Not keen. I liked being able to just complete the dailies by playing the content I wanted to play. At the moment (and for the past several months), I have only had time to log in once a week at most for a few hours, and no matter what map or content I was trying to catch up on, I could usually knock out the daily. Looking at today’s selection, that will no longer be the case.
I’m not angry or upset. It’s just pretty clear I probably won’t be completing any dailies on a regular basis any more. If it was Anet’s intention to change the purpose of dailies then . . . shrug, I guess. Time-wise, I’m a casual player, so it doesn’t impact me massively in the grand scheme of things. It’s just a bit disappointing I suppose.
Oh dear. Maybe there was a fire at the Queen Jennah mini factory.
I think it’s structured well at the moment. I’ve been doing the story instances with a regular group and it’s been good fun, but it’s even more reassuring knowing that if I want to replay them or anything or my friends are unavailable, I can go in and do them solo. It’s the perfect way to do it for the personal story-esque elements – make group play optional.
I’m not really inclined to call this a fridging. On a technicality, I suppose it arguably fits the bill (female character killed off to further someone else’s plot), but we’re not left with a short supply of female characters as a result, and the plot/character development being advanced is that of even more female characters.
It’s one of those cases where yes, there is a widespread pattern of killing off female characters for narrative purposes in the media. But killing off characters is not inherently a bad thing in a narrative (not everyone can be a main character and it can have emotional impetus), and when it happens in a game or movie or TV series where you have a balanced and diverse cast, the gender of the character killed is less of an issue.
I do wish we’d got a little more interaction with her though. It was a little abrupt, but then maybe that was the intention.
So basically, you want armor to be devoid of gender. Because of the lore and all.
Nope, that’s not what I want (or said) at all. I would like armour to stop being gender-essentialist – that is, enforcing standards upon people because of arbitrary gender choice.
I’ve got no problem with armour being conservative or revealing, or having skirts or trousers, or having a bowtie or a ribbon, or any other traditionally “gender-specific” motif (that actually has nothing to do with your sex or gender and is all socially dictated). I have a problem with armour being completely different (and in many cases completely inaccessible) depending on that option you picked at character selection.
What I’d like to see, and the link in my sig explains more, is some basic design tenets being put in place so that armour is not substantially different between the two genders. This doesn’t mean taking away armour or making it all “male by default” armour. It just means taking a design and making it available for both genders. That’s it.
Traditionally masculine or feminine stuff doesn’t need to go away to achieve this – it just needs to be available for both genders, so players can decide what their character wears, instead of someone else’s preconceived notions of what’s acceptable for a particular gender.
It’s a real shame; I thought GW2 would be the MMO to really push being progressive on the gender front.
Wait. Waiiiiiiiiiit right there. What? You have to elaborate here because if any company did everything right in this respect, it’s Anet. The only other company that is on the forefront on this issue is Bioware. Anyway, you cannot blurt out such sweeping statements and not back them up.
I certainly can.
Much was made during pre-release of progressive elements to the game, and yes, as I mentioned in my post, Anet were successful in some areas. But they don’t follow through. I guess the best way I can sum it up is that the ideas are there, but they are failed by stereotypical sexist MMO implementation.
For example: when the sylvari were introduced and their lore and culture started to trickle out in interviews and blog posts, they made heavy mention of the lack of traditional gender roles. The sylvari are supposed to see gender as no more significant or defining than hair or skin colour – it’s a physical attribute with no social ramifications.
This sounded awesome.
Unfortunately, the game mechanics do not support this. The sylvari have no traditional gender roles but you cannot wear male armour on a female sylvari or vice versa. There are character customisations specific to the female models or male models. You see how the lore clashes with the game implementation, making this shallow gender-progressiveness at best?
Likewise, when the charr and asura were revealed and we first saw the female charr and asura, I was super excited because here was a great example of no gender dimorphism and sexualisation of the female of the species.
