Child-like characters?

[Elgeron]

Lets get rid of the Whole "Money" thing here. The issue also boils down to that SE and YoshiP do not want to risk Young childlike characters being sexualized in their MMO. Which puts their company, and the Entire game at risk of being shutdown. You can argue that a game being suspended is a loss of money...yes. But money and Maximizing Profits isn't the drive here.

Actually I think Ftail may be partially right. I think you are perfectly right that SE wants to maintain a certain image, specially because they deal with a huge international market. But I think the inconsistencies of how minors are portrayed and the declarations of Yoshi-P may point out more to covering their asses while trying to make good PR for themselves. Mainly, the issues is the character of Ryne. While the game is not stranger to present minors in situations of violence or danger (from the Scions twins to the children victim of war in SB), most of this cases were a bit in the "grey area" because the twins are clearly late teens, so it is not so frowned upon to see them in combat (while I would say SE is being cautious of avoiding any kind of sexualization of said characters), and other minors are, at most, implied to had been victims of violence off-screen. So far, so good. But the introduction of Ryne breaks this, by being a 12-13 year old girl clearly engaging in combat on-screen. Even more poignant, being involved in actual gameplay. Unless there is a piece of lore that I may had miss and Ryne turns out to be older, it seems to go against what was declared by Yoshi, and that it may not be so big of an issue.

Of course, you are right that they want to avoid any scandal that may arise from players sexualizing child characters, but I think as big of a reason is that it would be a nightmare to introduce a child version of each race, even if they would limit them to be 16 or so. It has to be all or none, or you will end up with even a worse situation than Vieras and Hrotgarh's limitations. Add having to make all gear fix, animation look good on them, probably make some new ones, and if they have to adapt dialogue to avoid unfortunate situations (NPCs flirting or making remarks of a sexual nature to the WoL) etc, etc, even if there was no moral issue, it would be a nightmare and too big of an invest of resources for what would be a very superficial feature of the game (reason why I would be against it and against adding more races).

But money and Maximizing Profits isn't the drive here.

I'll say that the vast majority of times, profits is the main reason for almost any decision a company makes, specially a big one like SE. No matter how noble or right it may seem.