Females never given flirt options?

[NermalDetonator]

You should giggle and blush and then go gossip with your female companion about how cute he is.

 

According to this game, female NPCs are sexmaniacs and male NPCs have been castrated.

 

Well, the latter is probably WHY the females are lonely.

 

I'm all for expanding options. I mainly just want my male BH to be able to romance Blizz. Dont judge our love!

[Jebazel]

Not so much a glass ceiling, more a brick wall!

[JawaJedi]

I didn't really notice the gender discrepancy in terms of flirting until I saw this thread and thought about it. It's sad but not surprising that women either got less development attention or are simply being designed around sexist, narrow-minded ideas about gender.

 

As a gay woman I've been frustrated with feeling like I have to create male versions of my female characters just to experience the story with some romance, yet in doing so I'm forced to play as a male. The alternative is to play a female character and be stuck flirting with boys, and that's just not a pleasant thought.

 

I love this game and all, I just suspect it's more fun if you're straight. And a guy. And white.

 

Wow.

 

Really? Going there?

 

Anyway, for the last time, the difference between four and two doesn't really matter. That's you being nit picky. The only class that I'm aware of with a significant discrepency is the male IA versus female IA-which does surprise me because playing female IA you clearly had the fastest possible one night stand.

[Jedi_Luxora]

Made a fresh female Twi'lek Sith Inquisitor last night.

My boyfriend, right beside me, made a male Zabrak Sith Inquisitor.

 

 

We play through the VERY first introductory conversation.

 

He gets his first flirt option with the red-head newbie "classmate."

I got nothing.

 

 

 

 

Am I in the 21st century? Is Bioware?

[Jebazel]

I got nothing.

 

 

Am I in the 21st century? Is Bioware?

 

Par for the course.

 

Boys toys for boys.

 

 

[Jedi_Luxora]

Par for the course.

 

Boys toys for boys.

 

 

 

Par has changed. Girls expect toys.

[Jebazel]

Par has changed. Girls expect toys.

 

Hehe .. THIS one certainly does

[Jedi_Luxora]

Hehe .. THIS one certainly does

 

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/828/1308210195471.jpg/sr=1

[Randehman]

Let me tackle this piece by piece...

 

You're contradicting yourself. The very fact that they didn't bother to use part of their budget to make same options for both genders proves that they don't value women as much as men.

 

Abhorrent logic there... Not sure what your job is, but nobody in game design "bothers" with any aspect of their budget. The budget is a limiting factor - you're treating it as though it's free money the developers got handed at the beginning of a project and they spent it wrong. It also doesn't, by necessity, have to go into what you're insinuating as a "male feature".

 

If time crunches down to the point where money can only fund A or B, that money is always spent on features that are going to be utilized the most. If the predominate amount of your playerbase is male, then odds are the raw number of times an average player will access content designed with females in mind is lower, thus funds are harder to justify being allocated to that instead of something universal, like say bug fixing or additional animations or model customizations.

 

This doesn't mean the designer doesn't want them, they just prioritize it lower and sometimes those things don't make the ship date.

 

And what you call a "subsection" of customers is a pretty damn large part of the community! Which only reveals that you are a sexist as you don't even acknowledge that women can be just as important customers than men.

 

It's true that more females play games now that teenage boys, but this is largely due to casual and mobile gaming. MMORPG demographics are much more "old school" - 84% male / 16% female (Yee: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php) or 80% male / 20% female (http://dmitriwilliams.com/LFGpaperfinal.pdf). [There's an article on the BBC about 60/40% but it actually is misinterpreting the data in the article listed above by Dmitri Williams which clearly found an 80/20 divide - it also refers to "sex" as "gender", big indicator of it's scientific accuracy]

 

You couldn't even make it two paragraphs without telling me what my own opinions of women were (without really knowing anything about me). You are also drastically overestimating the actual numbers of female MMO players. In my opinion, you want the designers to be sexist for the same reason you want me to be sexist - it makes you right and justifies a position you had BEFORE you played this game.

 

But the statistics just aren't there to back up your most likely pre-determined opinion. Neither is an English language, as the word subset doesn't imply inferiority: 99% of players is a subset of 100% of the players.

 

But again. Games are a business. If these numbers keep repeating themselves in market research then the game is going to be designed with that statistical slant in mind whether it was designed by a team of nothing but women or a team of sexist males or a team of relatively socially conscious and feminist-minded men.

 

Again, proves against your argument. Men are valuable customers but hell, we're not giving women tha same rights as men even though they pay just as much for this game as them!

 

EDIT: Besides, how much more does it cost to write a flirt option? About the same as it would cost to write a normal reply, right?