But they can only wear male armour. They are male by default. Male is normal armour, female armour is other. It’s exceptional, and assumed to be sexualised or inappropriate for everyone else by default.
Then there’s the fact that we had to fight tooth and nail pre-release to get anything but ‘barbie’ physiques for the female humans (and there are still no well-built or muscular builds available), and after more complaining we got one token older female face, and one token ‘black’ face preset added.
Don’t even get me started on the lack of armour diversity and revealing armour for male characters. I’m tired of seeing male characters look like they were dressed by overprotective mothers who think they might catch a chill if they leave anything but their face exposed.
For every great step Anet takes forward (inclusion of non-hetero romance, prominent female lead characters, races who in principle do not embody heteronormative standards or have no supposed sexism in them/mock the sub-groups that encourage sexism), they take three back with the lore vs game mechanics and gender restriction clash.
This issue won’t be resolved until Anet stop designing the humanoid armour to be so drastically different based on gender. The gendered differences are so massive they could easily get two completely different armour sets out of each humanoid armour released, but instead we’re stuck with arbitrary restrictions because we picked ‘Female’ or ‘Male’ in the character selection screen, or a non humanoid race, in which case we are ‘male’ by default.
Still annoying. Will complain every time it happens, but after 2 years, not honestly expecting anything to be done about it. It’s a real shame; I thought GW2 would be the MMO to really push being progressive on the gender front. It succeeds in some areas, but has some major fails in character customisation.
Some content is more difficult than others but simply because you can’t do it doesn’t mean all content should be made for the lowest common denominator.
Wow. Ruuuude.
Designing content with users with impairments in mind is called accessibility. It has little to do with content difficulty. Options and design choices made with impairments in mind are often supplementary/beneficial to all users . . . and yet there aren’t even basic colour blindness options in GW2 yet. That’s the standard being set here by the game.
You’re right about your focus on “have to”. Game mechanics don’t “have to” exclude those players with impairments. There are often quite workable solutions to improve accessibility that don’t impact the unimpaired at all.
That said, I do believe what OP is tackling is the jumping puzzle, which can definitely be a pain with the timed crystals (the jumps themselves aren’t too tough). The vista is lower down, I think.
Overall I’m pretty stoked about the changes, but having to pay to unlock makes me raise my eyebrow. I don’t feel overwhelmingly negative about it, but I guess I just don’t really get why having the chance to just log in once during the window, even if you don’t play any of it, means you’ve ‘earned’ the story for free, while if you miss that window due to work or family or holidays or your PC blew up or whatever else, suddenly it will cost you money. It feels like a really . . . artificial way of applying a price tag to things.
But, the changes on the whole, I’m really happy about. I just hope this doesn’t inconvenience too many people. Yes, being able to buy old content is better than not being able to experience it at all, but I don’t accept that making it purchase-after-the-fact was an inevitability.
Usually I can at least log in once every 2 weeks so I guess it won’t impact me that much, but ehhh. Weird one.
I think there’s a small but vocal subset of GW1 players that prefer the solo around with henchies playstyle and really didn’t understand what taking the franchise to MMO status meant.
I think the major issue was locking personal story behind group content. I’ve been playing since pre-launch weekend and I still haven’t actually completed all of the story dungeons, including the final one. It’s not because I don’t want to, nor because I don’t want to group up, but my schedule and home situation makes it difficult to commit to the dedicated slot of time it takes to put a group together and run a dungeon. Rather than be unreliable, potentially have to pull out before the dungeon is complete etc. I tend to just . . . not run dungeons.
The implementation of group content outside of the personal story has otherwise been pretty great for me. The casual ‘just turn up and take part’ and ‘function as part of an ad hoc group’ strategy has suited my playstyle and IRL commitments perfectly.
