Don't worry...

Most men are bad at PvP too =P

How it works:
http://xkcd.com/385/

"if women are so great at figuring out their opponents, why aren't we seeing all-female teams winning Arena tournaments?"

I'm with you...I'm in a non-PvP realm for a reason. I don't do PvP. I don't do arenas. Why? Because I suck at it. And, in truth, I could really care less about it. It's just not my thing.

This isn't to say that ALL women are lousy PvPers, but I might go so far as to say that the majority would probably reply to the above question with something like, "Because we simply don't find it that interesting."

Another woman who dislikes PvP here, but I'm really, really, really hesitant to jump too far into the gender theory on this one. Personally, I dislike interacting with the general WoW population, which kept me out of battlegrounds and has also kept me away from larger leveling guilds, out of /trade and /general, and out of pugs. Once arenas started up I tried a couple, but at that point had been playing exclusively PvE for so long that I really didn't want to learn how to play all over again.

One could probably make a good argument that women are socialized to be less competitive in general, but since I'm not an expert of any kind, I think I'll keep out of it. Personally, I'm hugely competitive, but find that when I get into that mindset, I get nasty and frustrated and basically don't enjoy myself. WoW is my fun time, so anything that's not fun has to go.

I used to pvp a lot. To gauge, I had 25K kills and Justicar. Before TBC. On an alt. Yes, really. I totally wanted those Sentinel Chain Leggings.

At this point, I'm still relatively hardcore into WoW. At least, I think server 2nd to 80 on a pvp server is pretty hardcore (5 hrs sleep, 1st to 80 had her husband play half the time, gag me). Maybe it's because I don't play one of the more desired arena classes, but I just haven't been able to get into pvp too much, though I will say I totally adore wintergrasp.

I burned out on pvp shortly after TBC dropped because it kind of sucks to be stuck at Gold Mine every game. Or be the only one to try & flag carry because your team is hanging out at the rejuv hut farming HKs. Not gonna lie though, I loved kiting lieutenants, lol. I did a long series of cycles where I would be hardcore into pvp for about a month and then be disgusted and not pvp at all for 2 weeks so the highest rank I attained was Knight-Champion. I wonder now if my irritation was due in part to my brain chemistry, which anticipated empathetically that if we leave a flag unguarded the other team will totally come and get it, while the failpugs on my team didn't have the same biological advantage. huh.

There are a couple caveats on the study:

1. It was written to evaluate if women are better 'mind readers' than men, because of this there will be a finding one way or the other.

2. The 'game' used was not WoW PvP, in fact it was a very simple series.

3. In general all participants had marked excitation in the medial frontal gyrus, so all participants that thought they were playing against a human reacted in approximately the same way. The main difference if one of degree.

4. The sample size was somewhat small, well over 2 standard deviations.

5. Possibly most important is that the subjects' brains were not not benchmarked... meaning none of them were asked to perform other tasks to evaluate their own inherent biases, which could have easily polluted the study. The IQs and general executive functions were checked, but not profiled. For such a targeted study on such a small group, I would have expected much more careful parameterization.


Bottom line.. this study almost kind of says something useful, but not quite.