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Tsol'aa Ears
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Edit: atavians excluded from the above for obvious reasons.
Ears visible, ears not pointed.
There's really no question here - they don't have pointed ears, and have never had pointed ears.
But we might forgive players whose first experience with the word "Tsol'aa" is immediately followed with the word "Elf" when they fail to accurately parse the seven pixels dedicated to ears in that little .jpeg
edit: does anyone roleplay tsol'aa with normal ears?
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
The problem stems from the fact that on the HTML5 client character creation screen, directly under the word "Tsol'aa" is the word "elf". In addition to this, the example picture of the Tsol'aa does not have the ears visible, as they are obscured by the woman's hair. This leaves that part of the body up to the player's imagination,
The term "elf" in its fantastical, non-Christmas terminology nowadays has been heavily influenced by Tolkien lore. As Achaea can adequately be described as high-fantasy, players will therefore equate the term "elf" with its modern high-fantasy description, over Santa's cute helpers. The poster boy of the former is this guy:
Note the pointed ears.
The in-game help files on the race do not help, at all. From HELP TSOL'AA:
Bolded areas are my own, highlighted for attention. Most people - including those who would play a MUD in 2015, perhaps even moreso than the general masses - know their basic LoTR lore, if they've at all seen the movies. Included in this is the concept of the elves before the men; the elves start off strong but decline as the humans make their foothold and become the dominant species, with the elves slowly fading into the background. This is again highlighted in the wiki entry for the Tsol'aa:
The Tsol'aa are far older than other races, and fought in an ancient war of legend against the gods themselves. One can assume - and I use the term "assume" for a reason - that that was their heyday, and that they have now faded into the background, content to live their lives in isolation within some forest.
The four other bolded sections in the second paragraph of the help file practically word-for-word describe Legolas and his brand of Tolkien elves. Note that HELP TSOL'AA does not describe their ears, nor does the wiki entry.
So, based on all of this, my personal opinion as to the mindset of the player creating a Tsol'aa is something equivalent to: "Oh, they're like Lord of the Rings elves, just with different names. It says so right there in the subtext!" Elf > "you mean like Legolas?" becomes "Tsol'aa". Within that train of thought, somewhere between "they're like Legolas" and "Tsol'aa" is the "they must have pointy ears!" bit. The problem here is not that there was anything confirming the Tsol'aa having pointy ears, it's that, up until a few days ago, there was nothing outright denying it. Based on all of the mentioned similarities, it would not be that far of a stretch to assume the general anatomy of the Tsol'aa ear.
And that, my dear @Sarapis, is why I personally thought the Tsol'aa had pointy ears... until you turned my world upside down.
I'm fairly sure this topic has come up quite a bit before, and the answer's always been consistent. I somewhat understand why people think Tsol'aa have pointed ears, but saying something like "they basically have the same purpose as LOTR elves lore-wise, thus they must have all of the same physical features" is a bit strange.
That said, I'm also the person who, despite having a name that's a bastardization of the name of one of Elrond's sons, first thinks of these when elves are mentioned.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
The irony is that I do have something about ears in my description, but it has nothing to do with their shape.
Honestly, I think if this really is such a big deal - and it shouldn't be, they're ears ffs - then I think all it takes is changing the subtext in the HTML5 creator from "elf" to something else. That'll separate the Tsol'aa from their wrongly assumed persona enough that people won't run around claiming to have pointed ears.
emote adjusts the strap of his eyepatch, briefly pausing to rub the top of his ear with a faraway look of forlorn disappointment.
emote pauses mid-speech to idly tweak the tip of one ear in an entirely subconscious gesture.
But yeah, I do appreciate clarity on this type of thing. When you're creating a new character in a new game, you want to clearly envision them, which requires a good idea of what their race is supposed to like. Human is obvious enough, atavians are humans with wings, tsol'aa are elves more slender, willowy humans, mhun are malnourished North Korean humans, sirens are sexxy human women. Others can be more ambiguous: horkval or grook could be imagined in many different ways. I always imagined grooks to look like Toad of Toad Hall. Even races like trolls, a fantasy staple, have many different depictions in other sources, from rock-skinned to leathery, and goblinoid to cave-man. Clarity here is what I appreciate about the racial portraits, although the two pieces of troll art are still conflicted: one is tusk-toothed and green, the other, older one more rock-skinned.
New players aren't really equipped to wander around racial areas taking census of physical features, and will probably first have to cover their modesty by writing their character's description. Not every race has a significant racial area, and some that do are older areas with NPCs with barer descriptions.
Tangentially related: racial naming conventions. I would have appreciated something like this when creating a character. A list of a few examples for what a typical mhun or atavian or rajamalan name might sound like. Blujixapug was originally supposed to be a grookish sort of name. I liked that Lusternia had this type of cultural heritage for its races, and although you didn't have to follow them, a typical Lucidian name would be recognisable and significantly different from an Illithoid one. It would be a bit awkward to suddenly impose this upon Achaea, though, and retrofit game-wide naming conventions that haven't previously existed outside of isolated areas.
Tsol'aa were, in everything I have read IC, actually made by Proteus and Phaestus. Proteus becoming Sarapis in this instance as he merged with Ayar but whatever just wanted to add my two cents.
Edit: And man, as I think about it, we should change some of these others. "Winged Human" is pretty bad from the same perspective I criticized you on. We have to be brief as we're limited by space and by the fact that we have that very short plain-language summary to explain races whose names are unique to us, but we can do better than that.
For those who love your pointy ears, just call it body modification or a birth defect. Makes more sense than arguing with the Logos about whether you're meant to have those pointy ears or not.
Nothing denying it except the racial art that's been around for 12+ years that shows very clearly they don't have pointed ears, and the fact that there is literally not a single mention of pointed ears anywhere in the game's canon. Not one. Of course, newbies won't see that old racial art (and it shouldn't even be up there any more...is an oversight on our part).
We're going to change the html5 client phrase, but keep in mind that it's said "elf" for only a handful of months. Understandable that it might confuse new players, but most people who erroneously describe their Tsol'aa as having pointed ears created their characters long before the word 'elf' ever appeared anywhere in conjunction with Achaea. And that's fine. If you want to describe yourself as having pointed ears, or horns, or tentacles, that's your business and as long as it isn't offensive we don't really care. But, the canon is what the canon is, and player descriptions have no effect on it.
Doesn't really make sense in modern IC Achaea in my opinion. Adventurers are part of a multiple-hundreds-year-old highly diverse and racially-integrated culture. There are no cultures on real-life earth that have been that heavily racially-integrated for that long (and of course Achaean races vs. human 'races' are not a perfect analog at all), but it usually only takes 1 or 2 generations for people to start largely abandoning their forefathers' naming conventions in favor of their current culture. For instance, I'm a second-generation American on my dad's side, but I have a thoroughly non-Hungarian name. I have, as do many of you I assume, many friends of all races who, once they're 1 or 2 generations removed from the immigrant forefather, have names that don't provide any clue as to racial origin. Chinese friends named Sam. Peruvian friends named John. Japanese friends named Brian. etc.
Beyond that though, the impact would be minimal to zero considering how frequently many players change race and how many people want to play using whatever favorite name they use in multiple games.