You seem to be missing the point, there’s an obvious reason why men were not put in tutu’s (outside of some fetish or some form of cruel punishment). Lacey and frilly type fashion just isn’t manly. Works for females, some even have a defined grace that flows with it, but it’s hardly the pinnacle of masculinity. It looks cute on my 4 year old daughter. /shrug
Yeah, just like high heels aren’t manly, right? Men would never . . . oh, they were originally worn by men, and ladies started wearing them to adopt more masculinity, my bad.
But hey, at least we can always rely on gendered colours, right? No colour is more manly than blue, after all, and pink is . . . oh, this was actually the reverse in early 1900s and blue was for girls and pink was for boys.
You see how trivial this is? How subjective it is? How arbitrary this is? What is “manly” isn’t objective fact. You can’t pin it down to scientific analysis of aesthetics based on anatomy or “grace” or any other gendered stereotype. It’s social stigma, nothing more, nothing less. Let people express themselves how they want to, regardless of sex and gender, and let’s all stop pretending we are in any way able to objectively define what is masculine and what is feminine.
The birthday boosters make levelling alts slightly less painful, so I’d like to see those return. I miss the birthday mini lottery from GW1 though. The one decent place for some RNG in GW2 and I ended up with about 12 account-bound Queen Jennah minis instead . . .
I’ve seen him around too. I whispered him once to tell him no one was ever going to give him the kind of replied he wanted, but all I got in response was “are you girl?” about 5 times then asked if I’m on Facebook. I didn’t reply.
I can’t help but laugh at this.
In my eyes the issue is that GW2 has so much potential, but the devs are not getting the best out of it. This leads to people being frustrated, but not enough to leave the game. As a result, people whine (as do I).
Yeah, it’s still a pretty entertaining game and it’s incredible, incredible value for money. It’s the squandered potential and the problems in the implementation details and the derailing of the game’s original vision that frustrates me and players like me, who came from GW1 and found themselves in a muddy half-visionary, half-tentative game that can’t decide whether it’s really bold enough to be as different as it promised. It tries to please everyone, and that leaves it floundering sometimes.
Furthermore, GW2 is aimed at casual gamers, and those are the worst when it comes to whining. They always feel entitled to everything and complain when things are “too hard” (while most PvE content is as easy as can be) and they feel entitled to getting the rewards anyway, so instead of improving, they whine.
Was with you until this point. A lot of whining about there not being enough grind is exactly why the game deviated from its original skill-based and cosmetic-rewards design model. I could easily group those people into “hardcore” players and irrationally blame them for all the game’s flaws, but I choose not to because I know logically that players cannot be swept neatly into two hivemind crowds who are either/or.
well i think you should shout out things, but i dont think shouting that this armor shouldnt exist is the best bet, the best bet is shouting out what armor should exist.
That’s exactly what I do. I’ve never, ever asked for armour to be removed from the game. I’ve never, ever said “don’t make this armour available to people anymore because I personally don’t like it”. Even my sig thread just says “If the female/male versions are so different they don’t look alike, turn it into two sets instead of one gender-imbalanced one”.
My stance is this: I respect people’s preferences, so if they want to wear conservative armour, that’s cool. If they want to wear revealing armour, that’s cool. But they should never be forced into extremes, particularly revealing armour (see: female scholar starting armour), and these options should not be dependent on gender (e.g. revealing armour being only/mostly available to female characters).
So my complaints pretty much every time new gemstore armour is release tend to be “The female version is nice, too bad I can’t wear it on my male character” or vice versa. It’s frustrating and it has kept my money from reaching Anet on a multitude of occasions. Ridiculous toggles (female head on a male body, seriously? That’s an answer? 9_9 ) are not the solution. More intelligent and thoughtful armour design is.
essentially your biggest opponent right now, is probably not the players, but the bottom line(money aka what sells) Second opponent is the dispositions of the actual designers, even if they tried to make something you like, it may not hit home. I dont think most peoples fashion senses will ever be satisfied until some game formalizes player generated gears. Of course, if that did happen there would be a lot of bad points, as well the good points.
