~*~I Must KNOW~*~

Alright everyone, my New Year's Resolution is to find out ....

WHY DO GUYZ PLAY GIRL TOONZ??!!

I say it's to give them some sweet candy to look at while they play lol I mean why would a guy wanna stare at a "guy's" buttocks all the time when her can have a chic instead ?

I was suprised by the amount of this happening when I first started playing... seemed a bit odd to me.

As EnnVee said though, it is a better view when playing a female toon...

But personally the reason I did it was because I stumbled across a character design I really liked. Fenians precursor was an entrant into one of the Color Pallete Contests... I really liked how the witch costume pieces looked but at that point I still wasn't going to play a female toon.

I had been trying to make an Irish themed character. I tried several male versions using the green, orange and white color scheme but nothing ever really clicked... Someone mentioned how the contest entry could work like that... Using the fur on the magic bolero for white... Eh, I forget exactly how convo went but I decided to give it a try.

I tinted the contest entries colors in that scheme and see how it worked. I liked it. A lot. So I played around with different female faces and bodies and such and eventually ended up with Fenian...

But for most I assume it's a lot simpler... It's about the backside view

Girls are hotter.

Concept for me:
Tally-Ho wouldn't work for me as a guy.
Polish Princess actually started as a pair (with Prince Poland) except I didn't enjoy playing the Prince (some flavor of tank.. was very slow to solo especially back around I1 & I2) so he got deleted and the Princess remained.
Rose Veldt is a pun on Roosevelt (as in Theodore) although she's taken life of her own.
Pachamama started because my wife tried to make an Inca with the costume creator and got annoyed (she had never touched CoH prior or since so didn't really know how to 'work' it). One day I tried to do it and came up with Pachamama.

I start with an idea... usually either a name that pops into my head or a costume concept and I build the character around that. I don't worry if they're male or female, just that the gender fits the concept. Just as my females wouldn't work as males, Bad Czech, The Lounge Crooner and Reconquista wouldn't work as women.

This topic has come up many times across the various MMORPGs that I've played. The most common reason has been the desire to stare at a female's butt, or the aversion to staring at man-butt. It's sort of surprising how much butt-staring goes on in these games!

*pictures The Lounge Crooner as a woman. With chest hair*


..............

*bleach IV*

Because women are more interesting. I don't view MMO characters as being digital representations of myself, I view them as characters and I am writing/controlling how their situations play out. And I've always preferred movies/TV shows with female protagonists, they are almost always more interesting than male protagonists, in my opinion: Buffy, Dollhouse, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil (the movies), even Alice in Wonderland, and the Wizard of Oz. The male and huge characters that I do make have all been caricatures rather than characters. I believe I have yet to make a male character with a normal face.

Probably for me it's because I'm a libra and have an odd compulsion to balance everything! So I play and make just as many females as male toons. Though I seem to have a much harder time making female costumes I like. Plus for the most part it's the interwebs and no one really knows if I'm male or female from my "avatar".

Ironically I've been hit on more as my male toons than any of my female toons.

yes i play chick toons as a guy, and they are dead sexeh!
and i semi roleplay,ehn its dead sexeh, too.
which toons? i won't tell and thets the fun, yeas?
"if it's all good, dont look under the hood." Brad Pitt

The few times I've made them, its been either concept or tactics related.

Concept: once felt my all-guys stunt pilot SG, Flying Circus, needed a break from the relentless Y chromosome. So I made Memphis Belle. (And deleted her after a relatively short time because it was totally freaking out my lifelong friend that I "was" a girl. But I always saw Belle as just another character, not an opening up to my supposed feminine side.)

Tactics: over on WoW, I had a 19 twink Alliance shaman for PvP battlegrounds. Those who've played the game know that means it was a Draenai. So I could either go thundering down the field in an oversized barrel-chested monstrosity of masculinity, or I could create the much more diminutive female version, with exactly the same abilities, but much more likely to be overlooked sneaking down the far side of the field. And underestimated. I found all too often the "male" toons came at me like I was not a fighter. Big mistake. I got a ton of honor points that way.