 

The fact that you just said that equivalent dialogue options is a "right" that Bioware's developers have infringed proves you're taking this a little too seriously. I'm a male gamer and I don't really have any problem with paying full price for Cooking Mama despite it's lack of male avatar or "Cooking Dad" feature. Nor do I call this sexism. It's a game, aimed at an audience, and I also like it. But the key is I like it for what it is instead of resent it for not being what I arbitrarily demand of it.

 

And the answer is a lot. Voice acting is expensive. Especially since you realize that not all of this was dubbed in one giant 48 continuous segment. That's airfare, hotel fees, food / dinners out for the talent. They got Steve Blum and Jennifer Hale (Female Troopers FTW) for God's sake. That is EXPENSIVE. And calling them BACK to the studio, processing the audio, etc, would take a LOT of money compared to the cost of say, adding new model customizations or fixing bugs.

 

LucasArts doesn't get involved in specific conversation options, they're more interested in making the lore work as intended.

 

My personal experience, and the personal experience of others who I work with, some of whom for Lucasarts... has proven this to be patently false.

 

Somehow I have a hard time believing your speculation. This game is written for the heterosexual male. And when the same sex relationships come out I guarantee you that it will be almost exclusively witten for women/women relationships because that is what hetero males enjoy.

 

Play Dragon's Age II - a game in which they got flak in the forums for how easy it was to be homosexual and how forward some of your homosexual party members were (also look up the awesome response from their head writer).

 

What you're describing sadly was the case with, say, Mass Effect 1, but Bioware has learned from their past experience, and has really shown a level of dedication in social progress that very few companies have. If anyone in this industry DESERVES the benefit of the doubt, it's Bioware and it's writers.

 

I cannot see budget being part of this at all whatsoever.

 

The fact that they're spending your subscription fee to add in male/male homosexual characters tends to indicate that yes, there's a lot of content they want to include that isn't designed 100% for heterosexual males (who by the way can also enjoy playing homosexual male characters BTW).

 

Typically, if you're looking for proof of something you already feel before you even see evidence of it, then no matter WHAT they do you're always going to find something wrong with it and be unhappy. Stop WANTING to them to be sexist / unfair and start being happy that they're doing so much more than any other MMO has in HISTORY - my female tank isn't in a metal bikini for the first time in ... ever? How are you not as stoked as I am about that?

Edited January 7, 2012 by Zilrota
removed inappropriate content

[Robodexter]

^---- +1 To the person who makes sense!

[vicious_cake]

I've been following this thread for a while and just wanted to comment when I saw Randehman's winning post. Everything is said.

[LeJay]

I've been following this thread for a while and just wanted to comment when I saw Randehman's winning post. Everything is said.

 

This, this so much. I can't quote that post for truth enough.

[Nozybidaj]

Let me tackle this piece by piece...

80% male / 20% female

 

20% is a pretty significant number. If 20% of the player base were to just up and leave, the game is going under. 20% isn't something to sneeze at, and really contradicts your position that it is justifiable for that segment of the population to be ignored. If it had been more like 2% maybe you'd have a case.

[JawaJedi]

Made a fresh female Twi'lek Sith Inquisitor last night.

My boyfriend, right beside me, made a male Zabrak Sith Inquisitor.

 

 

We play through the VERY first introductory conversation.

 

He gets his first flirt option with the red-head newbie "classmate."

I got nothing.

 

 

 

 

Am I in the 21st century? Is Bioware?

 

That's the most illegitimate arguement I've seen yet. Seriously, its one conversation. And guess what, female IA gets the fastest first night stand...yet the only class with as many flirt options as the male IA is the smuggler-and both genders of the smuggler get ridiculous amounts of flirting.

The only imbalance is between the male and female gender of the IA. Beyond that is people ************ about miniscule differences. There is a legitimate difference there, but beyond that is incredulous nitpicking.

[Lizski]

Official statement follows:

Due to the design constraints of a fully voiced MMO of this scale and size, many choices had to be made as to the launch and post-launch feature set. Same gender romances with companion characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic will be a post-launch feature. Because The Old Republic is an MMO, the game will live on through content expansions which allow us to include content and features that could not be included at launch, including the addition of more companion characters who will have additional romance options.

 

I found this here http://www.hotrodacc.com/swtor/comp.html

 

Also this states all romancable options for classes in the game

http://www.swtorface.com/p/swtor-companion-list.html

 

I'm a female gamer and I do hear you ladies but also I understand how difficult it is for bioware to meet all expectations. At the end of the day they are going to please the wider audience which is the males, but bioware you have so many female fans, put us first for once? Lets face it, we only got a decent femshep for the 3rd and final game of ME3.

 

If the statement speaks the truth and has been said by bioware, then I shall happily wait for them to follow it through.

Edited January 5, 2012 by Lizski

[cuddlebucket]

If time crunches down to the point where money can only fund A or B, that money is always spent on features that are going to be utilized the most. If the predominate amount of your playerbase is male, then odds are the raw number of times an average player will access content designed with females in mind is lower, thus funds are harder to justify being allocated to that instead of something universal, like say bug fixing or additional animations or model customizations.