The trouble is that marketing is drowning in sexist ‘facts’ about what does and doesn’t sell. There are publishers out there who still actively rail against female game protagonists because when a game that happens to be female-led doesn’t do as well as expected, that is suddenly evidence that the whole gender is a write-off. This is the kind of marketing “fact” that dictates decisions like not providing male eye candy even if female eye candy is an acceptable thing. Don’t want to make that equally mythical completely straight-male userbase uncomfortable or anything!
I can’t honestly see what we can do better to combat this than to shout out what we want to see, pointing suggestively at our open purses. There is demand for this stuff. Some beautiful posts (and example images hurr) in this thread on the topic, too <3 I’m gonna run out of +1s at this rate. It’s . . . really heartening to see, I can’t lie. The only thing that would make me feel more cheerful about it would be an Anet response.
More options for all are great!
An example of RL dude rocking a sexy, skimpy adventuring outfit, to prove it can be done: http://fashionablygeek.com/costumes/gender-bent-erotic-metal-gear-solid-v-cosplay-is-fantastic/
Uh yeah. There’s a reason ArenaNet doesn’t have armor like that in this game. That looks kittening ridiculous.
How about you take off the “shirt” and actually wear more than a thong. You can have skimpy male armor, but that’s not male armor. There’s a reason men in dresses look bad.
Battle lingerie for women looks ‘ridiculous’ to a lot of people, but it still exists. Your opinion on how men look in revealing armour is not objective fact. What looks good and what looks bad is completely subjective, and a lot of people think differently, including a lot of real people out there who wear clothing opposite to the stereotypical norms of their gender. Consider what the opinion used to be on women wearing trousers. Now it’s perfectly acceptable. There’s no objective fact in this trend – it’s just a social perspective shift and a growth of acceptance.
On the MGS cosplay dude . . . dang, those fishnets . . . <3 It makes me hate even more the fact that the latest medium armour in the gemstore had those sexy lattices on the female that showed the underlying skin, but the dudes are still apparently allergic to direct sunlight.
And god forbid you get made uncomfortable. It only women who should there to be ‘make your own kitten material’.
If your going to do skimpy at least make it so for both although at this point I would say some more armour that actually armour or covering on girls and skimpy on guys is due.
Personalty I want more elegant stuff and while I like the trench coats more that aren’t for medium without making them underboob or having fishnet slits down the kitten would be nice. The only one I want ‘skimpy’ medium armour for is my charr.
I wish they hadn’t put a boob window on the latest gem store one.I’m not uncomfortable with male characters who expose their skin, fur or leaves. However, in contemporary fashion ‘revealing’ just does not work the same way for males.
Not fair! The male shirt is shorter!! That’s cheating!!
Alas, I searched for pictures of Chris Evans in just a shirt, but could find none. If it existed, I’m pretty sure it would prove this point wrong and make many ovaries explode in the process.
Point being that “It just looks wrong on guys” is pretty much the dreaded male gaze plus gender stereotypes talking. People are always quick to quote “sex sells” when defending skimpy armour, but it hardly sells just to straight guys with stereotypically cheesecake tastes.
So uh, bring on the skimp! I’ll be here in the corner eagerly awaiting some male battle lingerie, sculpted bare midriffs, hotpants, tasteful thongs and whatever else they’re bold enough to give us. Final Fantasy can do it, so you can too, Anet!
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I’m all for a good shipping session, but I like Rox and Braham as really close buddies.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how they develop the anti-sylvari sentiments. I guess I should actually get a move on and finish my personal story – if they’re bring Trahearne back in, they’re probably going to make a concrete decision on PS/LW chronology.
I hated the bi-weekly cadence, so this is promising to me. Hopefully we get meatier releases with more time to play them as opposed to the short bursts of achievement grindfests that were my least favourite parts of season 1.
Anti-zerg events aren’t inherently bad design – in fact, I think they’re a lot more satisfying to play – but as plenty of other good posts on the topic have stated, the in-game facilities for organising an entire map are just not good enough to pick up that slack yet. Selectable instances, better commander tools, visibility of multiple boss event progress etc. all needs beefing up, and then events like this will run a whole lot smoother and be a lot more accessible.
