New hrothgar hairstyles are really bad.

[Kelev]

@Kelev

Hrothgar (and I presume Viera, but the problem seem to be more visible on Hrothgar)

*snip*

... Firstly, if all you said is correct, then it does mean Square Enix has issues with the new races...it will only continue to cause problems further down the line.

This problem is specific to Hrothgar. Period.

So a lot of the re-does of the new races are better shaders and textures, but that doesn't solve the Hrothgar problem, which is that we need more vertices and bones and such. Viera, you've got an issue with ear placement, but that's a "suck-it-up-and-deal" thing more than anything else. Viera head shapes are pretty much human, you just have ears up top. And as evidence I will present the Viera character creator, where you're allowed to select your ear type/shape. We don't have that option because our ears are bolted to our faces. Those vertices have to come from somewhere.

Keep in mind this part is largely conjecture on my end, but remember that a character if nothing but a big ball of data. An example of a more invasive (but in my opinion better) option would be to treat the Hrothgar like we do embedded systems, like you'd find in a car, or on an electronic keypad. What's the difference between tail length 46, and 48? Nothing. So having tail size be small, medium, large and manx would take up two bits of the value that the Hrothgar carry around with them for the slider. By performing bitwise arithmetic on that value, you'd be able to pack more information into a Hrothgar's data "ball" than you would normally be able to fit into another character, and that's because the decision was made to have those be what the sliders represent. But without additional vertices, you'd be able to do things like keep more "skulls" (hair/face combos) than is normally allowed.

Another would be taking a vertex or two out of the tail.

But because of the Hrothgar jaw and the tail, we more bones borrowed than do other races. Viera don't have the complications we do, and that's one of the reasons that the problem is, in Yoshi's defense, so difficult. But when he says "the hair and face were designed as a set," he's leaving out something crucial to the problem, which is that we don't have ear bones, and the ears and face aren't even a set. They're a unit, and until those units are standardized on ear placement, or a couple of vertices are borrowed from someplace else to give us real ears? You just can't. And the hideous abominations are an attempt to "standardize" on a haircut that fits all four skulls and like most one-size-fits-all stuff, it looks like crap.

What we need is ear standardization. What we got?

[Kelev]

This is a great post.

Also, thank you all to folks who keep reading these things. I try to put a lot of thought/information into these posts because I don't want to grouse about Yoshi and the devs modding and stuff, I just want it fixed. And the way that it's being explained is misleading and needs to be more complex than "these two things go together."

I am not a 3D modeler nor a real programmer, but I have 15 years of DevOps experience, so I'm not the guy you come to when you need to figure out how to make something work properly - I'm the guy who tells you 'sure I can put duct tape on it for you for now, but you're gonna have to come back and fix it right'. And it makes me feel negative, and petty, and awful.

So, thank you to all who read and comment, and post and hit like buttons. Not for me. For everyone. And this community and the game itself facilitate a lot of really great interactions, and I write what I do not to be the cleverest person in the room. I write because people should understand Hrothgar are in beta right now. We were for an entire expansion, and we deserve a go-live date.

[Kelev]

I was INSTANTANEOUSLY corrected by my other half who is a programmer and loves 3D work.

What we got was this:



Can't breathe.

[Pip_Chick]

lmao the theresa person's last post is them complaining about toxicity meanwhile they put up absurdly toxic tags.

good lord.

People in this game hate Furries and Furry races, anything you add to the conversation that even slightly disagrees with them will be brushed off and disregarded with an "OK Furry" or "The Furries are mad!". This is seen in and out of the game. But remember "we are the most accepting community, guys!"

[Midareyukki]

People in this game hate Furries and Furry races, anything you add to the conversation that even slightly disagrees with them will be brushed off and disregarded with an "OK Furry" or "The Furries are mad!". This is seen in and out of the game. But remember "we are the most accepting community, guys!"

Pfft. Probably because WoW fans have been accusing FF14 of being a furry game for years. Thing is, it doesn't matter what you think: they're both furry games.

TBH the furry hate goes way past this game. People associate the furry fandom to its sexual portion, and while that's admittedly a big portion of the fandom it goes way beyond it. They only know of furry fandom because it is way more visible now than it used to be, a level of attention older people in the community don't want because they know it's just going to attract undesirable members (members of hate groups and sex offenders) and even more harassment toward furries in general. To many people, it's not about the sexual aspect. It's about having an avatar that expresses who they really are. The whole "equality by everyone being different" and "celebrating what makes you special". But do you think internet people care? They just see people in animal costumes making kinky content, and boom, controversy and weird. Yet I've personally seen far more good things done by the furry fandom itself than anything the FF14 community has ever made. Have any of you managed to get disadvantaged people a house? Came together to help pay off someone's health debt and treatment? Because I've seen the furry fandom do that. I haven't seen the Yoshida Club lift a finger.

But this reminds me of how this community has treated players of certain races through stereotypes. Not just the whole "Lalafell = Child" thing. Roegadyn, Male Au Ra, Male Miqo'te and Male Viera were and sometimes still are equated to being "for the gays". That "if you're X race, you're gay". Mhmm, because being straight means you want to be a bland Hyur. Just as much as you have straight people playing all those races, so too will you have non-furries playing Hrothgar. People need to stop throwing in stereotypes. FF14 may be a welcoming community, but it's not an accepting one. It's only ever accepting toward the same boring and bland groups. Ask a Roegadyn, a Viera or a Hrothgar if they feel the acceptance in the air.

