Guild Wars 2

Hard to tell what gender someone is these days unless you outright ask them. A lot of males like to play as female characters. I myself have a few female alts because their armor looks better and a female warrior is appealing to me. Yah I am weird.

As a female gamer (with a masculine account name), I am greatly disappointed in never having the opportunity to reveal my gender and being bombarded with flirting and free gifts! Curse you enlightened mmo! ~shakes fist at gw2 community~

But seriously, I was pleasantly surprised by the community’s maturity. One of the reasons I was afraid of mmos was because of stories I heard (not even having to do with being female) of people being mean. So it’s even more surprising to hear stories from the ladies here about the extra grief associated with being female.

As for the ratio in this game, I always assumed it was about 50% (give or take) for each gender. In fact, my guild has quite a few active ladies. There were about five of us in voice chat during a guild bounty (I think there were about 10 guildies participating in bounty).

I would like to thank all the gaming women who came before me. Your courage is most likely why I’ve had such a positive experience here.

Ratio of male to female playing this game is the same as the drop rate of porous bone:Dusk.

Adine.2184:

like i said before why does it even matter if its guy or a girl behind the screen? Its like asking the ratio of white to black people who play shooters , nobody knows and nobody cares nor should they .

You could argue that the OP was asking a pointless question and that the thread is moot because there is no way we can reliably answer the statistics question the OP was asking. If anything, your question would be better suited simply asking the OP what their motivation was for asking the question. However, I think others in the thread already have already touched on a number of socially interesting reasons to ask such a question. Demystifying gender demographic stereotypes and gender expectations in games has been a recurring theme in the responses. I’m sure the OP had some conscious or unconscious desire to learn more about what significance or impact gender distribution has on the social atmosphere of an MMO. I think people should care about who is playing games with them. It’s really interesting when you think that there are people behind those avatars with different experiences than you. It’s actually a discussion that developers and players are having more and more these days and what you can discover through these discussions, I feel, is significant in one way or another.

Spider Bro Jenkins.2780:

But seriously, I was pleasantly surprised by the community’s maturity. One of the reasons I was afraid of mmos was because of stories I heard (not even having to do with being female) of people being mean. So it’s even more surprising to hear stories from the ladies here about the extra grief associated with being female.

I’ve found the community to be very good compared to some of the other multi-player games I’ve been involved in. I think the game design itself, and ANet’s active enforcement of the code of conduct contribute to making it a better environment for everyone to play in. The mean folks tend to gravitate toward toward games where it’s a little easier to grief folks and where you aren’t going to end up suspended for 72 hours for your vulgar character names. (Gaile is my role model for being assertive in text).

Fay.2735:

(I come from the Jedi Knight series of games and am female so I remember when coming across another female gamer on there was fairly rare).

I’m sorry but that sentance right there unloaded a whole lot of nostalgia on me thank you very much =D

My guild has quite a few ladies. They are the most active in our mumble server a lot of the time. I’d say they are about 25% – 30% of our active players.

Riviriel.9718:

My guild has quite a few ladies. They are the most active in our mumble server a lot of the time. I’d say they are about 25% – 30% of our active players.

Obviously voice-changing software. Don’t be fooled. Refer to my previous post.

I’d say 15 -20 %. Of the 100 actives in the guild there are about 15-20 girls/women that I know of.

Sky.7610:

Riviriel.9718:

My guild has quite a few ladies. They are the most active in our mumble server a lot of the time. I’d say they are about 25% – 30% of our active players.

Obviously voice-changing software. Don’t be fooled. Refer to my previous post.

Your response actually reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend about spotting the difference between a female player and a male impersonator. I came to the conclusion the only way was to talk about periods, lols were had.

MMOs tend to attract a much larger portion of female players than most other genres. I don’t think it’s as high as 30%, but it is probably not too exaggerated either. In WoW my guild is very close to the parity, for example.

Spider Bro Jenkins.2780:

Sky.7610:

Riviriel.9718:

My guild has quite a few ladies. They are the most active in our mumble server a lot of the time. I’d say they are about 25% – 30% of our active players.

Obviously voice-changing software. Don’t be fooled. Refer to my previous post.

