A letter to the Devs, Producers, and whoever else has a say

[ChocoFeru]

This is so simple that I can't believe it's still a thing to talk about.

Ronso were the original upcoming race. Male and Female.
Players were asking for Viera, so they deleted female Ronso in order to make Female Viera.
There were resources to make 2 new races, not 4, so they decided to make Male Ronso and Female Viera. That's what we can get FOR NOW.

This is not sexist. This is not a backward step. It's just what we can get for now.

You can ask them to make Male Viera and Female Ronso, but if you feel betrayed or disappointed, that's your own problem. You choosed to be selfish and impatient, and that's not SE's fault.


Anyways, I rather have Male Ronso and Female Viera instead of yet another boring "humanoid" race.


So, for me, SE choosed the best option here. Now it's your turn to choose;

1: Be patient and ask for Male Viera and Female Ronso for future expansions.
2: Be a child and spamm the forums with nonsense accusations, looking for some attention.

[Halivel]

1: Be patient and ask for Male Viera and Female Ronso for future expansions.

Note: most of people do this option. There are some selfish persons, but well, we can't erase them, and should not judge whole group of requesting players based on those who makes it in an inappropriate manner. To be quite honest, maybe we should stop bump such threads so they will be able to die in depth of Forum, and use megathreads instead which are reasonable and positive enough.

[Joven]

Where was this passion for the male/female counter-parts for these races years ago?

Why not just make this a suggesting instead of demanding the Development team to drop everything they are doing and pour resources into every whim and desire.

Stop thinking like a consumer for a moment and put yourselves in the shoes of a developer/character concept artist for a large triple-a game studio; the compromise for the Viera seemed very realistic to me.

And who is to say that they aren't working on male/female versions? Maybe this is something tucked away for the future of the game and this is a short-term solution?

"But I want it NOW" is essentially what these threads boil down to.

[Joven]

Agree with this. And looking at amount of likes in main Megathread you can say it is quite loud reaction. Much more loud than it was with Eureka and BLU for example, and it's not like everyone who is interested came on forum so there is definetely more people who worries about this without actual reaction. Forum itself is a minority of community, but it's still the representation of playerbase so using likes on threads as statistic can be more or less accurate.

These forums can't be used as acurate data because you're only seeing on side of the data: the "likes". If the primary post had both a "like" and a "dislike" button then you'd see an entirely different metric. The fact that the only way people who disagree with what's posted is to either post their disagreement or ignore the post skews the data since not everyone feels the need to voice their opinion. If they had the option to drop a "dislike" and move on there would be a more acurate depiction of the forum community and just the forum community since not all players use the forums.

[Kaedan]

It doesn't matter how many people wanted Viera or how many wanted Hrothgar or whether they wanted male or female or both. Time is time, resources are resources, and facts are facts: They didn't have time to make two races with both males and females. They only had to time to make two genders. So instead of doing male and female Hrothgar, they chose to make the male Hrothgar and the female Viera.

If they had the time and resources to do both, they would have. It has nothing to do with SE and Yoshida not wanting to do it or trying to piss off people. Simply not enough time.

In an interview, Yoshida said they are open to making the missing genders, but he can't make any promises. "The most important thing" he said was that they aren't saying "no" to the missing genders.

[Senn]

...

I had somewhat of the same discussion you're having right now. It's kind of a long read, but maybe you'll be interested in reading it?

The conversation starts in the male viera thread on page 267 until page 268.

The post I'm referring to is post #2664 by VirusOnline.

I questioned how their data would be accurate if there is no dislike button. This question has been answered.

When you're talking about sample sizes, aren't those normally done by picking people at random, and not people who all agree on something? The 1577 likes don't take into account the people who don't want male viera. This isn't a random sample size, so would using this still be accurate?
I'm not trying to play devil's advocate or anything, I just want to understand.

It is picking at random since you are not controlling who is liking the thread OP. In this case Virus figured the number of individuals that would need to like (aka show support) to show that there is an overall demand since you cannot tell if the non-likers are in agreement or disagreement or ambivalent. That’s why the number is only 384 needing to like in order to show demand instead of simply saying the 1577 itself shows demand. Essentially on the OP there only needed to be 384 likes, with a + or - 5% margin of error, in order to statistically show there is a demand within the overall community. 1577 like have been given, almost 5x’s the needed number.

