Race Heights

[Myranda]

There's already a thread on this, but it's in the LOC forums with a last post way back in March, before we got the Lore section, so I'm creating a new one to have it visible in the appropriate section.

EDIT: The char creator now includes physical heights directly in it, I've updated the spreadsheet to reflect the new info. The rest of the OP follows which I'm going to leave as is to show my original assumptions and work (which are still in the spreadsheet, I only hid those columns by default).

Edit 2: Swagger FC members have created some nicer (IMO) visuals, so you can check their thread and I'm also reposting them here in spoiler tag.

Guys:


Gals:


Both guys and gals (merged together by Nique):

v===ORIGINAL POST===v

Someone (possibly from bluegartr?) made and released this image showing the relative heights of the different races with the value for the height slider from ARR's character creator given. (If anyone knows more details of who made it please let me know so I can credit them)



This, however, was not satisfying enough to me because I wanted to know the actual physical heights and not just the relative ones, as well as having some hard numbers to examine instead of just a visual comparison. So I set out to measure the heights in pixels on that image for each one and tabulating them. I then chose to use an average height (50 on the slider) male hyuran midlander as a standard height to compare the rest to and computed percent differences to that standard.

To get the physical heights, I had to make just one assumption and that is assigning my standard height the value of 170cm (about 5ft7in) to match them to average male human height in the real world for Asian/Eastern regions. This choice was made with the implication that the generally taller European/Western regions of the real world would be decently represented by the taller highlander clan.

And of course, what you all really want: here is the resulting spreadsheet, with values in both feet/inches and centimeters.

Note that all the heights are calculated via formulas in the cells, so you can change only the value of the standard height to something besides 170cm in case we desire/need to change our assumption and everything else will also scale accordingly. (You have to change the cm one; the ft/in version of the standard height is also calculated from the cm version and is just there for reference if you're not familiar with cm, it isn't actually used in the formulas.)

Edit: I added in slope values and equations to calculate arbitrary heights/slider values, with a couple examples.

Some interesting notes:

-Roleplayers will obviously want to use the feet/inches value as that corresponds to the fulms/ilms used in the game.

-Lalafell have no gender gap in height, all other races do.

-There are no differences for clans except for hyur highlander vs midlander.

-The slider acts linearly from 0-100 within each race, so it should be easy to extrapolate to intermediate slider values that aren't just 0, 50, or 100. In fact, I've now added equations that do just that!

-Generally, all the races have about a 13-14cm (5-6in) span between shortest and tallest options. The lalafell and female miqo'te (both only about 10cm/4in in spread) and female Roegadyn (a huge 30cm/1ft range) are notable exceptions to this. In other words, although the slider acts linearly for all races, the amount of physical height granted by 1 additional slider value (the slope of the line if you graph them) is different for each race/gender.

-Highlanders end up a bit taller than actual typical European heights according to this, by a couple of inches. At least when using 5'7" for average midlanders, anyways. (This one is negated by the new char creator values: apparently all hyur are in general taller than average RL humans)

-These results are all dependent on the posted image being accurate for relative heights. I didn't create it myself and I don't know the methodology of how it was pieced together, so I can't guarantee its accuracy, but I'm assuming it's good enough. (Still true for my original work off the image, but values are now coming directly from the game itself!)

[finiteHP]

Wow. Just wow. Fantastic job Myranda. Your heights turn out to be about what I expect just by eyeballing them in game.

[Aethelinda]

Thank you Myr. :3
Love it!

[Lusavari]

It's interesting that the female Roegadyn have the biggest differences. Personally, I think in some ways the Miqo'te are more likely to represent Asians, while Highlanders reflect Americans, and Midlanders represent Europeans. That's just one possible alternative.

[Myranda]

It's interesting that the female Roegadyn have the biggest differences. Personally, I think in some ways the Miqo'te are more likely to represent Asians, while Highlanders reflect Americans, and Midlanders represent Europeans. That's just one possible alternative.

Americans and Europeans are not terribly different, and if anything Europe is slightly taller, especially in Scandinavia. I used this chart from Wikipedia as a guide to base it off of.

