FoxLee

This.

The problem with the "equal but different" idea is that because there is essentially no male article of clothing that's socially inappropriate for women these days (and much of the rest - say, uniforms for male-only positions - is covered by the fact that it's a science-fantasy game where superpowers mean your gender is irrelevant to your physical ability), so female characters will always be getting stiffed on unisex pieces in favour of "female exclusive" stuff. Thus, an environment is created where women are pushed toward girly looks, which does not sit well with those of us who don't care for traditional gender roles in our costuming.

The reverse, however, is not true - women get to wear piles of stuff that's still considered socially inappropriate for men. Is that fair? No, but it's a problem in the actual world, and an MMO isn't the place to combat that. In reality there is extremely minimal community demand for MtF crossdressing, so the fairest thing the devs can do is just let unisex items be unisex.

If you want extra facial hair or maybe a hairy scotsman chest or whatever, you're welcome to it and I won't complain. But when female characters are given a "distaff counterpart" instead of a unisex piece, it's reasonable for people to feel this is unfair to female characters.

Because if the only feasible alternative is that women are no longer allowed to eat M&Ms because some marketing guy said girls prefer jellybeans, it stinks.

The problem with your argument is that it can't be separated from content. To make your simile apply, it would have to be a fact that generally guys don't want jellybeans anyway, while women generally enjoy jellybeans and M&Ms generally equally, and restricting them to jellybeans kind of has unfortunate social implications.

Asking for unisex pieces to be unisex (including if thery are currently female-exclusive - I'm no more happy than you are, that my guys can't use Carnie head details or sashes) is reasonable. Admirable even. But forcing numerical equality into this equation, when it is actually about who wants and would/wouldn't use piece A or piece B, is a waste of time.

QFT this.

Also, Dink is still awesome <3

I think that is overstating your case a little. Every "costume equality" thread I have ever participated in has included long hair, dragon bracers, padded gloves, buttcapes et al along with everything we wanted ported the other way. Perhaps you should view this as a step in the right direction, since it will show that porting unisex pieces between models is a worthwhile action. It certainly gave me renewed hope for a few male ports.

Good point. I don't play Huge characters (because they're buttugly), so every time they make a M/H only costume piece, I'm losing out TWICE! I guess I should treat the dev time wasted on Huge pieces as a personal insult and complete disrespect of my hard-earned money.

...Or I could be too busy loving this fine coat.

I see where you're coming from, but I expect that the way most of us see it (based on information the devs have collected that led them to this resolution) is that "equality" in this case means "nobody is barred from non-gender-specific costume pieces". It's not equality as in "everybody gets everything", it's equality as in "everybody has access to things that can reasonably be expected to be desirable for both genders".

Or, more simply put, people who want metallic minidresses on men are not yet a market force - so this is the best way to make the largest amount of players happy. I do sincerely hope that it will lead to the unisex items that are currently female-only being ported to males also, but I didn't want to sully the thread by going "Hey, thanks! Now about all that OTHER stuff we wanted..."

Sure, it can be allowed to join in the game, as long as it doesn't get in the way of anything. But it's not more important or relevant than "what looks cool" or "allowing maximum creativity" or even "what we should do on principle".

As soon as it gets in the way of something more important - like being used as an excuse to limit the choices available for depicting a character based on their gender - then it can GTFO.

Why on earth would a game about superheroes care about being "historically correct"? If it was historically correct I wouldn't be able to make female frontline soldiers from most cultures, lady knights who weren't hiding their gender, female samurai who had romantic relationships, or any number of other worthwhile concepts. Or, you know, magic-users or catboys or cyborgs or SUPERHEROES.

And historical correctness has no place in a superheroic fantasy game!

To be fair, I don't think people are calling it a prostitute pack because it has bare legs, I think they're calling it that because saloon girls were, if not prostitutes, certainly the "easy"
women of their day. Tights doesn't change the fact that the costume portrays a character that would traditionally be an actual prostitute. Given that, I think the nickname is rather fair.

Ah, no, you misunderstand me - I was referring to the title Gunslinger Girl, a decidedly creepy anime about little girls trained to be gun-toting murderers for their beloved daddy figures. Man, I draw hentai and I still felt like I needed a shower after two episodes. *shudder*

In that case, let me reiterate my long-term harping on how lame it is that our male characters...