Your response actually reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend about spotting the difference between a female player and a male impersonator. I came to the conclusion the only way was to talk about periods, lols were had.

I’m kidding.

Sky.7610:

Spider Bro Jenkins.2780:

Sky.7610:

Riviriel.9718:

My guild has quite a few ladies. They are the most active in our mumble server a lot of the time. I’d say they are about 25% – 30% of our active players.

Obviously voice-changing software. Don’t be fooled. Refer to my previous post.

Your response actually reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend about spotting the difference between a female player and a male impersonator. I came to the conclusion the only way was to talk about periods, lols were had.

I’m kidding.

Pretty sure she knew that. lol

Just to clarify, there’s a couple of completely logical reasons why female gamers are more prominent here than other games. I think the main reason is that It’s just nice to see a mmo community that can accept the presence of female gamers.

One of these days the stereotype can be dropped from female and male gamers, and we can all just be ‘gamers’. Maybe when we reach a 50/50 diversity, which is not grouped with subcategories using gender oriented games. (girls only play cutesy games, guys only play bloody games, etc)

What originally sparked this thread was someone made a comment about my supposed ‘girlfriend’. I politely replied that I did not have one, not everyone here is a guy, and not everyone thinks below their waistline. To which the response was, “Yes it is.”

…This thread says not so.

In my current guild, there’s about 40% female to 60% male gamers. In my previous guild (that I’m still a part of, but don’t really rep anymore), it was 60% female to 40% male. So yes, I’m sure that the ratio of female to male gamers in GW2 is about a 40 – 50% of the playerbase. It’s just that most female players don’t advertise their gender in the game (and why should they?)

For convenience, I tend to assume that the player’s gender is the same as their character’s, but I know it’s not a hard and fast rule. I’m a male player myself, but 3/5 of my characters are female. (I tend to create male – female characters in a 50:50 ratio in my fantasy RPGs.)

I was also hit on once by a male player while playing as my female human Mesmer. At least he didn’t freak out when I told him I was a guy. XD

Sokar Rostau.7316:

I think at least part of the reason is that GW2 isn’t as… “masculine” as other games of the genre and has many “girly” elements to attract female gamers. Both Legendary bows are extremely feminine, for example. As a guy, I find Skritt to be really cool and they make me smile… but Quaggans are just far too cutesy (though still amusing at times) to have been designed by a guy for a male audience.

Wow, really? You’re going to stick by that comment? I don’t play games because they’re “cutesy” and I don’t know a single adult woman who does. Most of my girlfriends are as in your face, knock-you-down-and-take-your-stuff competitive as you guys – news flash, we’re not aliens, we like alot of the same stuff you do.

I started playing MMOs with Star Wars Galaxies and have played a lot of titles since then. GW2 is my favorite right now because:

1) No grind … you can if you want to, but you never have to and I’ve got better things to do with my free time. No gear treadmill goes along with this.

2) Downleveling – ever who came up with this idea needs a raise; two raises. I love that I can go to any area any time and still have fun. Exploration is a HUGE part of the game for me and this keeps exploring interesting.

3) There’s more to do than just killing stuff – Hey, I like killing monsters, but that gets old after awhile, the jumping puzzles, mini dungeons, and hidden areas give me a chance to take a break from that. (exploring falls under this as well – I love the cities, love exploring cities, want more cities)

4) Roleplaying – more than any MMO I’ve played, and I’ve played alot, I’ve seen GW2 really bring in the roleplayers. If I every want to rp I can always find someone to do it with – at just about any time, in any map. The game draws rpers.

5) Everything else – there isn’t much I don’t like about the game, really. Dungeons can be hard when no one wants to play with your thief and I wish they did more with the cities, but mostly I love it all. After the huge disappointment TOR was, I appreciate this game even more.

6) I love that the game knows when not to take itself too serious like. It has some serious stories to tell, but it doesn’t forget that it’s a game and people play games to relax and have fun. If I want to be depressed I’ll watch Honey Boo Boo and ask myself what has happened to the human race.

"">>I suspect 90% of the women/girls who play this game do so, because their husband/boyfriend play this game.<<""

That’s insulting. I expect most of us play the game because we like the game. Some of us play because our boyfriends or girlfriends are playing – but some guys only play because their Others are playing, as well. Video games aren’t this big strange boy’s club world any more – if they ever really were – and women play them for alot of the same reasons guys do.

