Yeah, I raised an eyebrow at that. They really should lean into the thematic of them being rogue automatons that cobbled a culture out of millennia of forgotten obsolescence.
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The fact that they gave Alliance mechanical diaper gnomes instead of the Sethrak will forever be mind-boggling to me. A lot of Horde players complained about Vulpera, but at least they got something that was a bit more unique than a rehashed gnome. What makes it even more puzzling is that the Sethrak were clearly built to be playable. They seem to be able to wear different gear and wield weapons just fine. Not sure why Blizz decided to not make them a playable race.
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At least there’s a fancy blackrock mountain. 
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Sethrakk were higher effort. As simple as that.
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I just think they don’t want to spend time developing a new base frame model for a new race so they add skins to existing ones. Been that way from the start.
Nightborne is the best example of this since they didn’t make the Suramar Nightborne frame the playable model but just put skins on the NE model for the males. The females I honestly haven’t compared to the NE females.
And that’s fine. Squeeze the existing assets for all their worth if it means more content. It’s just a shame that they’re skipping their new creations to the front of the line, so to speak.
It’s not whether it’s old or new, it’s whether it’s cool or not.
I can’t remember where I read this so it’s not exactly fact, but I have read that people generally do not like to play short characters. And I think statistics bear this out because all short races; Gnomes, Mechagnomes, Goblins, Vulpera, and even Dwarves have lower populations than other races. People like to play medium to tall characters that look pretty, which is why Humans, Night elves, and Blood elves are the three most popular races to play.
It has less to do with them being new or not. Since earthen are not new. People want cool races. Rock dwarves just are not that cool, Dwarves in general are not that cool except to a certain kind of person.
Sethrak were added as a new race and to this day people clamor for them. People would be elated to see Sethrak as a new playable race. People want the bipedal Nerubians to be playable. People are okay with entirely new races, they just have to look cool.
I just can’t get hyped over dwarves. Just never gonna happen
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Every race has its audience. Nothing is universally appealing. And honestly, it’s disheartening when any developer keeps appealing to the same demographic over and over again.
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I think they’re meant to be bigger than normal Dwarfs.
A Kul’tiran sized Dwarf would be definitely be different!
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I think they could stand to lean into the inorganic theme a bit more, too. Their hair shouldn’t be literal hair.
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They can do what they want with factions if players don’t have to be attached to them. The era of telling part of the playerbase that another part of the playerbase is their rival/enemy is over. People want alts that look like all kinds of things, they want those alts to work together, they want to be able to hang out with their friends regardless of what their friends taste in character appearances is.
And they’re going to other MMOs without factions if they don’t get it.
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For me, its nothing to do with what race they are.
Saying this again - it’s everything to do with them being ‘allied’ races. We should not have to grind reputation of some sort to be able to play a race. The only criteria to play a race should be to have an active subscription and be able to create a new character on the selection screen.
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To be fair, “sub-races” were something suggested by the community for years; usually for Arakkoa, Ogres, Naga, and Ethereals. What it boils down to is understanding that the creation of starting zones the quality of Gilneas or Kezan take a lot of time and people want more cosmetic options than the game necessarily has room to create starting areas for.
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Love my dragon, it’s what I wanted when I heard we were getting dragons. Don’t want fat, ugly, reject dragons in the form of Drakonid that wouldn’t have much of any armor because the art and animation teams would have too hard a time fitting all the existing mog to the new mesh they’d need to create/implement.
I want a good fantasy race. Not High Elves. Not Ogres. Not Naga. Definitely not another Dwarf race that’s way too overdone at this point. What I want? No idea yet, but it’s out there waiting to be discovered.
The starting zone for Orcs is tiny. Not every race is the same as Pandarens or Goblins, which were unnecessarily large and complex. Its pretty easy to create a small area and use that to create a character, give it few starter levelling quests and then send it out into the world.
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Earthen are unlocked solely by doing the story quests at launch.
Races with such a specific origin like Earthen need that context to situate them. They don’t make sense as a “core” race that wouldn’t be out of place in Westfall or Durotar.
How is that possibly your critique of drakonid when you’re playing on a Dracthyr? Textbook hypocrisy right there. Dracthyr transmog is shoulders and belt buckles - it’s terrible, and grates on my nerves every time that I log in that I can’t progress my character visually.
I don’t see why Drakonid would have any issues on that transmog front, either. No more than any other new race.
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I love dwarves, and I’m pretty excited to undergo a culling of my redside toons and the physical pain that will entail, just to replace them with more dwarves.
But I really wish they had a class or two that isn’t available to baseline dwarves (and granted, dwarves have a LOT of classes so that’s tricky) and that their armor wasn’t quite so Dark Iron-y. At least some titan colors or something, yeesh.
You didn’t need to be Exalted with the Troll races to create a Troll. In fact, you didn’t need any sort of reputation with any of the main core races to be able to play them. Indeed, you could earn rep after making them via use of a tabard.
Evoker - playable at the start. Pandaren - playable at the start. Sure, we had to do a fairly substantial questline but it made sense within the story. Any character creation could be made to make sense. We could be an Earthen discovered lost in tunnels somewhere who has to get out of said tunnel system to be able to join the fight.
It’s all a matter of approach. Rather than making it a grind (and whatever might be said about ‘just playing the game’ for someone coming along later it will be a grind) just have the option there, at the start, and give it its own story.
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