Still Sexism in costume choices? Really?

Please be more specific: which things that I said did not look like "strippers and fancy underwear" appear that way to you. I was pretty careful to specifically write off the entire "tops with skin" and "bottoms with skin" as being possibly within that category, even though there are obvious exceptions as I noted. But what did I say was not skimpy did you think was obviously so.

Sorry, but I'm not going to get into one of those nit-picky little battles with you, Arcana. I've seen far too often how silly those become, and I'm just not invested enough in the subject to open the costume editor and burn an hour or two meticulously listing every single female costume piece in the game that I'd put into some skimpier-than-guys-get pile...

I also know perfectly well that a list like that is exactly what you'd insist I compile before you bothered to consider my opinion worthy of more than casual dismissal... So, so much for that.

Suffice to say that I'd call the witch costume, many of the corsets, the top+skin designs, some of the skirts and various other assorted bits and pieces farther on the sexy side than I care to use on most of my characters. When I look at a costume pack and see that the females got corsets or spike-heeled thigh-highs (again) while the guys got the nice suits and killer jackets (again), I'm going to raise an eyebrow.

And for what it's worth, I don't think "Sexy Jay" got his nickname due to his own choice in office-wear.

I see. So you say that things I said were not skimpy are things you think are skimpy, but asking which ones is getting nit-picky.

You know what: there's the ignore button somewhere. Find it and use it.

The only person on the forum I've IL-ed is Golden Girl. Unlike her, you tend to make decent points. There are times when I disagree with them (This being one of those times-), but until and unless you reach her level of sheer annoying lunacy I don't see a reason to ignore you.

We totally need more realistic looking busts - the way the slider calculates expansion is weird and un-natural, and doesn't take into account how clothing affects the shape in real life.

Well, this is well-traveled ground, but having a bunch of sliders to cover the wide variety of possible shapes of breast might be overkill for a game where we don't actually have fingers. And the game doesn't do complex sophisticated draping algorithms that allow clothes to properly interact with bodies. Clothes are either painted on or rigidly encasing us (or sometimes not encasing us: some of the female bottoms still have that funny intersection at the hips) because that's the current limitation of the game models. To make it all work with geometric sliders that currently do not much more than linear scaling (if anything) severely limits the options available for how this can currently work.

It wouldn't be difficult in theory to, say, have Poser-like graphics and animation, but to be able to do that in real time would probably then place the game outside the limits of most people to run. The difficult part isn't figuring out a way to do it, these days its figuring out a way to pretend to do it within the computational budget you have on the client. More detailed and realistic busts have the same requirements as more detailed and realistic everything else: a higher-precision model, more complex rigging, more complex dimensional sliders. All that complexity is difficult to keep under control, particularly for a customer base not composed of three dimensional modelers. Its one of the problems that afflicts that other superhero costume creator.

You've got to admit that there's some truth to this post...

However, I'll go out on a limb this once, and get into a slight nitpicking battle, because Arcanaville is so highly esteemed that her word often bears the stamp of law, especially when she makes lists. This once, though, her analysis could use some tweaking. I don't completely disagree with the list she provided, mind you, but there are some areas in which I find it misleading. So I'd gone into the costume editor myself, and tried to improve on it.

Caveat: I don't have all the packs. I still don't have steampunk, i never bought the Martial Arts, Beast or Party pack, so this is going to be slightly off. Not, however, by much.

I am not going to quibble with anyone over the definition of 'slinky', 'sexy' or 'skimpy', because these things can be awfully subjective. While I agree with people who posted concerning the neckline of such pieces as the v-neck (we could really use a v-neck that doesn't look like it might fall off the nipple, in my humble opinion) I'm going to be a bit more generic than that. My two main concerns as for addressing the analysis made previously are going to be that:
a) It is not sufficient to list the root categories in the costume menu in order to achieve any sort of comprehensive analysis of how much of which there is. You'd also need to go into the categories themselves, to check for overlaps, and to see how many items each category contains, in order to detect a trend.
b) It would be necessary to examine the items added in the recent slew of expansion packs.

