Gender locked race?

[Gwenorai]

I'll wait for you to provide a rule that states a new playable race must be teased before it's implemented.

I actually don't recall one game where the developer hasn't teased an upcoming playable race. I honestly can't think of one. I'm sure there's some out there? But really, I can't think of one. Does anyone recall a developer doing this, ever? I'm actually curious if this is a business practice some developers do?

I honestly thought it was a given to communicate with your player base regarding such things; especially when the new playable race is locked behind a paywall. It gives them time to prepare or set aside funds. I know people who got HW just so they could play Au'ra when they only wanted to test the base game.

I can't imagine just starting up my game and suddenly wham, a new race. One that wasn't even hinted at until they implemented it. Why would I even bother to check the CC or buy a fantasia, why would I even prepare or go out and buy an expansion to lift the paywall? I certainly wouldn't preorder because of it, because I can't turn back time to do so. How would you use it as a selling point? And if they weren't using it as a selling point then it shows how little they actually care about it. They're not even bothering to hype it.

I don't know, I am confusion...

[Shippuu]

I agree with the point regarding rank and rule. So yes Yoshida can overrule. But that does bring up another question; he's very high up, and he represents Square. Regarding something that is as touchy as gender locking a race in our times. He reverted it once and was met with universal praise. While bringing it back, that's something that isn't going to meet with approval but seen as a backwards view. Yes, he'll be sticking to his guns - but in the end, it's going to hurt his image and squares. Because yet again, it's a backward view and people will glom on that. All it takes is folks to broadcast, Twitter, Reddit, Twitch etc.

Here's that assumption that a gender locked race being added to the game will somehow cause this very successful game to suddenly catastrophically fail? He reverted the gender locks before because 1.0 did fail to the point of damaging the Final Fantasy brand. He needed to do whatever he could to regain favor, and he did so by fixing as many of the complaints as he could.
Once again people are greatly overestimating the kind of impact this would have. He's still adding the most requested race, and that's Viera that have only ever been shown as female. It's a much smaller demographic who wanted male viera, and if he thinks a brand new race would be better for marketability (especially when his primary goal is to get new players) then taking a chance on something different may pay off better than any small negative hit he might take.

Now that backlash could be big or small, but the backlash is backlash. We only see a small amount of it regarding BLU, I've seen so much more in discords, twitter, Reddit and other social media outlets. TLDR; the forums are just a small part of it. People are screaming all over the place regarding BLU, and I imagine they will listen, they have to since the class is in such a sorry state.

Except he's come out saying Blue Mage was still a success, with something like 70% positive. So your personal anecdotes on how much complaining is going on may not be an accurate picture (nor could SE's statement on Blue Mage being positive).

I think the backlash would be considerable regarding male Viera.

It would be loud for a little bit, but would certainly be far from "considerable". In the end he could easily just net brownie points again by implementing them in the future if it really was that bad of a situation.

While it's acceptable in Eastern MMOs; it isn't so much in Western MMOs, and that's where the money will haemorrhage.

Huge assumption. The game won't hemorrhage money if they don't put in male viera. This is some seriously overexaggerated doomsaying. There are plenty of MMO's on the market that have done just fine even with gender locking.

Western MMOs do not have gender locks - why? Demographic, political correctness, etc.

I mean, they do, one of the biggest upcoming western made MMO's is Crowfall which has had great success in crowdfunding (showing people are willing to finance it) and it has both gender and race locks to classes. Other western MMO's have done it in the past and you'd be hard pressed to prove it was because of gender restrictions caused them to fail and not because of plenty of other issues.

Business; in the end, this is all a business. Money matters. A new race will come, that's for certain. We have Viera, and that's a lot of money in Fantasias and the likes. A lot of money. Male Viera done 'correctly' close to the female but not straying too much; more money. A race that hasn't been shown or previewed or hinted at seems like more of a gamble in regards to that income.

As I mentioned above, they want to attract new players, potentially people who have never played a Final Fantasy game in their life. By this alone, they may be more willing to try something new in order to attempt to appeal to a wider or untapped demographic. A new, more unique race could potentially do this and be more marketable than playable bunny guys.