That all being said, if I’m mistaking anything with this, and I am only human, Virus or anyone else better versed in statistics can feel free to correct me. this is my explanation for the data provided and I’m fairly sure that’s how it was intended based on my own knowledge on how to read it ^_^

The numbers are a bit dated since the male viera thread has 1600 likes now.

[Halivel]

These forums can't be used as acurate data because you're only seeing on side of the data: the "likes". If the primary post had both a "like" and a "dislike" button then you'd see an entirely different metric. The fact that the only way people who disagree with what's posted is to either post their disagreement or ignore the post skews the data since not everyone feels the need to voice their opinion. If they had the option to drop a "dislike" and move on there would be a more acurate depiction of the forum community and just the forum community since not all players use the forums.

I don't disagree with this, without dislikes it's hard to have the absolutely correct picture, but we sadly do not have this feature and probably will never actually have.

Still, looking how some people drops opinion that those who was angry about Eureka/BLU were a huge amount of players (about 300 likes on OP if I remember correct?) but those who asks about implementing missing genders in future expansions are suddenly a vocal whiny minority (more than 1500 likes on OP) is just hilarious. With this kind of logic how those who were angry with BLU are not whiny? How those who were angry with "bowmage" are not whiny? If we "respect dev view without whining" then we should just accept everything, isn't it? (It isn't)

And well, I think there are more people who are "I'm not for it, but I'm not against either" than those who are strictly against. We can't say for sure without official in-game poll anyway, so it's just speculation, but if SE look for feedback, they do it on OF mostly and I'm sure translators will bring both "for" and "against" comments.

With what I am agree is that people should not be impatient and selfish. But we can't controll everyone, sadly, in whole group of player there will be 10-20 persons who will bring up wrong loud arguments - best option is maybe ignore them because it's almost impossible to change their mind. EN Forum section is biggest one, cuz it unites all regions since it's a worldwide language so it's hard to make it quiet as JP one (which is 5 times smaller than EN. DE and FR are nearly dead tbh. I mean overall amount of threads and comments now).

Recent megathreads about genders are quite positive and polite, and most people there speak about 6.0 and later. In case with Viera's one though it's a little bit more messy because all of those who just want to troll/fight for sake of fights show up exactly there.

[Joven]

I had somewhat of the same discussion you're having right now. It's kind of a long read, but maybe you'll be interested in reading it?

The conversation starts in the male viera thread on page 267 until page 268.

The post I'm referring to is post #2664 by VirusOnline.

I questioned how their data would be accurate if there is no dislike button. This question has been answered.





The numbers are a bit dated since the male viera thread has 1600 likes now.

I'm still not convinced you can gain an accurate census using only one set of data.

[Kaedan]

I'm still not convinced you can gain an accurate census using only one set of data.

You would be correct. You cannot get an accurate statistic from a poll on a message board, or even multiple combined, no matter how large the sample size.

The reason is because it's a self-select sample. It's not a random sampling. In order to get a truly accurate poll, SE would have to contact a few thousand players AT RANDOM from among the entire playerbase and ask them their opinion on the matter.

[kidalutz]

Okay, so here's the thing that people are forgetting in the midst of their I wants, do this now cause you're a no good very bad group of people if you don't. It takes Hundreds upon Hundreds of hours to Pre-design,mesh, test, scale, frame, debug, and finally set the final design of anything in a game especially one as large as FF XIV where there's gearset upon gearset upon gearset that needs to be gone over and retooled to fit new character model and frame just so. Demanding it "Right Now" is well churlish and self centered. As I've said in a previous post Japan doesn't have labor laws like America and these programmers will stay at work to the point of sleeping there and not going home until it's done if they're told to, that means they will spend zero time with their families, friends, having a life in order to put something in that's Demanded "Right Now!" For the sake of 2500 people demanding pixels instead of relaxing and waiting a little bit longer for their thing to happen. Instead of right nows there needs to be more patience and just say a simple as soon as it can be made within reason available.

Sorry for the rant I give the floor back to you.