(08-30-2015, 04:38 AM)Ashe Wrote: Also, lining up stuff with other Au Ra players sounds easy but with Xaela they are warring tribes. Does that, lore wise, even make sense? Some of the tribes were especially violent--Jhungid is a tribe that held an annual battle against the Kharlu and while they weren't doing that they were enslaving other tribes. That doesn't seem all too friendly to me...Xaela lore makes sense in the right situations. Unfortunately, those situations didn't happen.
According to the census SE has done since Heavensward was released, only 4% of the character population on NA servers is Au Ra. If we're going to be generous, only 2% of the population is Xaela. And then, to be fair, divide that 2% by the fifty-one recognized tribes (while ignoring the lore-allowed PC unique/original tribes and non-lore-compliant names), and you start to see that we're facing very small populations of any one tribe. If we only had, say, ten recognized tribes instead of the fifty-one, numbers would be a bit better.
There is little environment in the game that would foster Xaela-styled tribal lifestyles to continue. The Core-game zones are all claimed by existing NPC-populations, and the HW ones are 1) gated and 2) also claimed by NPC populations (some of which, there is evidence that a significant part of the NPC population would/could be hostile). Instead, there is a sort of undercurrent of "We are Eorzeans. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile".
... And let's not get into the (depending on how one interprets parts of the lore and if you consider MSQ events to be canon to your character) paradox that occurs if you level up a brand-new Au Ra through MSQ and you hit 2.2...
Anyways.
Everything SE gave us to base Xaela lore around would have worked out just fine if the player population had actually boomed in that direction (much like how when WoW released Burning Crusade, Blood Elves very quickly became one of the most popular races) and/or if we had gone to a war-razed Othard instead of Ishgard. Neither happened, so a lot of the lore becomes... kind of irrelevant, leading towards the trend of "Hyur with scales and horns" that some people notice. I'd like to think that if SE gives us an expansion that sends us to Othard/Doma, that we'll see Xaela populations rise, but... *shrugs*
I'd suggest trying to cultivate a group of Xaela players that can be semi-closed so you could... maybe use a pre-existing settlement and just RP that the NPCs there are also Xaela, and that there's a bit of a rule in the settlement that previous tribal loyalties aren't to be made an issue of since everyone there is trying to preserve the core of Xaela culture? I know the semi-closed part might be a turn-off, but with all the balls SE dropped (at least in my opinion) with the new race, it's going to take some work to get what you're looking for.