That sort of thing shouldn't be a factor as to whether or not this race should be supported or improved upon. And Square should not be listening to people like that. They should be listening to the people who play their race. People who've shown support for it and people who've shown interest in it. Because, and I'll say it as many times as I have to: No one asked for Hrothgar. Square themselves added it in. And even though it's not the most popular for a myriad of reasons, you have players who really do enjoy it as much as any of you enjoy your own race.

[Vahlnir]

People in this game hate Furries and Furry races, anything you add to the conversation that even slightly disagrees with them will be brushed off and disregarded with an "OK Furry" or "The Furries are mad!". This is seen in and out of the game. But remember "we are the most accepting community, guys!"

Then there's people like me who simply enjoy playing the race. My enjoyment doesn't go any deeper than "they look cool". I've still been called a furry. I also got quite an education a good while back on the forums as well that I never wanted or needed. Apparently I have to be attracted to my character to enjoy playing them? lol That was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard.

[Midareyukki]

This problem is specific to Hrothgar. Period.

snipped the rest

>< sorry, just wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. To me, Viera were incomplete as well, so I was expecting them to also Kludge their way through some stuff. But this problem is just singularly on Hrothgar then.

I too spoke to a friend of mine about this. He's got a degree in Software Design and is currently on a Master's degree on Game Developping. And what he said was that not only is this inexcusable from a software design stand, it's also inexcusable from a game dev design. Because yes, you need to factor in costs, time, effort, resources, how comfortable your team is making a race that isn't a humanoid, stuff like that. But you do it right at the start, before any of this is released. They get together, make a design and plan this stuff out. They ask how long it would take, if it's even doable, and sometimes, if the company is any good, they'll ask how they plan on doing it. They'll ask how they plan to do it so that they don't meet random "unforeseen" situations such as a programmer saying "Yeah, we wanted to do it, turns out we have no idea how and figuring out how will take us longer".

He also said something about "iteration". For a programmer, an iteration is just "how many times a loop has looped". But for a software developer, an iteration is every version of a software you have until the final product is released. He said that if Hrothgar are this bad at this specific iteration, imagine how poor the process was through each iteration until then. So either they Kludge'd their way into this mess over and over, which is just crap design. Or they just Kludge'd it once and called it a day, shipped it as-is, and that's what we've been stuck with for three years, which is also crap design.

Also... I get we're "in beta". But holy crap, Square, can you please release one feature in FF14 that ISN'T beta? Even the Adventurer Portraits say Beta! Why are you giving us stuff in this state? To rush out content and have us play around with features you want to see implemented? I admire the effort, but the more they keep throwing stuff that's unfinished like this, the more the game will need more and more work to fix everything it has. That's tiring to see.

I was INSTANTANEOUSLY corrected by my other half who is a programmer and loves 3D work.

What we got was this:



Can't breathe.

Yeah pretty much. We're just Roegadyn with hair textures and a different face. A face with a Roegadyn structure on the back and a snout on the front. It's not a "new" race, it doesn't have any different proportions like Au Ra did. Au Ra may be humanoid and stretched out Elezen, but their whole sillouette is different. Hrothgar are just Roegadyn in a permanent "I need to poop but I can't find a bathroom" animation.

[Midareyukki]

Then there's people like me who simply enjoy playing the race. My enjoyment doesn't go any deeper than "they look cool". I've still been called a furry. I also got quite an education a good while back on the forums as well that I never wanted or needed. Apparently I have to be attracted to my character to enjoy playing them? lol That was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard.

I just sum it up to "People talking about stuff they don't understand like they're suddenly experts on it" :|

Not even furries are attracted to their own creations like that, they really are just avatars. Sure, some might, but that's still reducing it to stereotypes. One would know better if they actually spoke to furries.

Keep playing the race if you think it's cool. Engage in the lore about it if you think it's cool.

Hrothgar are a race of people with an ancestral culture that worshipped their Queens as emanations of the Sun. They had a chaste social structure, they considered Gunbreakers to be a noble protective profession and they engaged in Astronomy more than Astrology. They were one of the few places in the Three Great Continents to never have been conquered by the Allagans, and indeed is why the Gunblade exists. Their legends speak of Queen Gunnhildr, who protected Bozja during the Fourth Umbral Calamity. They were invaded by the Garlean Empire, many of them placed in concentration camps and subjected to horrors, from torture to human experimentation. Their capital city was wiped out by Nael van Darnus and Midas nan Garlond. Though they are not numerous, and indeed their forces keep getting caught by Garleans, they still formed a resistance faction that we help from Gangos to reclaim their homeland.

That is what a Hrothgar is, and if people enjoy that, they have every right to without being called stuff they're not.

[myahele]

Yeah pretty much. We're just Roegadyn with hair textures and a different face. A face with a Roegadyn structure on the back and a snout on the front. It's not a "new" race, it doesn't have any different proportions like Au Ra did. Au Ra may be humanoid and stretched out Elezen, but their whole sillouette is different. Hrothgar are just Roegadyn in a permanent "I need to poop but I can't find a bathroom" animation.

When Hrothgar was 1st released I had trouble differentiating them from Roegadyn based on their frame alone if they're wearing a helmet and it's only when I see their tails and posture.

[Chikatsu]

When Hrothgar was 1st released I had trouble differentiating them from Roegadyn based on their frame alone if they're wearing a helmet and it's only when I see their tails and posture.

well, if you see them wearing a helmet, that is usually a dead giveaway it's not a Hrothgar..... yes, I am still salty about equipment, why do you ask?