Because the game was created primarily by males, and therefore the male modles are lackluster and boring, while the female models got all the attention.

Also: What DarkEther and Wassy said.

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Biggest Troll on the forums? I'll give you a hint:

For myself all of my early heroes were male, tall, muscular and fit which I suppose was me trying to create something close to myself in the game so I could roleplay through them and "give" myself the one thing the game has over real life... super powers (especially flight)!

My first 50 was a male also a "healer" named Simon Tam (yes from Firefly )... had a whole backstory of how he had ice powers which he used to freeze his sister and sneak her out of the Alliance facility in a cryo stasis capsule and empathy powers cuz you know doctor/healing ability... duh.
Turns out I make a good healer as all the early teams that knew me always clamored for me to get Simon for da healz yo. Well there was a whole 'nother kind of healer I stumbled onto (this was way back when all the powersets were still "new" to most people) a dark healer so I wanted a dark story of royalty overthrown and usurpage for my concept but stalled on the costume until issue 5 came along (Curse you i5!!!!!) and ruined all my favorite builds with heinous nerfs (sigh) which made me leave the game for a while... upon my return I tried some of the new content in Croatoa going up against Mary Macomber and presto I had a great bit of canon to go with my back story and Chloe was born. I found I just wasn't very sympathetic to a guy being overthrown (sack up dude, get over it!) but a queen being usurped by her younger sister was much more compelling. Well long story short, once I tried a female character and found it enjoyable I created more (Spinal Red, Xllusya, Shieldara and others). I now have about 35-40% female heroes vs males.

That was my reasoning at the time (and what got me on the path to the dark side lol) for playing a female, it was either try something new or walk away from the game forever (did I say curse you i5 yet?!!) so I did and I'm still here years later. For other guys I dunno... I suppose it could be a control issue... they create the woman of their dreams and then have total control over her... what? Was that treading too deep into the male nerd psyche?

Yeah ok it's more likely because they want to stare at chicks butts as they run lol

...the new walk animation doesn't hurt the view either.

One --> Artz Giveaway <-- To Rule Them ALL!

I will settle this. ORANGE FTW! - Ex Libris

Well, I'm not a guy and I play male characters all the time. In the game, because I love having the options to watch hotties in motion. outside the game, I like playing males in RPGs (tabletop) because their personalities can be boiled down more easily. I know it's not the truth lol but it's why I do it.

I create and give out adoptable dragons and critters online, and to earn them someone has to build a character and write a short bit online about them. For the longest time, the primary people doing this (girls age 14-18) hardly touched male characters. I pointed out how easy they were to write for. Never had an issue since

I don't really play female characters. I only have 2 or 3 and they rarely see the light of day.

As a guy, I DON'T play female characters, probably for the same reason most men (who do) do. If i'm gonna be staring at a toon's butt, I may as well like what I see.

@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too

for a long time I coulnt get into female characters. but now I pretty much am always on female toons. its probably because of the absense of females in my life *shrug*

Because jumping into a spawn of Super Arachnoids in the hopes that the boss will use his melee hold web cocoon on me, just isn't the same with a male toon.

I just love to create, wether its characters, art or storys and backgrounds. Gotta say though the female toons have much better options on their cossies...butts too

Wow, what to add to everything already stated. I agree with it all.

I would say almost half of all my characters are female.

Well, I couldn't fit ALL of my characacters, but you get the idea.

... it's more to me than "staring at an attractive arrangement of pixels".

I find roleplaying guys rather, I dunno, boring. I like playing the 'what if' game. And, as near as I can tell, my gaming persona is for the most part female anyway. So what if the meatspace me is male? Not like I'm going to be DATING any of y'all anyhow, I'm happily married.

Reason #1) Because the costume options for females are waaaaaay more interesting than males.

Reason #2) Butt stare factor

NEW! Reason #3) Swishy walk power.