Guild Wars 2 Forum - Guild Wars 2 Discussion

GW2 Armor is Sexist Towards Men

I have no idea why Arena Net hates gamers, and personally I don’t care anymore. I’ve played this game for 3 years, and as a proud member of their straight, male player-base I’m happy to say that I’m done with this game.

The final straw came today after I had a conversation with my game design friend about how these games tend to sexualize women to an excessive extent. (i.e. giving them impractical high-heels, armor that points towards their genitals, leaving tons of skin bare, etc.) I pointed out that, yes this exists but it’s ultimately the choice of the player whether or not they want to customize their character like that and there’s a lot of customization options in GW2 which is one of the reasons that I’m still playing it. But then he mentioned that he wanted to make a male character with the most impractical high-heels possible. And then when someone pointed out that his character looked ridiculous he was going to reply with “YUP, it does look stupid doesn’kitten” But then I decided to count all of the male light, medium, and heavy chest piece armors and compare them to all of their female counterparts that allow you to show skin in Guild Wars 2. 61Female to 11Male (& 4 of these are duplicates)

The final straw though came today when I was trying to make a new necromancer and found that the only male chest armor set that shows any nipple is, in fact unavailable and has been for some time.

Even when this armor was available it was necessary to grind to level 30 in order to obtain. The psychology of this effectively boils down to placing the lack of skin for men as an extreme reward while creating it as a “normal” for women. And before you start criticizing my basis for this, I am a cognitive neuro-psychology graduate from Cornell University and if necessary I will so you my f-ing degree.

This is ridiculous. It’s not just the way female characters have exagerated hip-swing when they walk. It’s not just the fact that they have more sexualized animations and sound effects. It’s really not just the armor discrepancies, although this is a big part of it. It’s that Arena Net doesn’t seem to acknowledge or really even care about these things. They don’t want us to play female characters, they want to sexualize them. Either fine and do that, or fair’s fair and do that for men as well.

So thank you Arena Net. Thank you for pigeonholing men, and gamers in general, as objectifying, sexist pigs. Truely thank you. You’ve saved me a lot of money on your otherwise solid game, and let me spend it somewhere else.