And scaling could definitely do with being a bit more intelligent. Encouraging people to spread out is a slightly different issue to having lots of people engaged in a fight and the scaling should take that into account for complex multi-event fights.
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I’m not gonna vote as the question’s not really relevant to my complaints about armour, but I’d just like to say that skimpy and non-skimpy armour is great in equal measures to suit all tastes – the most annoying thing is when it’s not gender balanced.
Chronic shortage of skimpy male armour, yo. See sig link.
The reality is not every armor is going to appeal to everyone and I am glad Arenanet isn’t attempting to make everyone happy, every time.
You’re glad that there are arbitrary limitations on what you can wear?
People enjoying different aesthetics to one another is a different issue to people not even having access to certain aesthetics because of an arbitrary character attribute.
I don’t understand what is the big deal about the “boob window”. A tint bit of sexuality for humanoids and a tiny bit of skin on Asura and Charr is so freaking scandalous. Where is the outrage for feathered armor or the new and improved flamekissed? There are such worse offenders of this.
It’s not a problem when it’s balanced with plenty of similarly skimpy armour on the men, or if both versions of the armour were available to both genders to avoid forcing a particular option on you just because your character does or does not have boobs.
The other problem is that outfits sexualised for humans do not really work on the non-humanoid races. Boob windows on asura and charr make no cultural or social sense for those races whatsoever. It’s lazy design. They do not have the same sexual or aesthetic drivers and it’s just silly.
I’d much rather see the time that is spent currently making massively gender-divergent armour sets set upon making armour sets really work and make sense culturally for the different races instead.
If you want an opposite gender armor, go pay 350 gems for a total makeover kit and actually swap genders.
Why should people have to change their character’s gender in order to wear something perfectly viable for that character? The gender restrictions on GW2 armour are for the most part completely arbitrary, for all races.
It’s not boob cleavage. Because there’s no boob.
And yet we got boob cleavage, but nothing for tail. And we looking at tail 99% of time.
I think that is a completely valid complaint. Tail dragon is win and females should have it too.
I just think the “it’s too feminine” chime made me seethe because… I just… I’ve been asking for more feminine models FOREVER.
I guess it’s important to understand that equating ‘feminine’ with sexist fantasy armour tropes like boob windows and random strips of missing fabric is worrisome. With charr and asura it’s also ridiculously inconsistent – do they have humanoid gender tropes or don’t they? The reason they don’t get more effeminate armour is already because they are relegated to default male armour, which is by and large more sensible, fully-covering and in many cases less diverse/detailed. And for the times that they get gender-specific aka female-sexualised armour, it shouldn’t just be a lazy mod of the humanoid version. Asura really go for big heads and ears, for example, and when charr get decorative it tends to be with their horns – socially it doesn’t make sense for them to have a boob window because that’s not something they emphasise when it comes to sexual attraction.
Honestly just wish Anet would switch to releasing armour accessible to both genders already instead of imposing arbitrary gender standards on any race. For an MMO that wants to be seen as progressive in a number of areas and has a lot of team members that are very vocal about gender equivalence, it really doesn’t push this boat hard enough at all. Sexualised armour is absolutely fine and good as a choice but it’s tiresome to see it forced on female characters time and again while the males get no equivalent, and it’s just plain embarrassingly awkward to see that sexualisation transferred to the non-humanoid races.
I really like the staff, but it’s way too costly on the TP for me and I don’t play the RNG game with chests.
I don’t think they should change existing sets, but I definitely think it’s time we had some new cultural armour across the board. The non-humanoid races in particular are crying out for some sets tailored to their particular needs, instead of being stuck with half-heartedly-modified versions of whatever looked good on humans.
Anet HAS to make money on Gem sales or the Servers shut down.