In the end, gender locking will always be something that takes away from the freedom of the player who is affected by it. It stings even more in an RPG - and even more so in an MMORPG as there is no hiding from the choice they made. And while we can take the lumps and deal with it - there is no reason why those who were slighted should stay silent about it.

Everything they add to the game can negatively affect one player or another. Adding jobs as certain roles takes the freedom from players as well. Something that's almost purely only cosmetic like a player race, is less impactful than jobs/classes.
And no one is saying anyone should stay silent about anything. By all means make noise if they don't happen. I'll be sympathetic for those who wanted it if it doesn't come. But there will also be people who would probably be happy to get something other than male viera if they weren't interested in Viera anyways.

I actually don't recall one game where the developer hasn't teased an upcoming playable race. I honestly can't think of one. I'm sure there's some out there? But really, I can't think of one. Does anyone recall a developer doing this, ever? I'm actually curious if this is a business practice some developers do?

I think you're conflating teasing a player race in general, to direct in-game teasing. I was talking specifically about the argument that no new race could possibly be added to the game because there's nothing in the current lore/game that hints towards it. (Which isn't necessarily true anyways, there could be hints and we just don't realize it.)
World of Warcraft is a prime example, when they announced their allied races and pulled a new one out of no-where basically in the Void Elfs. They didn't exist until you did the unlock scenario in game that showed their creation.
Guild Wars could be an example of this depending on how you consider Guild Wars 1 to Guild Wars 2, where they made up a brand new race that wasn't anywhere in Guild Wars 1. Could be argued they're different games, but part of the same IP and story/setting.
Adding races to MMO's isn't a particularly common practice anyways because it's a ton of work, so examples will be few and far between of either way.

I honestly thought it was a given to communicate with your player base regarding such things; especially when the new playable race is locked behind a paywall. It gives them time to prepare or set aside funds. I know people who got HW just so they could play Au'ra when they only wanted to test the base game.

Did your friend buy it before they even announced Au Ra? Did they buy it purely on the fact Yugiri was in the game? It'd be no different with this potential new race. It'd be announced and advertised.
They'd have 3 months to hype up any new race, combined with the fact the next fanfest will be close to the time they would be releasing the benchmark anyways. A new race would be advertised and the word would be out there.

I can't imagine just starting up my game and suddenly wham, a new race.

Yeah, you're definitely mistaking that I was talking about a build up/hints in game leading up to the announcement of the race.

[Fland]

To be fair, they also said that the male developers were "too uncomfortable" to design the outfits, and that they were handing them to the female designers.

lol what design?
It's exactly the same as the original female only version.
They basically just.... removed the lock.

Anyway,
I don't know if this have been mentioned before, but I'm hoping that the reason they hold the reveal of male viera is because there will be an important male viera msq character with unique model (a la aymeric/gosetsu/hien) who will be present in the full ShB trailer (perhaps in the extension of Urianger/Y'Shtola scene?), and they don't want to reveal the full trailer yet until JP fanfest.

[Crushnight]

We're about to get at least female Viera playable, who are severely seclusive and not seen anywhere else in the world until they're going to be everywhere come 5.0, including the 2.0 story. We also haven't even been to, or see half of the world of Hydalaen, there's a whole lot out there we have no clue about until SE puts it into their game.

Please stop exaggerating Player characters do not exist only your own character exists in any story within the game you also said yourself with Au Ra how absent they were in HW and how it took till we went to Othard in SB to start seeing an actual healthy population of them. Viera will be no different we might get a few npcs outside the wood but any sort of a decent population will be confined to those woods.

[Gwenorai]

Snip

No one is assuming the fall of a game, I'm saying the backlash is something to consider. That repeating mistakes that a previous developer made is not the way to go. He took a step in the right direction, he looked at those complaints and he fixed what he could. This is a good developer. You know what isn't good? Going from that and then slapping a gender lock back onto something again.

We've just had our first limited class.
There is a possibility that we will be getting our second-course of limited races.
- It doesn't help that this will be one after the other that is starting to make people uncomfortable. I honestly expect Dancer to be female only at this rate if the sole reason that Viera male isn't added is due to them being uncomfortable about it due to 'cuteness'. So now we're going to have a bunch of strapping young lads dancing around with grace and elegance.

