The New and Improved/The Flipside of the "WAR Gender Disparity"

So with 1.2 finally being released, I thought now was a good time to get off my butt and make a post. To start with, here is a recent picture of Vinda. You will notice something different about her... and not just the new headpiece. Vinda no longer worships Tzeench.

I can hear your jaw hitting the floor from my desk here in my living room.

"But... not worship Tzeench?! She HAS to worship Tzeech?! Why would she turn away from the god she has worshipped for so long??"

The answer is simple. Vinda has prayed to Tzeench every night... worshipped him devoutly and been a faithful follower... however, no matter how hard she prays, how many elves she eats for dinner or how many kittens she decapitates in Tzeench's name, zealots still remain broken. Thus, she has turned away from Tzeench and fallen into the loving (albeit rotten and pus smelling) arms of Grandfather Nurgle. It is her hope that perhaps Nurgle will appreciate her service more and sometime soon her tactics will work properly, and she will have more survivability than a piece of used toilet paper. Cutting the cast time on our group heals is all well and good (though it perpetuates Dust spammers, who I detest).... but what about balancing our survivability with our mirror class? What about making our Harbinger an integral part of our class like it says in the class description?? What about our role as the best single target healer in the game? As it is right now, a Shaman or DoK is far more desirable in a stacked premade. They can both put out more healing because they can live longer than we can... not to mention the DoK can potentially put out insane DPS as well...

Please fix us, Mythic. I love playing Vinda, but rerolling Shaman is looking better and better to me the longer you wait to fix things that were broken in BETA. :\

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The Flipside of the WAR Gender Disparity
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I've read a number of posts in a few different blogs regarding WARs supposed anti-female gender bias, and so I decided to write my own piece on it. Alot of you will not like what you read here, but I make no apologies. It's taken me some time to come up with what to write on this subject, and I finally came up with something cohesive enough for a post. If you don't want to hear what I have to say, read no further. You have been warned.

So, first a little background.

I am a 30 year old Navy vet. I'm educated and well read, and speak three languages. I'm an incredible cook. I'm heavily tattooed. I consider myself independant and "one of the guys"... as in, I can generally our drink, out cuss, and beat the snot out of most guys I meet these days. This is due to a few factors, the largest one being the absolute pussification of the modern male.

That's right, I said it. Men these days are absolute weaklings for the most part. They have stupid hair, wear girl pants, have no asses, and weigh less than I do... and I weigh in at a whopping 135. Not to mention they like stupid music, know more about clothes and shoes than I do, and are overly apologetic for everything they do that might somehow be considered offensive to anyone in the immediate (or not so immediate) vicinity. They have no balls, and no backbone. They play acoustic guitars (badly), and like terrible music. They wear scarves year round and basically look like homeless crack addicts. And for some reason, women these days actually are attracted to this wishywashy mealymouthed idiocy, thereby perpetuating it.

Now, I don't know WHY modern females like these sorts of guys, but I'm guessing it's that they're nonthreatening (I mean, who the hell could a beanpole in girl pants with stupid hair intimidate anyhow??). Personally, I find them to be disgusting. There is nothing on earth I hate more (besides maybe brussels sprouts, and even those are decent with enough butter on them) than someone who kisses my ass, and these types are just that. They have their lips firmly affixed to the ass of every woman they meet as soon as they open their mouths (while looking straight down at their shoes, of course).

Now, I don't blame the men for this. It's really not their fault. They have been conditioned and spoon-fed lies about what a real man is expected to be by the most despicable of all things... the epitome of evil... the bane of all that is good in this world:

The feminist.

That's right. The feminist. You all disgust me. You are the reason that men are wusses and I can beat the crap out of most of them. You are the reason that a girl can't carry on a conversation with a man without him yes'ing her to death while he stares intently at his shoes. And YOU (and the mealy mouthed cuckholds that follow you around with their noses in your fat behinds agreeing with every ludicrous thing that comes out of your slobbering pie holes) are going to ruin MMOs.

Let's face it. The majority of girls (not all, but the vast majority) of girls are not good at MMOs. They just plain aren't. Alot of them play to appease the men they're with, and that's really fine. There is nothing bad about wanting to do things as a couple and get into things your partner is into. It can be very healthy for a relationship for people to do things like play online games together. However, this does not mean that half the girls with virtual avatars in online games have any semblance of a clue as to what they're doing when they log on, and WAR is no different. Now, don't take this to mean that the glas I play with are slouches, by any stretch. These gals didn't get into some of the top guilds on Iron Rock because they're terrible... However, I think they would agree with me when I say that they are NOT the norm, as unfortunate as that may be.

