Request: Hempen Garb - Racial Unlock

[Serilda]

All that dodges the point, which is that racial gear exists (indeed gear unobtainable by many combinations of jobs and genders) and this is unlikely to change at this point.

I think the fact that they have deliberately added a NPC wearing another race's underwear in the last patch calls that last point into question, especially in the wake of them going out of their way to post an official response on the previous debate thread. It completely blows apart any argument that the underwear models are special snowflake items that can only be worn by specific races, and seems like a deliberate tease when they have tended to put townspeople in the 'correct' Hempen gear historically.

What you and those who agree with you have yet to demonstrate is why Hempen alone should have it's racial lock removed. Why not make all gear available to all races and all genders and all jobs? Or is it only because underwear?

It's more that it's one of very few examples where items are race locked at all and unlike the starting gear, there's no lore reason for underpants and thermal vests to be viewed as important racial artifacts. I think some of us are pretty vocal about certain other unlocks we'd like to see happen too, except this is something everyone can get behind without so much pushback. Furthermore, it's an incredibly easy way for people to get a large number of new glamour pieces (ten completely new items for everyone!) with close to zero effort from the design team in most cases. In other words, it's a cheap way for S-E to add more content. Being a business, I'm sure S-E appreciates that they can do something relatively easy to please a large number of people.

I also think a lot of gender locks should go, for example, the Werewolf Feet versus Werewolf Legs. All werewolves have both feet and legs and the models aren't especially gendered (in fact, the female boots would hide an unsightly gap on the male legs, while I'm sure someone somewhere out there has a female character and a strange UGG boot obsession). Why lock things for the sake of locking them?

--

Editing my post.

I honestly find it hard to understand why anyone would oppose this (though I appreciate a few do). I tried to work through the arguments but none of them hold up to me.

- I don't want to use the other races' Hempen items.
- You don't have to use them.

- I don't want other people to use other races' Hempen items.
- Everyone has to deal with seeing characters they don't think look attractive now and then. We survive. If you're a roleplayer, you can even use your character's reaction to provoke interesting discussions.

- Catgirls just want access to sexy clothes so that they can be even sexier.
- So what? This is the same as the 'guys just want to wear skirts' moralising nonsense we get in the male bunny suit threads. It's not true for most people; several pieces are perfectly concealing. And even if it is true for some, it's nobody's place to police how and why other people dress their characters. If it's ok for Hyur/Au Ra/Elezen to dress sexily, it's ok for Miqo'te to do so as well. If it's ok for Miqo'te to have a tight t-shirt, it's ok for Roegadyn who want to show less skin to have that option. Whether the player is doing it to be sexy or doing it for some other reason is irrelevant; this is a game, not a church meeting.

- I only play (insert race here) because I can equip special underwear, so giving it to everyone else is unfair.
- You play a race/gender combination you don't like for underwear? Then this is good news. You can be free to choose your character's race for a different reason.

- Giving everyone more items makes everyone look the same.
- Since we can each only wear one item per slot at a time, this should never happen unless one item is substantially better than any other, overriding all matters of individual taste and turning entire servers into armies of clones. And if that's the case, I would think that the amazing item really should be available to everyone and the designers should work on creating other items with similar looks. Making everyone wear ugly gear they don't like to artifically force them to look different makes a mockery of the idea of racial diversity. Nobody's going to mistake my Elezen for a Lalafell even with the same pants on.

- It would destroy the game's established lore if people could wear different underpants.
- Proven false by NPCs ignoring the lock. Also, Yda's non-race-locked cash shop outfit borrows from one of the Hempen models, so players can ignore the lock too in certain circumstances. The only 'lore' justification is that the Highlander talismans are meant to be cultural, but if we start citing real world examples of cultural attire repurposed for fashion we'll be here all day. It's some bits of wood tied together by string. Anyone can make their own version of that.

- S-E won't do it because they made them race-locked in the first place.
- I already posted a response from the devs saying that the requested had been forwarded; now I'll post an excerpt from the JP forum. This is more attention than most other issues tend to get from the devs!

着用した際、種族ごとに異なるグラフィックになる、カミーズやアンダーシャツなどの裝備については、前向きに検討を行っています。

So as of last month, they were looking into the equipment which has a different appearance depending on the player's race, such as the Hempen Camise and Undershirt. The context of this dev response is a reply to a player who queried the question asked at the European Fan Festival; Yoshida was asked to unlock the Hempen sets but the translator didn't recognise the English names (they aren't called 'Hempen' in Japanese) and asked the wrong question. The poster of that thread corrected the error and requested that the race-locked visuals be made available to everyone; in response the Japanese team went out of their way to reply that it was being looked into.

I would say that all signs are good for unlocked Hempen appearances in the near future.