While I might not be old enough to make an impression in this thread (I'm 45), I recently ran into some data on this subject that suprised me, and might interest some of you. I considered my self a part-time player until about a month ago, when I suddenly found myself the leader of a guild I joined in January. The officership just quit playing. So, I decided to make a good-faith effort to re-build the guild. I deputized a few of the remaining members and we all went to lowbie zones and spammed general chat for members. Once in the guild, we sent them to the website to register, and one of the application questions asked for the players age. Turns out we had more players over 40 than we did under 20, and 2 or 3 were in their 50's. It's not exactly scientific, (Many of the players didn't register, a few of those who did skipped the age question, and we mostly recruited after 10pm), but I was pleased to learn that our player-base tended toward the more mature.

When I began playing MMORPGs back around 2000, I remember thinking it was very strange any time I found out a guy was playing a chick because it seemed a little bit like lying. But as the years passed, I met so many guys who did that (And a few women who played men, as well), that I eventually came to understand that this isn't like a FaceBook page, or something. Your character doesn't have to have anything to do with who you are at all. In fact, once I let myself out of that box, it opened up a completely new way to enjoy gaming. It's 12 years later, and these days I play both. In fact, I make a point have trying out every class, race, model, and gender in a game until I find the ones I like. My current mains (that's plural because I 2-box) are a female Shadow and a male Sage. Tank and heals. It's a great combination. And while I prefer the voices of the female Assassin and the male Sorcerer, my friends who play with me prefer The Republic. Since several previous posters saw fit to announce that they're not gay lest anyone misunderstand their in-game gender choices, it may be fitting for me to explain that I am gay, but I don't think that affected my choices, either. I'm neither pretending to be a woman on my female toons, nor staring at the butts of my male toons. I'm just playing a game. I'm not getting emotionally involved in any of the in-game romances, either, although I don't find any of them bothersome. I might suggest to all the guys who are having difficulty adjusting to responding as a woman to the advances of a man, maybe you'd be less traumatized if you imagined yourself as the man who get's to pick the responses of the woman he's propsitioning. Either that or just consider it part of a story in which you don't have any vested interest. That's the way I'm used to getting through these sorts of things. And while we're on the subject, has no one tried a female Imperian Agent? Because if you do, the subtext between your toon and Kaliyo is gonna feel like it's bursting with lesbian overtones. I haven't got mine past about level 20, but I was seriously expecting Kaliyo to make a move at any moment. And for the guy who wondered how old we were. I'll be turning 45 this year. And I never played Tomb Raider. Finally, and this only just barely related, the single biggest let-down for me about character customization was that there were no plus-sized female options. I mean, there's a upsized male model. Do *all* the female toons really have to have to have sex-appeal? My favorite Warcraft toon was my female tauren, with her clunky run and rhythmless "Electric Slide" dance. Yea, she was dorky, but she'd kick your ***!

That was actually from the "fictional" part of my post, where I was giving examples of the sorts of unnecesarry comments people made as a result of mis-applying data from their damage meters. But if you never found yourself in a group with a tank who was geared enough to out-dps a new player in greens/blues then maybe you didn't play WoW enough to understand why those kinds of things happened (or maybe you were just part of it?). I mean, hell, if I were tanking with my druid in a WotLK heroic, I could out-dps a new level 80 in my t-9 badge gear easy. Remember when swipe didn't have a cool down?

This thread reminds me of an incident from WoW. During WotLK, around the time one of my alts was closing in on level 80, and I was beginning to get into the pre-heroic end-game 5-mans, I was thrown into an Occulus PUG with a level 80, raid-geared paladin tank. We fought our way through the first boss fight without much trouble, when this tank noticed he had done something like 50% of the damage, and we had the following conversation: Overgeared tank: ***?!!! DPS GET YOUR GAME ON! DPSer 1: What do you mean? Overgeared tank: I’m doing all the friggin’ work! Just because you’re 80 doesn’t mean you belong in heroics! LEARN YOUR CLASSESS! GET SOME GEAR! DPSer 2: We’re not all 80 yet. DPSer 3: And this isn’t a heroic. Overgeared tank: Huh? Ohhhhhh craaaaapppp. I meant to join a heroic…. [Overgeared tank has left the party] This Overgeared tank wasn’t really doing anything more than his usual 9-6-9 rotation (or whatever it was called), but when he checked his DPS meter he decided he was being over-worked and we were all leeching off him. You might say that was a special situation, but the core truth is that this kind of thing happened all through the game. Remember back when even our alts had T-9 badge gear? And even the lazy players were pulling 3.5K in heroics? And then some newbie in green/blues would find his way into our PUGs and do something like 1.5K? We probably all managed to complete those instances in full groups of 1.5K dpsers at launch, but now that we were all pulling 3.5K in our T-9 badge gear, suddenly this guy in his blue/greens wasn’t doing his part and consequently the rest of us were being overworked! Well, of course someone had to say something! And someone always did, right? Overgeared DPSer 1: I don’t pay $15/month to pull newbies through PUGs, brother. Overgeared DPSer 2: Join a guild group if you want help. Overgeared Healer: Your DPS is holding us up, so we’re gonna boot you now. Be sure to use the free time to check out Elitist Jerks so you can get some proper idea’s about spec and rotation. Overgeared Tank: Seriously, dude. At the very least, you gotta be able to out-dps the tank! [Newbie has been removed from the group] I don’t miss any of that….

44 year old pharmacsts. Been playing multi-player online games since the late '90s. Started with text-based role-playing games (Gemstone III, anyone?), but switched to video games when Everquest came out. My 43 year old brother (who is a medical technologist) and his wife also play. They've been living several states away since my brother graduated college, and online gaming has been a nice way for us to keep gaming together.