 

How about instead of giving male smugglers 37 flirt options and female consulars 2, they maybe give them 25 and me 14? It's not an all or nothing situation, there could have been compromise. The fact that they prioritized female characters SO low that we are noticing this and a thread like this exists means that they screwed up somewhere along the lines.

 

 

MMORPG demographics are much more "old school" - 84% male / 16% female ... 80% male / 20% female

 

This is of course not scientific, but FAR more than 20% of the characters I see running around are female. Does this mean that I think all of the people behind those toons are chicks too? Heck no. But it DOES tell me that a lot of guys roll female characters as well. The "junk" belonging to the human in the computer chair is immaterial. The real question is how many female toons are being created? Because all of the people creating them - male or female - deserve & expect fleshed out and satisfactory story lines.

Edited January 7, 2012 by Zilrota
removed content

[Randehman]

20% is a pretty significant number. If 20% of the player base were to just up and leave, the game is going under. 20% isn't something to sneeze at, and really contradicts your position that it is justifiable for that segment of the population to be ignored. If it had been more like 2% maybe you'd have a case.

 

In no way is choosing a feature that appeals more towards 80% of an audience versus 20% and going with the 80% considered throwing away 20% of your audience, it's just not catering to it.

 

That said, 80/20% is insanely slanted and something that is LAUGHABLY unbalanced when you compare it to other media. Women buy the majority of movie tickets in America (55% to 45%), but how different would our 2012 film lineup be if they knew only 20% of moviegoers would be from women? There certainly wouldn't be two Sex In the City movies and counting... How many hunky doctor shows would there be on primetime television if only 20% of the viewers were women? An 80/20% sex breakdown would DRASTICALLY change any media's content.

 

How about instead of giving male smugglers 37 flirt options and female consulars 2, they maybe give them 25 and me 14? It's not an all or nothing situation, there could have been compromise. The fact that they prioritized female characters SO low that we are noticing this and a thread like this exists means that they screwed up somewhere along the lines.

 

I'd agree with this (not your numbers, which you clearly made up, but the basic premise), I'd have planned to make them way more close together in frequency.

 

That being said, development cycles are bizarre and unnatural with how many weird and surreal things that can go wrong or come up. I can very easily see it being a matter of scheduling, voice actor contracts, Lucasarts regulations, market research / focus testing, or any number of things that prohibited / encouraged them to slant it more towards having the majority of flirt options on male characters.

 

For example, if you notice there's a lot of "repeat" lines. My Inquisitor gives the exact same "murder and mayhem" line at least once per planet now. Clearly they'd like to have an originally recorded track for each option. But they either didn't have time or didn't have the budget for enough lines to fill out every storyline, so I understand if maybe they had planned on including some "extra" flirting options and literally ran out of time or money for the voice budget and had to use "filler" lines instead. It might also explain why the Sith Inquisitor I play hasn't flirted since the mid-20's and my Imperial Agent literally can't stop flirting.

 

But then again, players have never been up in arms about how "loose" and "****ty" the male characters of a game are, so perhaps it's a desire not to step on a minefield by including too many flirt options and insinuating that female characters are apt to navigate across the galaxy on their backs.

 

This is of course not scientific, but FAR more than 20% of the characters I see running around are female. Does this mean that I think all of the people behind those toons are chicks too? Heck no. But it DOES tell me that a lot of guys roll female characters as well. The "junk" belonging to the human in the computer chair is immaterial. The real question is how many female toons are being created? Because all of the people creating them - male or female - deserve & expect fleshed out and satisfactory story lines.

 

True, buuuuuuut... I don't want to paint too wide a swathe here, but the reasons a heterosexual man plays a female character, and the types of love interests he pursues with that female character, are not going to have a whole lot of overlap with a heterosexual female playing a female character. All I'm saying is that I doubt the men playing female characters are noticing when they can't flirt with male NPCs...

Edited January 7, 2012 by Zilrota
removed inappropriate

[Punkre]

Ok, first of all you shouldn't compare flirt option of a male smuggler, with a female Jedi (of any kind.) because they are taught to NOT flirt, from a very early age.

 

Next, you keep using the concept that only 20% of the player basis is female, and while that might be true, not only women play female characters, or would want to have flirt options on female characters.

[_Scattered_]

The first flirt option I recall seeing on my female Sith Warrior was with the companion who will be my romance option. I do plan on romancing him, so I'm happy with that, but I would have liked a few flirts before I settle down and get exclusive.

 

You couldn't make this stuff up.

 

Anyway, talk about first world problems.

 

But generally how flirting for female characters would need to work is that not only would the npc initiate the flirt but he would need be a superior or extremely accomplished, otherwise it is "creepy"/inappropriate. The problem is no npc in this game is ever going match up to super heroine bioware has created for you. A female character is a victim of her own hero status.

