Viera and Hrothgar Megathread

[Awha]

To be fair I do not envy the dev team they are in a weird spot with the release of male bunnies they either comment to creating female kitties and push bunnies updates regarding hair and stuff even further back or focus on bunnies when they can and focus on kitties during the normal expansion cycle.

Either way not a fun position I would want to be in when it comes to managing resources. Though if it was my call I would focus on female kitties.

Overall though if it was always this complicated I would have just forgone adding new races and just spent that level of resources and time into customization options across the board.

[Yencat]

I like this idea, but i can already foresee the threads if the other races complaining why they can't use the hairstyle :^)

Let's get our "Just Fantasia or stop being impatient!"-signs ready just in case that happens.

[BunniEclair]

To be fair I do not envy the dev team they are in a weird spot with the release of male bunnies they either comment to creating female kitties and push bunnies updates regarding hair and stuff even further back or focus on bunnies when they can and focus on kitties during the normal expansion cycle.

Either way not a fun position I would want to be in when it comes to managing resources. Though if it was my call I would focus on female kitties.

Overall though if it was always this complicated I would have just forgone adding new races and just spent that level of resources and time into customization options across the board.

I see the “they should have just not added new races and focused on updating the existing ones” thing a lot but I don’t really think that was ever on the table, even without new races. We already have seen an expansion with no new races to work on and they didn’t touch the character creator at all.

Given their constant comments about being maxed out on memory for character data on top of the only real additions to CC being hair and a few face paints, I’m going to make an educated guess that the reason they haven’t updated the character creator or the old races is that there is no way for them to do so in a meaningful way without first doing a major overhaul of the game. Of course we now know they are looking into that, but it’s still way in the future.

So I do think making races to flesh out the variety (hrothgar) and give people the fan favorite (viera) was the right choice. However, I do think it was a bad design decision to make viera and hroth so different so as to leave them out of gear and hair, again with hair being really the only thing they consistently add to the bare bones character creator to give players variety. On top of giving them only racial hair, they also gave them few options. So there really is no trade off, especially for viera, just to have their ears a bit more centered than miqos. I do not think having the ears be static and more to the side would have made them too similar to miqos, especially since all of the viera in 12 have the same static ears, and were also more widely set.

But it is what it is.

Tldr: Even if we never had viera and hroth they probably wouldn’t have touched CC. See: Stormblood.

[LuluLavender]

There is no poor excuse. It doesn't take much to come up with a logical understanding as of why. However, logic and common sense seems to be replaced with frustration and anger because some individuals aren't getting their hairstyles they want in a timely manner.

As for the logical explanation - Hairstyles, are not important. Hairstyles, are on the bottom of the list as opposed to actual content. If it took them this long to shell out male Viera, it's going to take a little bit longer for more hairstyles. As to why it took this long? Well if you follow live letters you would know that they follow a strict update/patch schedule as to where they try to keep it to a point where they push out updates every few months. With Endwalker being a larger expansion than ShadowBringers (Per Yoshida) and them trying to keep consistent patch updates throughout covid-19, it's a given fact they could care less about hairstyles right now.

I'm sure they are coming. Just like how they got male Viera in and female Hrothgar on the way.

Right now all I'm seeing with these hairstyle threads is nothing but a good portion of people poised as kids screaming at their mom (SE) and throwing a tantrum because they couldn't get a candy bar at the store.

Not important to you maybe. But since there's a megathread with over 90 pages of posts discussing this issue, you can see it's important to a lot of people. Not a single one of us has thrown a tantrum, we've been discussing the issue calmly. The issue is not just hairstyles, it's consistantly being cut out of actual content because of our choice of race.

Also wanted to say that I had the new hairstyle in a box, so I've drunk a fanta in order to enjoy it. Because that's what we have to do if we want to enjoy a good portion of in game rewards and events. I'm still fighting with you comrades!! We'll see hats and hair yet!

[Awha]

I see the “they should have just not added new races and focused on updating the existing ones” thing a lot but I don’t really think that was ever on the table, even without new races. We already have seen an expansion with no new races to work on and they didn’t touch the character creator at all.

Given their constant comments about being maxed out on memory for character data on top of the only real additions to CC being hair and a few face paints, I’m going to make an educated guess that the reason they haven’t updated the character creator or the old races is that there is no way for them to do so in a meaningful way without first doing a major overhaul of the game. Of course we now know they are looking into that, but it’s still way in the future.

So I do think making races to flesh out the variety (hrothgar) and give people the fan favorite (viera) was the right choice. However, I do think it was a bad design decision to make viera and hroth so different so as to leave them out of gear and hair, again with hair being really the only thing they consistently add to the bare bones character creator to give players variety. On top of giving them only racial hair, they also gave them few options. So there really is no trade off, especially for viera, just to have their ears a bit more centered than miqos. I do not think having the ears be static and more to the side would have made them too similar to miqos, especially since all of the viera in 12 have the same static ears, and were also more widely set.