I’m all for getting it from players that want to play dress up and completionist collector rather than me. (I have bought a few skin sets and buy Gems monthly, so I’ve supported the game also).
Implying that there is no other possible, less exploitative way to make money? I mean, off the very top of my head, if they wanted to sell more keys/make money then they could make black lion chests more rewarding, or guarantee at least a ticket scrap per chest, or sell the skins directly in the gemstore – ANYTHING other than this “Key sale! ohbtwifyoudon’tbuynowyouloseaccesstotheseskinsindefinitelylol”
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I guess it’s time for the rich to get richer with discontinued skins which are obviously going to skyrocket…
not rly
this skins are bad and noone buyd or used them and sure price will rise cause speculators – but you will sit on this skins for months when not years
not worth to invest
Sets a nasty precedent, though e.g. don’t get comfortable thinking you can work toward cosmetic rewards at your own pace because we might remove them whenever we think we need a blc sales boost.
Sounds like they’re artificially creating scarcity in an attempt to get more sales. I hate it when they do that.
It’s a vile sales tactic and a horrible precedent to set.
Do not remove content from the game, Anet. Do not remove content from the game. Especially not to plug those scam-in-a-box blcs.
I do not spend my hard-earned RL money on a chance to get a scrap that can be exchanged in multitude for a token of which I need up to 10 to get a thing that I want. I mean, jesus. We were promised some ethics in the gemstore if I remember rightly.
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Maybe they’ll be tradeable to that vendor who will take old event items like the blade shards. Who is still completely absent from the game, of course.
They’ve never been ideal, with their stinky DRM, but this thread makes me feel pretty lucky to have received my soundtrack at all. It took a while, but I ordered pretty much the day it came out and it did eventually arrive, and signed by JS to boot (I assume, tbh I have no real way of verifying!). The worst sting in the tail for me was the import duty that got slapped on it.
Anet may have little control over how the soundtrack gets sold, but it would great if they could chase this up with DirectSong. You’d think they’d have some power in the relationship, and since they advocated the sales on DS they have something of a responsibility to customers to manage widescale problems.
Once upon a time way back in beta, transmutation stones were available for karma. It’d be nice to see that reinstated, since the transmutation changes are particularly punishing for below-80s.
Can’t say I’m a fan of the SALE SALE SALE culture of microtransactions in online gaming (where sale price is basically the real price and customers are under constant pressure to buy at the right time to maximise their savings).
That said, them’s the breaks when it comes to sales. It’s frustrating, but that’s marketing for you.
The dragons are more geographic as opposed to racial.
Besides, if you really want 6 races, I get number 6 would be the dwarves, who have strong ties to one dragon.
I do think a lot of the initial backlash has come as a result of not understanding the new system. It’s taken me a while to get to grips with it. It would be useful for Anet to publish a bit more guidance around e.g. the difference between the vault and the hero panel wardrobe, the difference between using a skin and adding it to the vault etc.
I’ll second this rant, but we should be careful:
The Secret world had/has this problem too and people complained about it. So what did funcom do? release “Gender Equality” which was a swimsuit set.
Women got a full covering wetsuit with rebreather… The snark comes in when males got a lime green body thong.
Admittedly, it’s hilarious.
It was an April Fools joke.
Not only was it a joke (and in pretty poor taste considering gender inequality in armour is a legit issue across multiple MMOs – punch up, not down), the main controversy actually flared up when they removed the mankini after April Fools because management said it wasn’t in-keeping with their vision for the game.
So the fact that they added a mankini wasn’t actually the problem. The fact that they then got prudish about it afterwards, all while being happy to keep some quite sexualised and skimpy female armour in game, is. It’s a painful double standard.
I just dunno how long I have to sit here waggling my eyebrows at Anet, jingling my purse, pointing emphatically at male caster armour like this and whispering pretty please.