How is this okay? Because it worked with other communities it'll be fine in this one? I really do not understand this logic where something bad has happened, you revert it, but then you add it back in again and NOT expect people to think that was an idiotic move and not go 'wtf'. He is a smart man, I can't imagine this happening because of how stupid it sounds on paper.

He reverted a gender lock, the community thought that was the end of it. He asked for races, people voted Viera. The assumption can be made that due to what happened and how silly it would be to return to those times that male Viera would be included.

As for the demographic, no one knows that demographic because we don't have that data. That's just as much of an assumption to make than people assuming that a gender locked race is going to make people flinch away from it.

70% positive? Where are you getting that, where are they getting that? Don't tell me they're getting that number from how many players are active vs how many actually picked up the quest. Or is it an on forum poll where only a small portion of the community voted? The same argument could be said for the race poll as well I suppose.

If he's adding in a new race for marketability he should do what all people do when they're trying to make a profit. Advertise their product. Where is the advertising for this new race? We don't know, they haven't shown it yet. Viera was used for marketability right on time for preorders. Where is the other one? If there new to FF then the current races aren't going to matter; they wouldn't have seen those races before!

And while adding in a completely new race could be the better option, it doesn't look all that great when the race you're adding is supposedly another feline race when you already have one! Out of all the things to pick from and then, they're just going to slap on a gender lock on that one as well. Creating a brand new race is one thing, something that is new and unique to the game that a lot of people can enjoy, like au'ra. But to create a brand new race and then slap a gender lock on it is a new thing entirely. It'd be like releasing Aura again but only having one gender.

If they're going to gender lock Viera then I'd rather they didn't gender lock the other race that has no need to be gender locked. In fact, I'd rather have them not release any other race at all if they're just going to lock them.

As for the friend, no, they're new. They bought into after seeing others using that race and thankfully for them, it wasn't gender locked.

Sigh - I honestly can't be chuffed to argue anymore; as we just end up talking in circles and then over exaggerations on what the other is saying. Actually getting lowkey tiresome. So I'm just going to leave it as agree to disagree and the likes.

[Roda]

lol what design?
It's exactly the same as the original female only version.
They basically just.... removed the lock.

I mean they had to model, uv, texture, and weight the outfits to fit the males' bodies. "Design" was a bad word, but they did have to develop them.

[Rokke]

Two, you act like this fanbase doesn't get whipped up over everything anyways. And three, they did exactly that with Blue Mage, having the CEO come out dressed as one, made a big dramatic show of it, to only "pull the rug out from under them" with it being a limited job. Of which they didn't even go into detail until the next day. They could absolutely do exactly the same thing with a new race.

They announced BLU as limited on it’s introduction slide and then further elaborated at the same event's live letter. I was there lol. They quickly explaining the limited nature of it AT THE SAME EVENT instead of letting people’s imaginations run wild till release, a few months later. We knew exactly what level it would stop at. We knew exactly how many spells we would learn on release. Most importantly: we knew exactly what we could and couldn't run with it.

The equivalent would have been to introduce the female only race and explain that it was female only on day 2. Which they didn't.

[Kupocoubo]

We will soon reach 100 pages, Im so proud of y'all
Male Vieras 4 life

[xbahax92]

1. They have concept art already for the new areas and 2 jobs planned as well as a new race. One job has it's concept art and the other has animation data.
2. Viera isn't the only new race.

The very first leak he mentions a new race, and 5 months later he talks about a 2. race... Something seems foul to me.

When Lupin got introduced with the SB Trailer, people thought about a new, playable race. Nobody knew about them. SE didnt announce anything like them during the SB FanFests, yet people made an small uproar about them - started speculating.
In the end, the Lupin ended up as unplayable race, as NPC's. Can only speculate about Revs being bara cats, being used as new-lupin race...

[redcurrant18]

Can only speculate about Revs being bara cats, being used as new-lupin race...

I hope so. Eventually it would be amazing if we could get a bestial race like Lupin or Ronso but now is not the time nor the place.