But it is what it is.

Tldr: Even if we never had viera and hroth they probably wouldn’t have touched CC. See: Stormblood.

I do not work on FFXIV and do not know the depths of technical debt they have to mange for any change, but from experience in dealing with systems with a great deal of technical debt especially in form of memory bottle necks. Generally it is always possible to work around it but in the grand scheme the effort required does not warrant the pay off. Though from a management position in my opinion if I in charge of the project I would honestly take the headache over coming the technical debt and memory bottle neck verse adding new races in such a limited state especially with this community. This is of course living in a world where I had to pick between such options.

In my ideal world I would have just put that overall resource into another project all together.

[Akimori]

There is no poor excuse. It doesn't take much to come up with a logical understanding as of why. However, logic and common sense seems to be replaced with frustration and anger because some individuals aren't getting their hairstyles they want in a timely manner.

1 (also).As for the logical explanation - Hairstyles, are not important. Hairstyles, are on the bottom of the list as opposed to actual content. If it took them this long to shell out male Viera, it's going to take a little bit longer for more hairstyles. As to why it took this long? Well if you follow live letters you would know that they follow a strict update/patch schedule as to where they try to keep it to a point where they push out updates every few months. With Endwalker being a larger expansion than ShadowBringers (Per Yoshida) and them trying to keep consistent patch updates throughout covid-19, 1. it's a given fact they could care less about hairstyles right now.

I'm sure they are coming. Just like how they got male Viera in and female Hrothgar on the way.

2. Right now all I'm seeing with these hairstyle threads is nothing but a good portion of people poised as kids screaming at their mom (SE) and throwing a tantrum because they couldn't get a candy bar at the store.

Several things

the 2 points on 1. They do not care about releasing hairstyles, but time and resources went into creating 10 new hairstyles for every other race :^). Sounds to me like they care at least a *LITTLE* bit teehee

2. I really only stick to my forum and I implore you to send those people my way so we can stop cluttering up the forums with the same threads every month so we can discuss our woes about the lack of customization support in a singular area, but I will say that in *MY* megathread, there has been no such type of behavior in here and it is not a "1 size fits all" scenario.

3. To say its not important, but also constantly seeing the same threads pop up every 3.5 months and the amount of pages and discussion that goes on in said threads is not doing your point any favors. If you are content on the current state of things, you go ahead and be content. But, dont come into any thread and try and dismiss anyone elses' claims/woes/worries about the current state of customization support. To a lot of us who love for our characters to look cute/sexy/handsome/elegant/ etc, glamour is important and that means being able to choose from the large variety of hairs and hats in this game because...those can kind of make or break a glamor.

4. With hrothgar and viera being excluded from not only a large chunk of the glam game, but also being excluded from event rewards/new glamour items/ whatever, it is a big deal...maybe not to you, but to a lot of us...it is

5. If what you say about point two being real, just know that not only have they bought the game (either 40$ spent for a pre-order, or just paid 60$ for the bundle) ontop of a 13-15$ sub/ month, they have every right to express their dissatisfaction of a product. They ARE paying customers afterall and they're paying for a constant service. Yes, there is other things to do in the game, sure, but customization is STILL considered content that they're paying for, but not actually getting...unless they either choose to not play these races in the beginning or shell out $10 to change to said race to get the satisfaction of being able to play the entire game. A lot of us refuse to change because these characters resonate with us and mean something to us... Unless these posts are literally threatening the lives of the developers, this criticism is welcomed and ultimately harmless. I dont understand why people like you even say such things to try and silence the criticism...Ultimately, its better in the end for them to take said criticism and do something with it 9even if it takes years to do it...

So, I really implore you to step off of your high horse and come back down to earth with the rest of us. You may see things differently if you do

It's worse, it's like if there's a party, there are 14 kids - 12 of them get a slice of pizza (or cake, whatever) and the other 2 are told to wait for theirs. Minutes keep passing, then hours, the party is almost over, and the other kids are given more and more slices, with the other 2 only being told "be patient" anytime they ask....then when they're approached, finally thinking they're getting something, they're told "your mom called and your siblings are coming too" without even mentioning chances are they're not getting slices either. So now there's 4 kids that may or may not eat any slice of that pizza/cake while the other 12 kids practically ate a whole box each, and that exact scenario will repeat on the next party.

I freaking love this analogy

[PureEclipse]

/bumping for hair


also bouncing like a bunny too to get their attention (the devs), it isn't working but damn my leg muscles are amazing now.

[PurinSato]

/ Bumping for hair and because my ears are fluffy and they would be even fluffier with modern aesthetics uwu

[HeyMcFly]

I want new Viera Hair
And Fran's ponytail :<
IT'S SO MAJESTIC

[Penthea]

I want new Viera Hair
And Fran's ponytail :<
IT'S SO MAJESTIC

Fran's hair is cool...but I really wish I had that hairstyle the hyur has. It's short and tidy. Exactly what is missing for me with viera hair. My character feels incomplete without that