Issue 22 Preview is up!

18 is nowhere near the cut off point for that tactic

The 5th Column RPers probably moved on to loyalist RP

Ugh.

Talk about a straw woman argument {on preview: That's what she said!}. Nobody in this thread or others where the trends in CoH's portrayal of its female characters has been criticized has ever suggested banning skin-tight or overly revealing costumes. The current problem is simply that we've been seeing an overemphasis on those designs lately. The game's art direction originally struck a balance, presenting a wider variety of designs. Returning to the old status quo would satisfy all parties.

Also, Mark and Jerry would be dismayed at your appropriation of their lyrics, spud.

Making them as villains I could see but as heroes...yeah, no.

EXACTLY. I want Swan, Ms. Liberty and Valkyrie, not Swan, Swan and Swan. And incidentally, women have different body types, all of which can be idealized as befits this setting. Right Sam?

I'd exclude the barbarian outfits, because the nature of the source material is that everyone runs around half-naked. But otherwise, yeah.

It's an art style that is rather limiting, especially when a large part of your audience is female.

Yes, and there were players who invited lowbies to team with them and teleported them up to the flight ceiling and let them fall into a bunch of enemies and die. They were RPing villains, don't you know. Nobody bought their "I'm RPing!" excuse either.

Yet.

It'll be here, don't worry. We're already seeing its little cousin, aka "Someone make the devs cover up Diabolique now!!" We also saw it in spades during the infamous "OMG GUNSLINGER PARTS BAD!!!" thread. Once we get that done it is a short hop to "Ghost Widow is too sexy, make her costume work-safe too."

I don't want unisex-only options from now on, or someone's arbitrary decision about what it is right and proper for all female characters - NPC or player-created - to wear. When people start belittling costumes showing skin as "hoochy" and other such adjectives, that is a belittling comment. Like it or not, what we have in the game now is extremely true to the genre.

... Only males between the ages of 13 and 18 are prone to distraction by hot women? ROTFL what planet did you just beam in from?! Men can't drive down the STREET without being distracted by hot chicks, be serious! And be honest!

Oh noes! Better start worrying now, lest the phantom menace take away all the "hoochy" costumes in the dead of night. That old Slippery Slope canard isn't going to grease itself.

First they're coming for the "hoochy" costumes in video games, then they'll go after them in the adolescent power fantasies that dominate the serial graphic narrative format in the U.S.A., which, incidentally, is shedding readers faster than contemporary superheroines are losing clothing material.


DOOM, I TELL YOU!!! UNSEXY DOOM!!!

"Zeus?" Boo. Wrong mythology, Sam. That was ODIN.

And I like the "fireplace" in the hat. If I was seeking to be Death Incarnate myself, it's the sort of hat I would wear.

This. A thousand times this. Sword and sorcery sorceresses almost always dress like this. It's like a uniform for Evil Matronly Ladies with Spellcasting Powers. As I said, I created a character a few months ago that was going for this look.

If we could get that loincloth piece, I'd seriously use it for a few of her alt costumes.

Heh. Yeah, I was thinking the same. Another reason why I love that hat.

Bad_Influence, Bad_Influence, I'm coming in the night to steal your girly thiiiiings.

.....'k.

Y'know, I've seen this claimed by two or three forum posters lately (I think one of them was you, in the Gunslinger debacle), but I honestly run into way more comic book readers as an adult than I did as a kid. Bringing up comic books in public is starting to become as casual as talking about the weather, something I wouldn't have expected until the first time I let it slip that I read comic books as an adult. It was like I'd turned a key to the floodgates. "Oh, you too?" The biggest surprise was when one of my serious-face bosses saw my Comixology app on my Android and started talking about her collection, and I stopped her so I could pinch myself. Now it almost seems like all the cool smart people at my work and at college are readers (and happy to talk about it), or just now picking up comics, or at least letting go of a long-lived social stigma and not harping on their friends and S.O.s for doing so.

What, you want a bunch of scrubs?

Why do you think I'm not a big fan of unisex? I'm unisex every day I work. See it in real life. If that's what you like in-game, go for it. Just don't touch everyone else's stuff, thnx.

Well, I could use them for crafts I guess.




I'm lying, I'm going to force your characters to wear them.

It's just a little bit amusing to see the "slippery slope" argument being applied in this fashion.

The issue at hand is NOT "sexy = BAD! No SEXY!".

The issue is that the track record is of a design team that believes that sexual objectification is the "right" way to do things. Whether it's the silliness of barbarian women in spike heels or the gratuitous conversion of Diabolique into yet another evil dominatrix villain or the outright absurdity of the female gunslinger costume bits (because clearly, men gunslingers dress in leather and dusters like cowboys but women gunslingers dress like dance hall girls).

Nobody wants to remove all sexual objectification from the game, so really, stop with the outcry of "protect our smexy before The Puritans get it removed entirely!" There are plenty of people who think objectification is a required element of the genre, and obviously our designers have been amongst them.

Here's the thing, though: As a player, the game begins to feel tired when you get the same damn thing over and over. How overused is the whole "men covered head to toe, showing off their chiseled musculature (because the clothes somehow contour to their Schwarzenegger-style muscles) and women covered in barely anything showing off their sexual attributes"? Pretty well overused, IMO.