The game has a rich lore which has been set in place for the last 20+ years. When this game came out, having done some research and read some books and familiarized myself with the lore, I was a little taken aback that Games Workshop bent their lore as much as they did to accomodate the minority female playerbase. In reality (and in keeping with the lore, if you wanted to be totally strict and not bend or break any rules at all) there should be no female Ironbreakers, Engineers, or Rune Priests. There should be no female Witch Hunters, Bright Wizards or Knights of the Overpowered Knockback... I mean... Blazing Sun. There should be no female Maguses (Magi?) and no female Warrior Priests. There should be no females anywhere in WAR at all with the exception of Witch Elves and Sorceresses... but they changed over 20 years of lore to accomodate people and make it possible for people to have more options for their online avatars.

And please don't even get me started on female Greenskins. There is no such thing as a female Greenskin. What would set them apart from the males? Boobs? Why would a greenskin who is SPAWNED FROM SPORES need boobs? Boobs are to nurse young. Greenskins don't nurse young, they're frickin killing machines. They have need of strong, thick bone structure and big muscles to swing axes that look like they tore the front fender off a dump truck and tied a handle to it. Their purpose in life is to tear things apart and avoid being eaten by any greenskins bigger than they are. That's it.

And Slayers... this argument is also ridiculous. There never has been (and thank the GODS there never will be) a female Slayer. First off, if a female dwarf were to break an oath a male dwarf would become a Slayer in her place to save her the shame because female dwarves are so revered in dwarven culture that they are not permitted to fight. And its not because they're weaklings, either. Dwarves are a dying race, for goodness sake. Letting the few females they have become Ironbreakers, Engineers and Rune Preists are putting enough of them in harm's way, thank you very much.

Now, I understand the concept of the desire to relate in some way to your virtual self. If you're going to play an MMO and have others see you online, you want what they see to represent you to a degree. It's why I feel more of a relation to my Zealot than I ever felt with my Rune Priest. However, riddle me this:

If you consider yourself to be a strong, "liberated" (lol) woman, why wouldn't you want your avatar to be physically strong and intimidating in appearance? What is wrong with playing a male toon as a female? Quite frankly, I feel as though the people who complain about there not being enough female avatars in WAR are sexist themselves. Games Workshop not only bent alot of their own lore to accomodate players, they damn well broke alot of it into little pieces. It is YOU, not Mythic and not GW, that is limiting your character options. YOU choose to cut your choices down to a fraction of what is available to you, and cry and whine and moan that more exceptions and allowances aren't made, and honestly, I think it's utterly ridiculous.

First off, this game does not take place in the real world. Your social standards and expectations do not apply here. You are trying to apply modern human social mores to a game that takes place in a medieval timeframe on an imaginary alternate plane of existance. This other universe contains completely different societies than the real world, and completely different races with completely different values. It would be like discovering life on a distant planet and trying to force how we think and act on the native inhabitants. It just DOESN'T WORK that way.

Second, the female character options you DO have available to you are some of the most chaste and respectably dressed women in any MMO I have ever come across (with the obvious exceptions being Sorceresses and Witch Elves, however, if you were to visit your local S&M club how they dress really isn't all that far off from the stuff they're into). The vast majority of your options are not scantily clad harlots, they are, in fact, fine representatives of strong, valiant females.

For example, this was my character from Beta. Her name was Ygrid:


She looks tough, and no-nonsense... and she looks like she could beat the everloving crap out of anyone who pissed her off.

However, I play Destruction now, of course. I decided recently that I would like to try out some melee DPS.

So, this is Bjarn...


...and this is what Bjarn can do in a scenario:


TL;DR version:

There is nothing wrong with a female playing a male character. (In fact, two very well played Chosen on my server are played by females... Hi Burghur and Ducatii!! <3) Not enough females open themselves up to the option due to some feeling of entitlement that they should just be able to play any class they want as either gender (even if the race doesn't HAVE genders!!) and rather than try out a class they're interested in the mechanics of, they cry about how they can only ever possibly play a class with a female option. To them, I say knock off the sexism, honey. You're being just as biased against males as you're saying the folks at Mythic/GW are against females. You are the one limiting your play options, not the company that wrecked alot of their own storyline to accomodate you as much as was within reason.

--Miz V OUT.