Child-like characters?

[Vidu]

I'm just as curious about why everyone is being overly touchy on this topic. I came from anime MMOs and literally, all of them have chibi or underage character models that you play. No one cared not even in the slightest about this and just carried on without a second thought. In Mabinogi, you can literally make your charact 10yrs old and strut around in ANY outfit. That included outfits like the sexy Scathatch outfit or the revealing hunter outfit they released for a Halloween event, paired with high heels and victoria secret wings. No one would blow up the forums about seeing characters like that and honestly, it was like the norm for anime MMOs. We just didn't care.

Our minds just didn't jump to those thoughts, or at least nowhere near as much as it does here. And if it did, you never heard about it. It makes me wonder what the heck is going in non-anime MMOs to where everyone must think of the pervs first before adding anything to the game. Is it really just the times we're in, or something else? Or both?

My guess would be that the dev-teams behind those anime-MMOs you're talking about arent part of globally known, multi-billion dollar company with a lot of famous brands.

Or in other words: a tiny korean studio has a lot less to lose than Square Enix. And chances are that anything said tiny studio does will go unnoticed by most people. Infact, a sh*tstorm because of showing underaged characters in... questionable outfits etc. could even be good for such a studio/game, since that would put it in the spotlight for once.
FFXIV on the other hand is already constantly in the spotlight, SE as a whole has a huge media-presence - and something like children in sexy clothes will only hurt them.
Bottomline is: Those anime-MMOs can get away with it because no one cares about them - FFXIV and SE cant.

Personally I find it way more disturbing that people seem so extremly eager to play as children in a setting like this - while it is fantasy, yes, we've got tones of war and violence going on. This doesnt seem like a game to me where playing a literal child would be "natural". The game is also not being marketed to children (at leat in germany we've got an age-rating of 16). So needing to play a child to "play yourself" kinda goes out of the window.
So... why is playing a child so appealing to people?