VIERA AND HROTHGAR COMPLAINT MEGATHREAD

[Puksi]

To be fair, Blizzard was way, way more transparent with the state of the Allied Races before launch of BfA, and they had the KTs/Zandalari ironed out with the first patch iirc. We knew before launch Mechagnomes weren't ever going to display arm and leg gear.

In Hrothgar and Viera, Square's done the worst of ActiBlizz and then some. The Fantasia cash grab singling out Hroth players who wanted haircuts was just a scam.

You know what would've prevented all this? Not rushing the models and welding the ears to the heads in the hat slot, and the hair to the faces in the case of Hroths.

[Avidria]

To be fair, Blizzard was way, way more transparent with the state of the Allied Races before launch of BfA, and they had the KTs/Zandalari ironed out with the first patch iirc. We knew before launch Mechagnomes weren't ever going to display arm and leg gear.

In Hrothgar and Viera, Square's done the worst of ActiBlizz and then some. The Fantasia cash grab singling out Hroth players who wanted haircuts was just a scam.

You know what would've prevented all this? Not rushing the models and welding the ears to the heads in the hat slot, and the hair to the faces in the case of Hroths.

Y'know it's funny, I've been thinking a lot about why this bothers me so much in FFXIV but the limits WoW has never bothered me nearly as much. And I think it's twofold really.
One, in WoW I played a ton of alts. I maxed multiples of my favorite class, I raided (very casually) on more than one character, I goofed off with different playstyles on different alts. So I could play every race in the game whenever I wanted at no additional cost to me. Whereas in FF... I got one character. I've already spent a stupid amount of money on fantasias because sticking with one look for too long gets boring for me. And when a race is more limited than literally every other race, with absolutely nothing to make up the difference in any way... It's harder to justify spending actual real money to change to that race. Even if it's my favorite by a very large margin otherwise.

The second is that glamour and hairstyles just generally feel like a bigger deal in FF than wow? Like wow's style is more goofy and cartoonish, but it also has a huge variety of styles, and lacks the inventory space limitations FF has for glamour. So yeah, mechagnomes can't wear arm and leg gear, and the races that don't have human feet get their boots chopped in half, but it was always like that for all of those races, always expected, and they otherwise have options on par with the races that don't have those limitations. It's part of the aesthetic really.

Whereas the only special thing about Hrothgar is their head shape (which I liken to Worgen, who could still wear hats no matter how ungodly stupid it looked) and the only special about Viera is.... they have rabbit ears instead of cat ears. Like, those limits were part of the design decisions behind them. They chose in advance to just not bother giving them more options, apparently assuming everyone would be chill with that (I vaguely remember a statement somewhere that they didn't think it would be that important? But can't remember where so meh). And just. The disparity in options is massive. Viera are barely unique at all from a player perspective. I'd argue they aren't when we have cat and lizard people already. Which just makes it even more frustrating.