Oh, and Quaggans? I hate Quaggans. I will fail events on purpose because I hate Quaggans. I used to hate Skritt, too, but I changed my mind about that.

dislocated.4673:

As a woman who has been gaming and online for years now, I just want to add that the notion that women don’t obviously ‘out’ themselves and that online, men assume they’re dealing with other men, has a lot of truth.

The reasons for this have been stated in previous posts, discrimination, abuse, assumptions of incompetence etc. I know not every guy online has behaved like this, but enough have for women like myself to behave ‘gender neutrally’ online.

This, so often. I ran into this a few times here and it stopped me from spending much time in the bars … not that I like dropping my character in bars for rp anyway – always seemed lazy to me – but after being openly harassed and degraded I decided once was more than enough. I’ve also had a person jump on me and demand to know if I was a girl or a guy while we were running a dungeon … all I could think was “why does it matter?”

But it’s happened here a lot less than in other MMOs; Everquest 2 and SWG both being pretty bad about it. Part of that, though, could be that I just know how to avoid it better than I used to.

Einlanzer.1627:

Nova.8021:

Isslair.4908:

In our 500-man guild I know 3 ladies and heard about one more. So yeah, you can see the trend.

This.

It gave me an idea of the numbers actually. We have many players with Teamspeak and mics in our guild of 500 and we have peaked in the 100s of people on it at a time. Of all the people that have talked with mics, the women hardly even make up a 10th of that number.

Women also don’t participate in large guild events or highly competitive game-play nearly as much, and make up a higher percentage of the ‘casual’ playerbase.

This is false.

It may be just easier to notice if they aren’t participating, but I have no evidence to back up your statement, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Draygo.9473:

Women also don’t participate in large guild events or highly competitive game-play nearly as much, and make up a higher percentage of the ‘casual’ playerbase.

This is false. [/quote]

Uh, I missed this one … work it into my rant above somewhere. Yeah, Draygo’s right, I don’t know where you’re getting your numbers from – person that Draygo quoted – but most of the women I know love large guild events in MMOs; we have a bang up – shootin’ up time. ( the last part, meh, it’s all based on the person; I’m a casual player so I can’t say too much about that)

There are a lot of women that play GW2 in fact they enjoy the same type of content that men do. I see women in dungeon runs, PvE content, and WvW PvP. In fact, they are as competitive as anyone else in the game.

My boyfriend and I were new to dungeons and had a few sub-par experiences with PUGs, so he made a post on the server-specific forum asking if anybody would be willing to group up with us and show us how it works. We got many awesome people offering to help us out. Almost ALL of them were women. (Even I was surprised.)

So, there’s that.

The other person we run dungeons with is a player that we randomly met in a jumping puzzle, also turned out to be a woman. But last time she brought a male friend.

Gluttony.2017:

There are quiet a few female players, however they dont run around and yell “im a gurl, gimme attention and free items”.. with the exception of a few.

And some of those are males who like to freeload, spoiling it for us female gamers.

Remember too, that being competitive isn’t a “manly” trait, but a personality thing. I am not competitive at all, behaving more “like a woman would” for this biased society’s purposes.

Males/females aren’t supposed to act like males/females, but as THEMSELVES, whether that is traditionally masculine/feminine or otherwise. We are individuals, more than genders. Some ladies are not “traditionally feminine” (which is a societal construct), so they don’t fit many of the stereotypes cited on this thread (Facebook games, playing because their boyfriends play, must be “casual”-as if “casual” meant something bad anyway, etc.); that said, being “traditionally feminine” isn’t bad, just be who you really are.

Simply put, people don’t need to know or care about your gender in game, and they would be in the wrong if they treated you differently for being any given gender. Not all males “act like males”, nor all females “act like females”-some people just are who they are, and that’s the end of it. Accept people for who they are, not for who you think they should be.

In my small Friends and Family guild of 16, 4 are Female. In my larger WvW guild, we have a large number of females (though I don’t know the count offhand). As far as character gender goes, I have 4 male and 3 female toons.