• ...Look like pro athletes even at lowest physique setting
• ...Have heads that, even at max sliders, are too small to make them youthful-looking unless you opt for one of the (roughly) three "voluminous" hairstyles.
• ...Even at the lowest slider settings, have chins and cheekbones you could use to cut glass.
• ...Have hairstyles that are 90% boring short-back-and sides, buzzcuts or crazy punk stuff - even after the barbarian pack.
• ...Have a run animation that looks stiff and robotic, and looks way better when used on women.
• ...Have voices make them sound like giant black men even if they're little white boys.
• ...Have about four faces that aren't breathtakingly ugly (or completely alien). Fewer if they're adults.
• ...Have permanent hyper-muscled textures on their arms and legs that, if they are not built like bulging steroid abusers, make their limbs look like they're made of wood.
• ...Are still being deprived of perfectly valid unisex options like martial arts bracers, the tribal belt, and headbands.

How's that?

Speaking of default options, let's assume I'm a new player how just loaded up CoH for the first time, and I think a gunslinger girl* sounds cool. I know I can customise my costume no end, but for a basic start, I see a "Gunslinger" option in the costume sets list. Hey, cool!



GUH! What the hell am I looking at?

I promise you, I made no choices on this character except for the costume set. That's what I got. Now I'm sure that the buttcape/belt not glitching would make it a less awful suprise, but still. Really not a good impression of the game!

(*Not the loli anime kind... ugh)

This exactly (though it's "she" for the record). Real world women in combat command are capable combatants themselves; I'm not talking about them at all. Masterminds without pets, OTOH, are not.

Dangit, my skanky crossdressing shapeshifter trap (the only place I ever used the female magic pack components) would have loved those.

Mind you, you still have a design that cups, highlights and draws attention to critical parts of the female anatomy. And it's still a skin-tight affair with high-heeled boots and opera gloves, emphasising sexiness while the guys instead get a practical and pretty durned badass look.

Saying that skin is the issue there is like saying that full-body spray-on latex should be appropriate for everyday wear, because it covers all the important bits.

I see what you're saying, but the point is not actually how much skin is being shown, it is the style and purpose thereof.

When male characters are designed showing a lot of skin, it is almost always to make them look rugged, wild, manly, powerful etc. Artists like Boris Vallejo illustrate plenty of nearly-naked men, but they're not designed to be sexy to women; they are an uber-macho ideal that men expect women "should" be attracted to (despite the fact that in general, women prefer guys who are fit but don't look like condoms stuffed with walnuts). In other words, skin exposure on male characters is (generally) aimed at guys who wish they were hyper-macho badasses.

OTOH, when female characters are designed showing a lot of skin, it is almost always because they are supposed to titillate viewers. It is extremely rare that a scantily-clad woman is dressed that way to make her seem cooler, tougher, or more powerful - she might still be a badass, but that's amost never the point of the design*. In other words, skin exposure on female characters is (generally) aimed at guys who wish they got to look at more boobies.

Now, typically both men and women actively like to see sexy female characters in popular media. However, while women also like sexy men, male viewers don't - there's even a trend of feeling a bit threatened or disdainful toward attractive male characters, and a preference for more primitive, ugly-but-manly macho ideals. Outside of anime/manga (which shouldn't be overlooked, since unlike western comics it has a significant female market segment), attractive female characters are highly desired, but attractive male characters are only somewhat desired, and otherwise merely tolerated.

Ergo, due to the inherent difference in how male and female nudity is treated, and the inherent similarity in whose benefit they are for, "showing skin" is not equivalent between male and female characters. Showing skin on either gender fundamentally suggests traditional gender roles - it is typically done to make the men seem more powerful, and the women more sexualised - and therefore they both actually cater to the same preference, not to opposites.

Besides which, males can always show more skin "real estate" without it being sexual, because a bare male chest is not viewed as an inherently sexual thing. The bare female chest, except in some older cultures that are certainly not the audience of this game, absolutely is. It's perhaps unfortunate that this is so, but it's undeniably a fact of how western society views the male and female forms.

So yeah. The barbarian pack may offer less actualy clothing for both genders, but that's certainly not equalising the gender roles - if anything, it's reinforcing them.

