (adding the male counterpart to Viera and promising Hrothgals are coming, giving Viera access to some all-race hairstyles) we're still seeing half-baked and frankly pathetic treatment of both races. Hrothgar are suffering even worse, and I can assure you it's because they're not as prolific as Viera are in terms of player's choice of race.

If they were going to treat them this poorly, they should have just waited and added them after Viera were implemented properly; not hand both camps some half-baked product with severe limitations compared to all other races in the game.

At least Viera can still change their hair via the aesthetician, though, and aren't losing their ears with every new hairstyle added. I genuinely feel awful for Hrothgar players, and this does not set a good precedence for what to expect with Hrothgals in 7.0 or whenever.

They are.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...81%84%E3%81%A6

Glad to see there's at least something over there. Though the page count is worryingly small compared to over here, even when you exclude all the repeat threads about it. (Can we please work on consolidating into one thread so problems actually get noticed? Please?)

[Minali]

Are the Japanese players as disappointed as us?

They are.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...81%84%E3%81%A6