Because what we're evaluating is a trend, or a tendency, these. points become important. Do the expansion packs strengthen the trend? Weaken it? Don't change it? How many of these items are actual distinct pieces and how many are the same piece? And so on. In my own parsing of the costume generator, I decided not to count patterns as separate costume pieces, because, frankly, they're not. Whether you've got stripes or little triangles on your shirt is really immaterial to the main point. I also noted duplicates between different options.

Here's my list:
Tops
Tights - basically one option of the same tight shirt, with applied patterns, but, for the sake of argument, there are 31 different varieties.
Tights with Skin - 51 options, none of which I would use on a character who wished to appear respectable rather than appealing
Shirts - 4 options, all of which expose the midriff. If you want not to expose the midriff, better select something to go underneath.
Baggy - 8 options, some of which overlap with 'tight'.
Robes - 7 options, including the 'tattered'
Sleeveless Robes - same, except, of course, sleeveless
Jackets - 27 options, including ones that are a closed/open version of each other
Sleeveless Jackets - same as Jackets
Trench Coat and Magic Bolero - one option each
Armored - 22 options, most of which overlap with Tight or Baggy

To sum up till now, Tights with Skin are, bar none and by a significant majority, the largest category on this list. 51 options to everything else's twenties and thirties. Among the rest, variety is somewhat limited as each piece appears with a sleeved and sleeveless variety. Some of the other pieces are debatable.

Bottoms
Tight Bottoms - same story as tight tops, but with an actual greater variety, 43 options. They're still mostly one style of piece with patterns, but we'll note them anyway.
Bottoms with Skin - 33 options, of which two are tights+shorts, actually less than tops
Skirts and Shorts - 15 options, including pleated and non-pleated varieties of each skirt. Including the Valkyrie and Witch skirts the latter of which, at the least, is definitely on the eyebrow raising end, as well as miniskirts. I did not count patterns like Plaid or Wedding
Tucked In - 10 options
Tight Pants - 3 options, including (and this merely amused me) a Baggy option.
Pants - 9 options, including another tight option
Armored - 20 options, once again with some significant repeat of the Tight category
Monstrous - 2 options. Whether to define them as 'slinky' or not I am not sure, but I don't quite see any cloth coverage there.

To sum up further, the bottoms seem to fall out better than the tops, with the vast majority of options sitting in the Tights group. Whether the variety of patterns is sufficient or not to make up for Tights being basically one piece is not an argument I intend to get into, now or in the future. The second largest category is still dominated by Tights with Skin, some of which are Tights with A Lot of Skin, with some of the skirts and shorts thrown in for good measure.

Now onward to the additions of packs.

I won't be able to be as precise here as elsewhere because I find it hard to locate and examine every single item, but the Steampunk pack added, chiefly, a rather brassieresque shirt, two types of corset, and a very tiny bustle. The Magic pack added the Witch skirt, a major offender, and the Witch bottoms, and corsets, even bigger offenders. The trend seems to be less pronounced in the Science pack, which added a labcoat with some variations, and that piece actually was the same for male and female toons, as I recall, except of course the female one was shorter.

Is the trend there? This list says yes. Is it absolute and unvaried? Obviously, no. It gives somewhat different results than Arcanaville's initial list, though.

Some of these sound like the criticism of options that allow you to show skin or not show skin. Put tights/bottoms on under the skirt or a top under the corsets (they're located as chest details) and its a whole different piece. Criticizing the corsets as too revealing is like wearing the Valkyrie or Enforcer breastplate chest detail over Eden and saying that the breastplate is too sexy. The "bustle" is a belt; while there's people who wear the Valkyrie or Vanguard belt over Bikini2 as some sort of micro-micro mini skirt, I don't think it's their real purpose nor is it so with the steampunk belts.

If you could only wear skirts over bare legs or corsets over bare torsos, I could see singling them out as overly "sexy" but, as components to costumes where you're in control over how much skin they show, I don't see the problem.

You mean I'm supposed to have options other than "pencil"? I don't believe you.

You mean when you start with the wedding pack (first booster), end with the Steampunk (most recent booster) and ignore the cyborg, martial arts, origins, beast and science boosters (and Going Rogue sets) and pick only the ones that fit your "trend"?

