Posts with tag female

Perhaps brought on by the news that a Chinese MMO wants to reveal gender bending gamers, Cary posted a pretty interesting poll over on the WoW LJ, asking readers what their gender is and what sex they play as on their main character. The general consensus seems to be that most people play as their own gender, but overwhelmingly, more women play as their own gender than men. The poll itself seems a little off to me, as it's really pointless to compare the percentages given, but by crunching the numbers a bit (and please remember how bad at math I am), I get that 40% of men who answered play the game as women, while only 11% of women who answered play the game as men. Here's more data on this, that we've covered before.

Very interesting. We've touched on the reasons for gender bending in game a few times before, and there are all kinds of reasons why people play as characters of the opposite sex, from staring at an attractive behind to garnering more money and attention (or less attention) from other players, to roleplaying a character.

But really, none of that matters too much-- it's just a game, and for whatever reason, people are welcome to play it as they please. A better question might be how you refer to the gender of other players. I've gotten in trouble a few times here by referring to players on the forums (including CMs, way back when I started) as one gender when it turns out they're actually another, so eventually I just decided to call it how I see it: if someone plays a female character I call them "her," and a male character gets called "him." For people playing a different gender, sure, it might come off a little strange. But it comes with the territory, I guess, of pretending to be someone else for a while.

Newcomers to Azeroth are met with a choice as to which race they should choose. Undoubtedly, the most immediately recognizable and familiar choice is that of the humans. But are the humans of Azeroth really just Azerothian versions of us Earthlings, or are they better understood as a distinct species of their own?

The most obvious difference at first glance is that in Azeroth, all men are blocky and all women are curvy. Aside from various facial traits, hair and skin color, humans don't vary from this standard mold. Even in advanced age, Azerothian women's breasts do not sag, nor do men's muscles lose their beefy bulkiness. Some Earthlings have disparagingly compared Azerothian men to gorillas for their tree-trunk arms and their "smashed-with-a-shovel" faces, but others point out that Azerothian humans have been hardened through great suffering. Wars with orcs, demons and undead have reduced their population from millions to mere hundreds of thousands, and so the weak humans of Azeroth have possibly been weeded out. So, while many Earthling humans may enjoy the comforts of working at a desk all day, then coming home to play at a desk too (i.e. via computer game), Azerothians, even old ones, have to keep themselves fit to fight off the various enemies encroaching on their lands, such as murloc flesheaters and forsaken undead. While this may explain the over-muscled arms of Azerothian males, it leaves the question of youthfully curved elderly women quite unanswered.

When Ryan wrote in suggesting we write about the concept of "wife aggro," a collective roar erupted over here at WoW Insider. The resulting conversation was both stimulating and more than a little silly, and in the end I decided if we can discuss this topic so profusely amongst ourselves, our readers certainly would benefit from us writing on the topic.

A couple of weeks ago several people in our guild started using the phrase "wife aggro" or "girlfriend aggro" as explanations why they had to AFK or log out of the game entirely. Now, being of that oh-so-rare female gamer demographic, I really took exception to this phrase, but it wasn't until four days ago when I actually spoke up to my guildies about how I felt.

We've written about gender before, and it's an interesting topic that confronts one more frequently and more dramatically in WoW than it does in other parts of life. Azeroth is a sociologist's dream in several ways; I'm not even a sociology buff and I'd love to see some data on player vs. character demographics.

Do you play primarily your own gender or the opposite gender from your own, or do you play both genders pretty equally? Personally, I'm male, but I mostly play female characters. My other two RL friends who play WoW are male and female, but they both play mainly female characters as well. Furthermore, why do you play the gender(s) you do, and do you find that you get treated differently depending on what gender character you are playing?

After today's discussion about looking good, I figured we'd go fashionable this week. Male cloth-wearers may complain about having to wear a dress from time to time, but when the girls put this one on, there aren't any complaints at all.

Name: Robes of Insight
Type: Epic Cloth Chest
Armor: 74
Abilities:

• +25 Intellect, +15 Spirit
• Use: Reduces the cost of your next spell cast within 15 seconds by up to 500 mana (basically a free cast). 15 minute cooldown.
  
• Could be (and is considered by many players to be) the best looking "dress" in the game-- especially on human females. Hawt!
  

How to Get It: Unfortunately, beauty ain't cheap. This thing is an Epic World Drop, which means it drops randomly, at an extremely low drop rate, on almost any mob in the world, which means you're just as unlikely to get it while in a group as you are tooling around by yourself. Farming it is like searching for a miniature needle in a hayfield, so you're likely going to have to depend on luck to get it in a drop.

Or, more likely, you could just buy it. Most AHs, when they carry it, will have it at anywhere from 150g up to 400g (most average around 200-225g). It's only a level 47 item, however, which means that unless you're an alt, by the time you have the gold to buy it with, you probably won't need it anyway. But on the other hand, it is a really cool looking dress... How much would you pay to look like Leia in Empire?

Getting Rid of It: If you're not that fashion-minded or don't wear cloth and are lucky enough to find this, by all means, put it towards that epic mount, and drop it on the AH for mucho moola. A vendor will give you 1g, 25s, 66c for it when you're ready to start wearing the next season's fashions.

Update: And if you like the style but can't wait for the drop (and have a raid of 40 going into AQ), commenter Spyder points you to the Robes of the Guardian Saint, a drop from Fankriss in AQ40.

If you haven't seen it yet, here you go. Shake that thing, girl, but watch the hooves!



Is it just me, or does this one look... boring? Anyone have a source on where it's from yet? The male comes from that crazy Mehndi video, so I assume the female is equally Indian in origin.