It’s confusing to get everything “set-up” (I spent a good hour and a half last night just logging into my different characters, trying to make sure everything necessary had been unlocked). By that point I was too tired to get much use out of the new features, but I did appreciate the fact that I could now equip my earmuffs on my mesmer for combat <3
The loss of town clothes doesn’t drastically affect me, but I do have to say I still find the new implementation pretty poor for anything that wasn’t converted into armour. The main issue is that I don’t get the functional point of outfits. It’s a clumsy way to allow an extra cosmetic layer on top of your armour.
I think you should have streamlined the clothing ‘channels’ – I mean, now you have armour (split into 3 armour types), outfits and tonics sort of representing outfits. It would have been far better to go the whole hog and separate stats from cosmetics, making what you look like an entirely separate decision to the stats of your armour.
Failing that, I think it would have done Anet great favours to promise, over time, to convert the new ‘tonics’ into actual armour pieces. I know that right now there are technical difficulties in doing so, but surely this could have been completed as a long-term project. The tonic solution is really pointless and half- kitten d.
I guess that’s my main bugbear. The ‘solution’ for outfits/town clothes feels half- kitten d and without any clear point to it. The stuff that works well is the stuff that’s been directly converted to armour. Everything else is neither here nor there. I can’t see myself ever buying an uncustomisable outfit.
[img]http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/gw2-strider-medium-armor-skin-human-female-6.jpg[/img]
vs.
[img]http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/gw2-strider-medium-armor-skin-human-male-3.jpg[/img]
Female has got even kitten physics. They took a page from Mirana from Mass Effect. Male gets a bulky skirt covering his kitten .
I guess they’ll never give males actual leather pants.
There’s really no reason the guys couldn’t have some fishnet sections, too. The design choices are bizarrely arbitrary. The way they treat male armour is almost prudish sometimes.
If they really wanted a fishnet and non-fishnet version, they should have made them both available to both genders. ArenaNet is so progressive in some ways with their game design, and then they keep making this terribly basic mistakes that make me headdesk.
You can do better, Anet.
. . . Same old tiresome gender discrepancies.
This is not the same armour as this. Yet again, male scholars are stuck with another dull-looking full robe while the female scholars get their bits out.
I’m not saying armour can’t be skimpy. I’m not saying it has to be practical. I’m saying can they at least look like they belong to the same set? Can they at least be equally skimpy on both genders because there’s a dismal lack of skimpy armour for guys?
Problem: Armour diversity and choice is sometimes arbitrarily restricted by character sex.
Suggestion: For future armour sets, keep the following design maxims in mind:
1) The armour set should look aesthetically very similar on both character genders. Minor detail changes are okay, but as an overall rule of thumb, they should look like they belong to same armour set. Key defining features of the armour set should be present on both versions (e.g. if there’s a particular motif, or mantle design, or design shape/flow/pattern going on). If there has to be variation, it would probably be much more appropriate for it to be based on race, because the charr get short-changed so often with humanoid armour basically just stretched to fit them.
2) The armour set should not be more revealing on one gender than it is on the other. Revealing armour is okay. Showing flesh is okay. But keep it generally equalised.
If the concept/design with one armour set for one gender becomes divergent from the other gender’s version based on these two design maxims, split them into separate armour sets. This could mean keeping the variant aside for later release as a separate armour set, or introducing armour set variants in some way, shape or form (discussion on which is welcome).
Why this is important:
- Aesthetic consistency
- Ensuring that players aren’t locked out of armour they might have wanted because it is arbitrarily only available to certain genders
- Ensuring that players don’t feel they have to play a certain race or character sex in order to achieve the non-sex/race-related aesthetic they want for that character
- Avoiding player disappointment when they see one gender’s version of an armour, based on preview pics and marketing and armour icons, but discover they can’t have it on their character because their character is not a man/woman/ or is a male-armour-by-default race.
- Reduce confusion/improve consistency around the male-armour-by-default races, who have in the past been given gendered town clothes for arbitrary reasons, but then only get male armour in other cases, etc. . .
