Thread: New 7.1 hairstyle looks nothing like the winning hairstyle from the 2023 contest

This poor imitation of an "inspiration" serves no purpose than to show their lack of an excuse, it is lazy effort. I'd rather they implemented this hair in a later patch where more ample care towards it is thoughtfully considered than produce this rubbish they plan on releasing soon.

I was really excited when I saw this hair style, but I can only imagine how the original artist feels. This is so disappointing... If they weren't even going to try to do the hairstyle justice why make it a contest winner? To get players hopes up that a hairstyle they really want won't see the light of day?

Originally Posted by Ascended_Demon

Weird, I'm seeing them neither on desktop or mobile even after reloading the page. Might be my browser, but if others can see them that's what's important.

They aren't there. OP hotlinked Discord images. People who can still see them are likely seeing cached versions.

Discord added expiration timers to image URLs because people were abusing Discord as an image host when it can't handle that amount of traffic. (It's a chat program, after all, not an image host.)

Here's Imgur reuploads of the two images from the first post. The first is simply a screenshot from the preliminary patch notes; the second is the artist's original drawing and renders.

I literally had to make an account on the forums just to post my disappointment about how this hairstyle was created. It looks nothing like the winning entry and is sorely lacking in what people actually cared about it for: representation. The game is sorely lacking in curly or coiled hair, and that locks a good amount of people out of seeing their wols how they'd actually like to see them! Shame on Square Enix for this horrible, disappointing hair.

Even if we were to believe it was loosely inspired by any of the other curly hair styles or an amalgamation of a couple of the winning entries, I'm sorry but it's jut so bad. Hair is really somewhere I feel like FFXIV's customisation really fails at, so to see this as the new hairstyle is really really disappointing.

ontop of this looking ass, they take like 2 years or so to even implement any competition items, i think we're still getting winner housing items from shadowbringers competitions even

I don't understand why hairstyles are released so slowly overall. Does it take a long time to test for each race? Is there some looming maximum number that they don't want to hit? It's going to take years, possibly a decade, to implement all the competition winners at this rate even if they do nothing else.

Originally Posted by IvoryHawk

ontop of this looking ass, they take like 2 years or so to even implement any competition items, i think we're still getting winner housing items from shadowbringers competitions even

This is a really good point actually, I didn't expect this hairstyle until much later if at all, I fully expected them to pick some of the easier straight hairstyles to do first. The fact they picked this one to do so early shows that they knew how much it meant to so many people to have natural curly styles, and that makes what they produced feel like an even bigger insult.

Originally Posted by Iscah

I don't understand why hairstyles are released so slowly overall. Does it take a long time to test for each race? Is there some looming maximum number that they don't want to hit? It's going to take years, possibly a decade, to implement all the competition winners at this rate even if they do nothing else.

Back in ARR ~ HW they would literally release like, up to four hairstyles per patch. Most of them would just automatically be added to the character creator too. I doubt it's actually that difficult for them.
https://youtu.be/8JPfQb549Eo?si=0Y_C2wz_cZmldjaX&t=148
You can see what I mean at the timestamp I (hopefully correctly) posted.

I've always suspected that the long release schedule for hairstyles is so that they can arbitrarily add them as a reward to some content they were going to put into the patch cycle anyway. It seems to be one of their only ideas for attempting longevity in something they created. I was never a fan of it, because I feel like it just inherently stifles character customization.

Also, if I'm to be honest, we're so lacking in black & curly hairstyles that I think they should just be added to character creation by default. It doesn't feel fair otherwise.