When it begins to limit your choices as a player, it's most definitely overused. When the only kind of character you can make using some new costume bits is one that adheres to the rules of objectification, then it becomes a problem.

The plain truth is, that it's not even really about objectification. It's about freedom and variety. This issue is really no different than the rut that the design team was in for a long time, in which we got armor set, after armor set, after armor set. It started to look like CoH post-2007 was going to be City of Armored Vigilantes.

In the end, what people want is freedom. Freedom to use costume bits no matter the size, shape, or gender. Freedom to objectify one's hero or not. Freedom to realize the vision in our own imaginations and be as unrestricted as reasonably possible by some imaginary rules by the design team that say that "only X is acceptable or correct".

There's no slippery slope here to defend against.

As a side note, I was speaking specifically of mainstream superhero comics - yes, aptly described as "adolescent power fantasies" in general, pace Messrs. Moore, Morrison, Ellis, Brubaker, et al. - as dropping in readership*, which is all the more disappointing since comics readership in numerous other genres is expanding (let's not get into the indie comics scene, which has never recovered from the heights of the 80s after Diamond Distributor's de facto monopoly clobbered them).

CoH should take note of those trends...


* EDIT: 10 million combined sales for Marvel and D.C. in 1987, only 7.4 in 2006 for the combined sales from Diamond and Heroes World distributors (i.e. including independent comics of all kinds). And let's not get into the enormous comics circulation figures of the pre-Comics Code Authority era.

That's right, I used ... sarcasm.

Noble Savage's Costume Set Workshop--Gender Equality was quite helpful as a discussion, but it's been inactive for over a month. This new redesign of Diabolique suggests that the issues are still present in the game.

A female villain who's a mastermind instead of a femme fatale, succubus, dominatrix, etc., etc., would be a welcome change of pace if we're talking about how to keep CoX fresh.

Okay then, start your own thread for that, this thread is for talking about Issue 22.

Shadow Cerebus glares up at you and mutters something about getting no respect.

Still works pretty well at the half-century mark.

I used to fiddle with my back feet music for a black onyx. My entire room absorbed every echo. The music was . . . thud like. The music was . . . thud like. I usually played such things as rough-neck and thug. Opaque melodies that would bug most people. Music from the other side of the fence.

I promise not to derail the thread any further but I just want to say, well, yeah--but see, I have ZERO problems with femme fatales, succubuses, dominatrixes, etc, etc, buuuuuuut I also can't blame someone for wanting different things in a game like this. Heck, this game is like one big excuse to do lots of different themes. Our newest Big Bad Villain is an awesome looking character, and I think she belongs in Dark Astoria, so I think they did this right (and unlike others I do think she looks sufficiently sexy but also evil and creepy). But I wouldn't complain if our next female villain was something different. The devs should do a contest like what happened for Numina.

For those who want to fight those kinds of female villains, the good news is that practically every mainstream fantasy MMO affords that opportunity and then some. Paragon Studios has the choice of competing with them head-to-head or taking advantage of their game's genre and dazzling players with variety and the unexpected. Offering up the new Diabolique as a cross between Maleficent and Vampirella isn't going to entice players away from games where that kind of villainess is already a gold piece a dozen.

I wouldn't dream of taking your idea, and if you do start a thread devoted to that general topic, I pledge to post there. (I already have some questions about why there's only one design in the upcoming Chinese New Year pack for males (a strong-looking set of armor) and two for females (similar armor and a silky gown showing off some skin), but that's for later.)

In the meantime, I will say that the player costumes for Issue 22 look very nice and avoid the recent issues we've discussed on these forums. The Olympian costume set should be versatile in a basic way, but I expect that players will find some surprising uses for pieces from it. The Elemental set is aesthetically very impressive, although it's a shame it looks like it will be locked behind the random number generators of Super Pack: The Gathering.

Didn't Chairman Mao have pretty much the same idea: let's make everyone equal by having them look exactly the same? Do we want to have the same mindset in CoX?

Ugh.

The use of loaded terms like "hoochy" and "sexual objectification" are part of the problem here; because everytime someone says this I just see Chairman Mao ordering everyone into that same frumpy uniform on pain of literal death.

I don't see everyone being slowly edged into unisex costumes by dint of lack of new feminine creations as "freedom and variety," that looks like LOSS of freedom of choice for me. Some of you act as if we have no unisex stuff now. If you want to do that right this minute, no one is stopping you.

And already we have people complaining about women getting two costumes in the Chinese set. By gorry, they have a point. Strip away [do pardon the pun] that pretty cheongsam [or whatever it is] and hand out that frumpy Mao shirt and pants for both men and women. Can't have any of that naughty objectification, after all.

*facepalm*

Yup. That Chairman Mao shirt and pants, compete with a pair of straw zori will be absolutely smokin' on our new villainess, no doubt about it. Nothing will draw in new players like ugly NPCs! Hey let's get rid of male eye-p0rn Foreshadow while we are at it: that guy is too sexy for his own good.

*throws hands into the air* I despair of this attitude. You win, everyone should be wearing the most hideous thing possible.