Gender Equality in Costumes - A lack thereof

On one hand, I like a lot of the new female pieces and the whole "costume equality" thing isn't a banner I care much about.

On the other hand, it's somewhat boggling that after this long the art team still hasn't taken the hint from the numerous complaints. But then, they're still giving us pre-tinted pieces as well so there ya go.

I imagine they must be selling or else they'd have some incentive to change their practices.

But it is not about this game only. Today Pop culture want to make all females s...s. Just look at videos either on TV or Youtube. The most of "popular" singers wear less clothes then MM and Bobcat.
Unfortunately this game is just following trends, and I don't believe that anything in game is going to change, unless we have change in society in general.

I don't mind sexy option in game. It is nice to have it. Since dual identity is used to hide real identity, if my alt is in her normal life covered from head to toes she will have almost no clothes as hero. It would still be nice to have some diversity, since not all my alts are same and some doesn't have hidden identity. Some of them are actual gunslingers that will continue to use trench coat vet reward since females doesn't have any other long coat option.
And males should have more long hair options. I grew up in 80's and the most of my male friends had longer hair then me.

Sadly this thread is just repeating the sentiment that showed up in the VIP beta section of the boards when this pack went onto the test servers. That thread, though dozens of pages long, did not even garner one redname "We hear your criticisms" response.

Nada. Zilch.

In that thread, I asserted that if any pack in recent memory warranted being delayed by a couple weeks to reproduce or retrofit the "male" components (the chaps, jackets and corresponding shorter boots) for female models, it was this pack.

Yes there are myriad other problems including pretinting, lack of holsters, and lack of cowboy hats beyond the one model that came with the i0 base game years ago. Personally I realized that all these points were not all of these battles could be won, as did other posters. So the two that the feedback thread focused on were: no more pretinting of parts please, ever; and "chaps for the female characters" please.

But alas, it was for naught. The pack has gone live exactly as teased via the concept art. Exactly as was put up on test. Feedback in this case null and void.

Personally, I am not too miffed by "gender inequality." Nor am I miffed by skimpy, ****ty outfits for the females as I do have a couple characters who vamp it up as part of their character. But I am miffed by the lack of obvious options in some cases. The Gunslinger pack is currently one of the most egregious offenders thus far. I think the accusations of art direction once again veering out of touch is accurate.

A year and a half ago or so, the multiyear trend was tech skin suit after tech skin suit with chunk armor overlay after chunky armor overlay. There was a wave of rather vocal criticisms and at some point we got a "we hear you" and an indication of correcting course. Even more exciting was Noble Savages assertion that he wanted to see the release of more costume parts that could be mixed and matched. I welcomed this first round of releases all the way through the Barbarian pack--despite the stark gender difference in outfits, I've been able to utilize numerous pieces from all the packs.

But for me the gunslinger pack really drifts into a dead zone: very specific pieces, further constrained by massive pretinting, and lacking in anything rugged for females. Reading the feedback throughout the now multiple threads I get one unifying sense regarding the "chaps for girls" sentiment: most people when they think "Gunslinger" have one thing in mind--a rugged persona. The "saloon girl" (massive pretinting problems aside) has some wonderful design to it but it misses the branding mark of "rugged persona" by about 20 miles. Would it have really taken more than two weeks to retrofit at very least the jacket and pants from the male and huge models to adjust them to work with the female models?

My overall outside perspective: Like most careers in entertainment industries, most likely for the a majority of our dev team, CoX represents a job. But for us members who actively, regularly spend on and participate in the game, CoX represents a passion. The dev and community reps have given lip service to valuing "the community" as we represent a core asset of their property. I understand that CoX and its character creator might no longer be a hardcore passion for those working on the game. A job is a job. And personal and creative interests will inevitably stray, either temporarily or permanently, for any given member of the development team. But when this does happen, for the love of Pete, please pay heed to the feedback that those of us who still are passionately engaged with the character creator provide to you the developers. When such a uniform response goes up, as did in the test forums regarding this pack, it is a sign that something is missing the mark.

You guys did this with the CoT. And the results were wonderful. Jay's revisions of the "first pass" that got such negative feedback did a great job of capturing the feel of the original CoT while sending the new designs sailing up and out of the park.

On paper, the one word branded costume theme "Gunslinger" should have equally been such a home run. But as of yet, you guys (the devs) have balked at doing any revisions on this one.

What I find really funny is that since Freedom launched they have not really listened to feedback and then they tell us the market stuff is not selling as well as they would like.

The thing that makes these Underwear Packs more irritating is the line Positron gave at the Player Summit for why the devs were wary of allowing full Mastermind minion custombility: they were afraid of the possibility of people making a Thugs mastermind with gun toting bikini girls.

I mean, seriously? You guys talk about "We don't want Masterminds with armies of strippers" but then give players stuff like this.

One of these things is not like the other.

I don't really have much to add, since I already went into several long tirades in the beta feedback thread for the Gunslinger pack (which, by the way, is over 500 replies long: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=277846 ). Basically, the whole thing leaves me with a really, really bad taste in my mouth, especially since I was one of the ones who stood up and complained about the Steampunk Pack, was told "oh, they just did it this time due to time, but next time they'll add different stuff"... and then saw the Barbarian Pack and now this one... I need an "I told you so" button here.

And for those people who bring up the IDF and PPD and CoT sets, I've said in my posts in the beta forum that the "Trend Against the Feminine" skips those sets for which "feminine" isn't relevant (namely, full body armor) and for which the theme is completely divorced from reality. The problem is that they can't do "feminine" without doing "titillating". It is possible to create female clothing (as opposed to unisex clothing) without going into "hypersexed" mode, but they just aren't doing that anymore.