(*At best you get interesting quirks like the version of Power Girl who was charmingly shameless; at worst you get blatant hypocrisy like the version of Power Girl who ******* about chavinism when any guy dared to look at her giant cleavage window. Either way, the costume came about purely for sex appeal.)

More to the point... Masterminds are lame as solo combatants. So what's really more empowering to females - a woman who has no choice but to let an army of men do all the fighting for her, or a character who relies a bunch of butt-kicking female thugs/soldiers/ninjas to do their violence?

We all know it - the opportunities for misogyny in the game are already without limits. The lack of female mastermind lackeys saves nothing.

I really want to see them fix the things that are withheld from males too. I'm not talking corsets or stockings (c'mon, we all know the prospective market for those is itty-bitty). But what about the so-called "tiaras" that women get, which are just headbands in a style that's actually quite suitable for barbarians or knights? What about the female "headband" detail, for that matter? What about the cloud and dragon bracers? What about shoulder pets? What about long freaking hair?

If the argument is that women miss out on lovely the stuff like the costume pack coats and boots because they have more options, then the obvious answer is to use give-and-take. I'll take your steampunk sleeves and Baron coat, you can have cool martial arts bracers and a haircut that isn't short bloody back and sides.

QFT.

My female characters have had a sad ever since the magic pack (actually, ever since /benchsit). These coats are really lovely, and it totally sucks to restrict them to men only. My pirate captain would have lived in the baron coat, if only she had the choice.

I assume this is being done to balance up the stuff they'll never give to men, like lingerie and attractive hair, but it's really not helping! It's just making things worse <:\

What he said.

No, they're not. They are combat tools which happen to include enhanced movement. Do people take Combat Jumping instead of Flight? Do people take Hover instead of Super Jump? The gateway powers are their own category, not directly comparable to the level-14 unlocks.

What you can use them to get out of recipes is irrelevant to their actual function. My friend's Stalker used his Patron Snipe to get defence IO bonuses - does that make it a defence power? Hells no. Besides, the bonuses are independent of whether or not you're using the power, so that doesn't change its function.

As has also been mentioned, its speed is compensated for by the fact that it takes the most skill and attention to use (as opposed to, say, Fly, where you can get some height and autorun while you fix a nice snack). It's also the only travel power whose effectiveness is mauled horribly by lag.

Even if it were fair for teleport to cost the most out of all the travel powers (something has to be the best/worst, one way or another) that doesnt really justify the huge gap there is now. As it is, I can't go from one end of a zone to the other without running out of end. Can you factor in the time I have to spend waiting to recover my end, and still tell me it's the fastest travel power?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but those bonuses mostly suppress in combat - along with the speed that is the point of your travel power - and the end drain generally makes travel powers unfeasible for in-combat use anyway. The lower-tier powers in the pools, which are combat-oriented tools, are what truly serve this function.

Why should Super Speed or Flight suppress in combat, thematically? It is never acceptable for thematics to be placed above balance. Period. Down that road lies "Blasters should get huge defence powers because I wanna play Iron Man".

Riiiight.

You know, I've heard far more people on Virtue complaining about the deluge of catgirls than I have seen actually playing one. Maybe the majority of Virtue players just thought "Killer of Catgirls" sounded like a stupid joke character? I know I prefer to avoid teaming with people I can't RP with.

Going out on a limb there, I know.

Quoted for Perfect.

How could anybody have trouble finding a team on Virtue, of all places?

I don't buy that... a travel power is there to be a travel power, not a combat tool. If it is designed this way, I would consider that a bad decision, not a fair justification.

As for speed and 3D movement, I rather think that's balanced already by the fact that it takes fairly intense concentration to use, lest you faceplant from eight hundred feet. It is way more susceptible to lag than the other travel powers - Super Speed is fairly affected too, but its stealth component means you get a bit of leeway (as opposed to falling to painful crushing earth every few seconds). Plus, its gateway powers are, save for niche situations, vastly less useful than those of other travel powers (Teleport Foe or Hasten... which would most players prefer?).

Since Fly's endurance cost and speed were rebalanced, Teleport is more the redheaded stepchild of travel powers than ever. Last I checked, it was considered a subpar choice by everyone but Stone Tankers.