[vicious_cake]

Next, you keep using the concept that only 20% of the player basis is female, and while that might be true, not only women play female characters, or would want to have flirt options on female characters.

 

This is true, but you are mixing things up. Afaik he mostly uses these numbers to counter the sexist arguments. Those accusations were made with the lack of consideration of game design decisions, which are not sexist/unfair, but take other issues like this in consideration.

Edited January 5, 2012 by vicious_cake

[sadaria]

I agree females in this game are just very poorly constructed.

[sadaria]

I play other games. Pretty much any mmo or rpg made in the last 10 years I have played and on some level enjoyed. The level of childish female characters in this game is glaring and not on par with other western games. (obviously asian game titles are....well...)

 

I actually addressed this issue in the beta. It is like a 14 year old boy wrote the female perspective and characters. Females are hushed and dismissed as children regularly in the story line even if they are powerful and they react as children. They do dumb stuff like my evil sith doing a girlish wave to a shuttle that actually made my eyes cross the first time i saw it.

 

Women make up more than 20% of the RPG/MMO base and more important there is a bigger difference. Women in this group skew older and also tend to be parents. This is important for 2 reasons. One developing a video gaming habit will eventually depend more on women, as they make more household budget choices. This happened with movies. Movies were pitched to young men who spent the most money on movies and they made fewer G rated films and fewer chick flicks so women got out of the habit of going to movies and did not take their kids. Women instead turned their budgets to video games for their kids. More women entered the video game market playing with their kids than as you think by playing with boyfriends stereotype.

 

The second reason this is important is these are GROWN women. They have had sex. They have had kids. They have paid bills. Manipulated men. Faced the consequences of real life. There is a princess for a day faction of the market which is guys who want to play pretty and mindless female characters that CAN NOT be ignored you have to make these characters. However games need to start thinking about real, seductive, ADULT female characters as well. Who use their minds and bodies to get ahead which is a more female subtle manipulative power style. And the sexist attitudes in the game are fine as they are a part of real life but the female characters need to REACT to them. Either submit or rebel but the fact that powerful female characters don't notice them is incompetence on the part of the writers.

 

They are also leaving out grown men. It is not just a female perspective that is lost here. There are no female love interest or male characters that are grown men. Not even side kicks. All the males are VERY teenage dreamscape. Even silly games like warcraft have more Adult male examples. Characters that have grown up the recent Thrall story arc is a good example.

 

All that being said I am still enjoying the game and the story lines. I am wanting to figure out who these mystery characters are and learn more about my bounty hunter. I log in to find out whats next in the story not to level, so swtor is far from fail but to keep me paying for years you are going to have to stop with the childish females and step up your story telling since that is the whole point of this game.

Edited January 5, 2012 by sadaria

[sadaria]

For those of you men who are focused on flirting from a perspective of getting sex and sex drive you are showing why there needs to be more influence from female writers and editors better than any other argument i can think of. Your perspective blinds you.

 

For women flirting is a way of getting what you want which is more likely attention, friendship, protection, love or resources more than sex. That is not on a monthly cycle etc. Women just don't think or act upon sexual urges the same way men do, at all. I do not deny biology and time of the month has been shown to correlate to cheating etc. I am saying there is a more powerful biological drive to raise children at play here. We must remember biology was not made for the modern world but for the ancient world of death, danger and starvation.

 

It is not to say women don't get horney or go after sex in an aggressive way. It is just so foreign to your thinking you have to think of it more as a currency than a need and you may start to get the idea. You first have to not think from a male perspective that gold diggers are evil and think from a biological perspective that gold diggers kids live and women who don't use it have kids who don't live. So a good mom knows how to control herself and use it to her and her children's advantage and you will get more of a realistic view of women's sexual motivations than just how she gets pregnant to start with. Having kids that just die is not very productive at all. Long term survival dependent on someone who is much smaller and has much less strength per pound means mother nature gave women a very very strong manipulation streak that is not evil it is just the power style of women vs the muscular strength of men which btw is also not evil.

 

So in a way flirting for women is more like going to the gym with your buddies is for men. It is satisfying in a primal way just for what it is not really what it leads to although that may be fun as well.

Edited January 5, 2012 by sadaria

[Evolvana]

The only imbalance is between the male and female gender of the IA. Beyond that is people ************ about miniscule differences. There is a legitimate difference there, but beyond that is incredulous nitpicking.

 

I don't call that "minuscule differences". Male IA getting 35 flirt options while female IA gets, what, 3 flirt options... it's not a small difference at all, sorry!

[Androvis]

Greetings-

 

I feel this must be a Republic-side issue. My wife's female IA has had several flirt options while we leveled together.

 

Regards,

Androvis