If I made the miqo'te similar in size to average Asians, all the rest of the races would become unusually tall (except Lalas of course, they're gonna be short no matter what lol). I mean, the highlanders are already taller than most existing real people and matching the very tallest measured averages, so increasing all the sizes just throws that further out of alignment. If I were to make an adjustment, IMO, it would actually be a slight reduction, but I think it's pretty good as is.

[Lusavari]

If anything, the chart you used pounds away at 5'7" being a universal average. It looks pretty common over all.

[Myranda]

If anything, the chart you used pounds away at 5'7" being a universal average. It looks pretty common over all.

It has the option to be sorted by height (or any other column too), and 5'7" is really not terribly more prevalent than any other value and definitely quite correlated with countries in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. North America and Europe are very clearly higher at about 5'9" or more... I'd hardly call 5'7" universal.

Keep in mind there's also a few entries such as multiple ones for the US where they've singled out sub-populations like Mexican Americans or Black Americans, or there's factors like the percent of the whole national population sampled in that study, the age ranges included, etc. All the columns need to be taken into account to get the full picture.

[Lusavari]

It has the option to be sorted by height, and 5'7" is really not terribly more prevalent than any other value and definitely quite correlated with countries in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. North America and Europe are very clearly higher at about 5'9" or more... I'd hardly call 5'7" universal.

Keep in mind there's also a few entries such as multiple ones for the US where they've singled out sub-populations like Mexican Americans or Black Americans, or there's factors like the percent of the whole national population sampled in that study, the age ranges included, etc. All the columns need to be taken into account to get the full picture.

You are right... But you also have to keep in mind populations. China and India are going to skew the over all statistics to the left. That draws the world average down, because you have 2 populations accounting for nearly 3/7ths of the over all population (With China around 1.4b and India being around 1.2b). European nations account for far less. The whole of Europe + the US accounts for 1 billion. People's Republic of China is right at 5'7", which "China" listed at 5'8", but I presume by China, it means The Republic of China... or Taiwan as we call it, which is a lot less populous. A lot of the South American nations don't report in for males on the list, but extrapolating from the female scores listed... a lot of them are going to have smaller than average males too, pulling the world population down.

[Myranda]

You are right... But you also have to keep in mind populations. China and India are going to skew the over all statistics to the left. That draws the world average down, because you have 2 populations accounting for nearly 3/7ths of the over all population (With China around 1.4b and India being around 1.2b). European nations account for far less. The whole of Europe + the US accounts for 1 billion. People's Republic of China is right at 5'7", which "China" listed at 5'8", but I presume by China, it means The Republic of China... or Taiwan as we call it, which is a lot less populous. A lot of the South American nations don't report in for males on the list, but extrapolating from the female scores listed... a lot of them are going to have smaller than average males too, pulling the world population down.

As true as that may be, I don't see a full global average as a relevant statistic here. It would wash away the entire point of this exercise, which is comparing different races/clans. This is all about the sub-populations, not a single global average.

Besides, what would you compare that to? The average of just all hyurs combined? Do lalafells count in the Eorzean global average too? What weights do you assign the Eorzean populations in the averaging? (e.g. do you follow the lore when it says miqo'te males are not very populous and thus rarely seen, or do you follow how many players actually make male miqo'te for their characters?) There's just not much in the way of meaningful comparisons with a single global value.

It still also doesn't support the idea in your original reply that Highlanders would correspond to America while Midlanders would be European, because regardless of what's going on in Asia or Africa or what total populations are, Europe is still on average slightly taller than America so it makes no sense to associate the taller clan with the shorter RL population...

Anyways, I stand by my assessment I've done so far, and it still won't change what the relative heights between the races are, miqo'te will always be smaller than hyurs, etc. Everything will scale up/down together, there's no increasing just one race while decreasing the other ones. Others are free to change the 170cm standard height in their own copy of the spreadsheet if they want to, but I'm keeping it at that unless we hear otherwise from Ferne or another loremaster.

[MithrasInvictus]

Excellent work! Thank you for your efforts!