There's nothing wrong with the Steampunk parts. The corsets are chest details. Detail a "real" chest piece with them instead of slapping them over bare skin and acting scandalized.

(Argh, I have to ask/say one more thing about this!)

Isn't the weird/ironic thing that if the devs had actually made tights and such stretch over the breasts like real fabric giving the sort of "mono-boob" (best way I could sum it) wouldn't it have actually resulted in an overall lower polygon count than molding most of the tops the the individual breast?

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Barbed wire is a lot more revealing.

I will concede that the corsets are intended to be sexy even if they can't really be called skimpy on their own because they are intended to be placed over another actual top. Not just intended: required to be placed over another top is more correct. To see the corset and only the corset as your top you have to specifically go out of your way to use a top that fits completely under it. At that point, its not the corset that is skimpy.

If you want to make the argument that the artists consider "sexy" to be a significant component of attractiveness for the female costumes, the corsets are in play. But if you're attempting to make the argument that the costume editor is full of skimpy outfits, the corsets shouldn't count any more than bandoliers.

To actually do this correctly in the first place would have almost certainly required a much higher polygon count. Breasts only look round because of eye-tricking shading, not because they actually are round. Look at the Witch tops: all that cleavage comes from shading, not from actual geometry. Those tops don't alter the actual shape of the model at all. I think female breasts currently have less polygon count than a twenty-sided die.

But to actually get a top to drape, wrap, or otherwise constrain the body with any sort of accuracy requires a much more sophisticated modeling and rendering engine than I think our client has.

I'd be ok with just a few more polygons to give us smoother curves, and a revamp of the way the slider calculates expansion - it needs to have way less sideways expansion when the size increases - the majority of the expansion needs to be outwards to simulate the shape made by clothing.

I don't think I ever actually said any of that. What I said was "Pretty much everything in the pack for female toons is a variation on high heels and lingerie." Which, you know, is true. I don't mind arguing about the merits of what I actually said, but don't invent things I didn't say and then tell me they're wrong.

Remind me again when I either replied to one of your posts, mentioned you in one of my posts, referred to you in one of my posts, quoted you in one of my posts, or attributed anything to you in one of my posts. I'm a little fuzzy on when I ever specifically mentioned you or your opinion at all. I was replying to Jophiel and something she specifically said.

Now, as to what you actually said:

It must be harder than you think, because its a trend I'm finding difficult to find, and it gets harder to find the more I look.

What we have to look at are the costumes in the Steampunk pack, and the Animal pack before that, and Mutant pack before that, and the Martial Arts pack before that, and the Superscience pack before that, and the Magic pack before that. And when I take them in total, I don't see a trend I find disturbing. Perhaps I'm looking at too many things to see the trend, and I need to focus only on the things that exhibit the trend to see it.

Unless you find the idea of magical mutant furry ninja steampunk scientists disturbing.

As I said, I'm really just not invested enough in the argument to burn a couple of hours making the kind of list it would take to get Arcana to do more than dismiss anything I have to say. If I were that passionate about it, I'd do it... But it's simply not so hot a topic to me that I feel it necessary. Nor am I entirely convinced that even AFTER all that work it wouldn't simply come down to a difference of opinion over what's an intentionally "sexy" costume bit and what's not.

I pick my battles, Guy, and this one's not a big enough deal to go into obessive levels of detail over. Before it was over we'd probably have someone building a program to collect the pieces and quantify the exact amount of skin every piece left bare in order to compare the contents of every update produced to date against samples scanned from Fredricks of Hollywood or something. That would be very, very silly... but tell me you can't see at least the threat of that happening.

Who was replying to me. I figured I'd address the same criticism from both places. I'm sorry that was so complicated.

The distinction is there, and maybe I do need to spell it out as explicitly as possible. In the Animal, Superscience, Cyborg and Martial Arts packs, the costumes that were released were ported more or less identically between the genders (it clearly wasn't too much trouble then). In the others, that is, the Magic, Mutant, Wedding and Steampunk packs, female and male toons got very distinctly different costumes. And in all those cases, cases where female toons received specifically designed costume items, most of the costume options added were lacy, lingerie-ish, high-heeled or otherwise skimpy.

That seems like a trend to me.