- Given that most revealing armour falls on the female version of a particular set so far, this would also open up a lot more diversity in available male armours, for players who want their boys to be wearing something less restrictive.
For more info/analysis of examples, see my original suggestions thread.
Please. Your gemstore armour offerings are boring me to tears. Give us something different. Convince me to part with my cash.
The default town clothes your character comes with don’t seem to get converted? They’re just gone o_O
EDIT: Okay, didn’t seem to get them on the first character I tried it with but have got 3 ‘Endless Common Clothing Tonics’ on the next char. They look interchangeable so I guess it’s sorta working?
(edited by Faowri.4159)
(But please more feminine armor for charr and asura please please)
On a personal note that has nothing to do with the overall thread – I love the fact that charr and asura don’t give two kittens about gender. They simply don’t distinguish and the idea of there being some clothes that only boys should wear and some clothes that only girls should wear is something they’d find odd. Unless I misunderstood you and you meant more feminine armour for both genders in which case sweet, I totally agree (like a frilly frock for both male and female charr) – I might actually make a male if that was available.
(edited to remove an extraneous end quote)
What I meant was that the charr and asura use what at first glance seems to be androgyny for their armor, but at second glance all of their armor is male. Oftentimes when people aim for no gender, what they’re really saying is a non-sexual male, rarely something that includes feminine qualities. Masculinity is seen to be the baseline and thus androgynous. As such, I believe we need more feminine armors for both asura and the charr because they are literally all masculine. I have no problem with female characters wearing masculine clothing, in fact I support that, but when there is no choice for feminine armor there becomes a problem.
Yeah, it comes back to the male = default/standard, female = non-standard problem, and all the derivative issues that causes. I’d honestly rather see more time spent on making the armours suit the races properly than the continued effort that clearly goes into gendering the armour when it only gets seen on 3 of the races at all.
Final Fantasy XIV is an example of a game that has a selection of armor choices for heroes that don’t look different when slapped on the opposite gender: http://www.dualshockers.com/2013/09/14/final-fantasy-xivs-gear-design-is-a-shining-example-of-gender-equality-in-games/
That is awesome and exactly what I meant. I, and a great deal of others, have no problem at all with armour that’s revealing or sexualised or impractical, so long as it remains so on both genders and there is enough overall variety in the sets to allow people to cover up if they want to.
So yeah, I don’t expect Anet to go back and address the current imbalances in sets, but it would be nice to see this adopted as a standard for future armour set designs.
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For me, the one flawless element of the Living World has been the audio. I’m a big Soule fan, and I used to think that nobody could replace him either, but I’ve honestly never looked back. I’m always excited to hear what the Anet audio team will come up with next – they have some very talented composers in their midst.
They should really just avoid making armour sets that are so dramatically different based on arbitrary gender expectations. Slight differences to account for anatomy are fine and all, and I can even tolerate a few stereotypical gender signifiers if we absolutely must, but when you’ve got massive thematic/motif/construction differences and the armours don’t look like they belong at all to the same set, there’s a basic design problem. More in my sig link on that, though.
I guess TL;DR is that this shouldn’t be a problem that needs a toggle. When you’ve got dramatically different looks across two genders for the same armour set, make them separate sets instead.
I enjoyed it <3 Had fun taking some ridiculous screenshots even if I had limited time to play today.
CTS surgery is pretty much out-patient these days and will cure you.
It’s not always (and often isn’t) carpal tunnel syndrome. CTS is the go-to diagnosis but you’d be surprised how often bad posture and poor ergonomics are the cause of hand/arm pain and numbness. You can also get other nerve compression conditions like cubital tunnel syndrome and thoracic outlet syndrome. Then there are other conditions like tendonitis, arthritis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and other things that aren’t nearly so treatable. Even CTS surgery doesn’t come without risks – operating on and around nerves is always dangerous.
In my case, it isn’t anything that can be easily treated with surgery, so every little ergonomic control system tweak helps.