Tag Archives: rant

Slut Plate? Please…

5 Replies

I was skim-reading Twitter as I often do when attempting (see: failing at) to multitask and saw a retweeted post that caught my eye. Let’s Get Rid of “Slut Plate” Forever. Okay so I’ll admit I rolled my eyes at first glance and thought: “oh god not another of these posts” and very nearly just carried on skim-reading but curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to know what she had to say. The first little bit of the post actually had me sighing in relief:

“Ah-ha, I’ve skewered you with my provocative title.

It’s true that it was a just a ruse; I’m not here to talk about abolishing the many, many sets of evocative armor in World of Warcraft. I’m here to talk about getting rid of the disgusting language and thoughts that surround them!”

Well hello! This might be a post I can get behind. See, while I don’t dress at all provocatively in real life (in fact I go to lengths to avoid it), I have nothing against it because each to their own and yes, depending on how you go about it, this so-called “slut gear” can look good. Take Paladin tier 8 as an example. On a certain female races, that may well be one of my favourite gearsets. You perhaps won’t catch me wearing the Black Mageweave set, that’s a little beyond me, but I’m not going to frown on other folk who do want to wear it. Do you know why? Because it’s their choice. And I’m sure even you folk who disagree with provocative gear can agree on that point.

In her post, Apple Cider goes on to talk about how the use of terms like “slut plate” and other such derogatory terms for the types of armour which could be seen as “poledancing get-up” and the folk who choose to wear it (either through transmogging into it, or not transmogging out of it – though more of the terms than this) are more harmful than the gear itself. This, a thousand times, this.

The biggest problem with this type of gear was always not that it exists, but how it exists, and I know this is an argument heard so often that it’s a little tired now but the fact lies that female characters get “slut gear”, guys get full-cover armour. Do you know what happens in Rift? The guys get slut gear too! I do have to admit, that made me smile a little. And apparently I’m not the only one who thinks that this is a good idea.

Now with transmogrification we have so much more choice over our gear’s appearance and so the terms become the biggest problem. There is so much stigma attached to this type of armour that it is at the point in which you do stop and think, “Now, I like the looks of this gear set, but will I be perceived as a slut or a pervy teenage boy if I equip this and don’t cover up with a tabard?” And to what extent is the gear slutty? Sure, there are the obvious culprits but what about armour that shows a bit of cleavage? This is all kinds of wrong. Why should we feel as though we can’t make our avatars look the way we want them to look? This is a game. It is our choice. We’re here to have fun and if we want to wear tankinis, by god, we should be able to wear them with no qualms. I think Apple Cider summed this up pretty well if you ask me:

The term and the ideas around it make me unreasonably upset, because it seems like once again, expressions of self in a largely sexist game environment can only be for someone’s enjoyment and how dare you enjoy it for yourself!

So what I wonder is: why the rebuttals to Apple Cider’s post? There are people who just really haven’t understood the point and guys, it’s a very good point that it’s not necessarily the gear or this one term that is the problem, but the entire derogatory sense around these types of armour. And yes, I’ll admit that myself and my other half do refer to it as “slut gear” between us, but jokingly so. What it comes down to at the end of the day is personal choice and when folk start to put certain styles in a negative light they are doing much more harm than good. When you won’t take somebody who dresses in provocative looking armour, guess what? You’re being prejudice! How a person chooses to make their character look is not a good evaluation of their value as a player or as a person. I really think that some people need to think about that.

Happy sassy plate wearing!

Hey Guys?

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I haven’t blogged here in a while and I loves you so I thought, as I’ve been posting my progress reports on my book blog (which is my reason for sucking, by the way), I would let you guys know with a casual point at the top of my sidebar. Oh yeah. Get me. I have a SEARCH BAR!

OH, that NaNoWriMo Winner 2011 button? *flips hair* Yeah, I did that.

Okay I can’t do nonchalant. MY THIRD YEAR OF TRYING AND MY GOD I’VE WANTED TO WRITE A NOVEL SINCE I WAS FUCKING FIVE!! I’m so excited right now, really. Couldn’t you tell from the caps? I’m getting somewhere! This is a step forwards! Yay! *happy dance*

Anyway, I am still playing WoW and I did sign up for the annual pass but with NaNoWriMo going on and all of the reading I need to do for the book blog and the fact that we’re moving in December, I have probably been playing for perhaps 2 or 3 hours per week! But tomorrow I get a flying tyrael golden pony and get to transmog my gear. YAY. Except after spending ages collecting my Priest’s unique transmog set and deciding what to get for my Death Knight, I might not bother. My Priest eventually, most likely, but I really like the Death Knight tier 13 set.

*runs around in circles* I might also be high on caffeine right now, I won’t lie.

Later edit: Wow that was quite a hyperactive rant, wasn’t it?

Treating Us Like Stereotypes

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In the real world I’m used to people mostly keeping their nasty thoughts to themselves because that is the known way to interact with human beings. It’s not cool to tell a random woman on the street that she shouldn’t be out wearing trousers and talking to men because her place is in the kitchen, in fact, you’d get into a heck of a lot of trouble for it ((understatement)). So why is it okay to talk to people like this in games? And it’s not just in World of Warcraft, though I see the massively antagonistic attitudes a lot more here ((but then again I don’t play Xbox Live, wouldn’t go near it)), you go anywhere near a raid pug, a battleground, or attempt to use friendliness in trade chat and you’re a noob/retard/insert other generic and pathetic insult here. Is it just a way for these folk to vent their prejudice frustrations because in the real world they’d never be able to get away with that kind of behaviour? Whatever it is, belittling people because you think it’s funny is uncool. It is bullying and I’m sure if there were proper figures around ((there probably are, aren’t there?)) these people wouldn’t believe how many have quit World of Warcraft and other such games because of that behaviour spoiling the fun for everybody else.

I for one get very tired of these antagonists. People who think it’s perfectly okay to talk aggressively to other people and make them feel like shit because they’re just characters on a screen, right? There’s no arguing with them because they’re too stupid to see reason and realise exactly what they’re doing and reporting them is a waste of time and effort. Sure, they might get a little ban but I’ve never seen anybody who had a ban for being a dick stop being a dick. It’s the internet. They’re anonymous. It’s going to happen.

But why do we nice folk have to just put up with it? The ignore feature only goes so far. It doesn’t take away from the fact that these people have ruined an instance run or perhaps even an evening. I don’t get a lot of the sexism aimed at me, thank god, because I don’t go around saying, “I’m a girl irl!” but I do often wonder if I’m just seen as “that guy’s girlfriend”, because that is a very real thing. I do, however, get a lot of the class stereotypes. When I was playing a Shadow Priest I was told that apparently all girls play a Priest or have a Priest. That made me feel a little uncomfortable. I was told the same thing when I played a Hunter because of the pets. Or from those who don’t know I’m a girl, “everyone plays a Hunter lol”. I decided that I was bored of those classes and their stereotypes and I started playing my Death Knight because I’ve really been enjoying it and perhaps a girl playing a melee gets less prejudice.. nope. The amount of hate you get for being a Death Knight is unreal. There are too many Death Knights, Death Knights are faceroll, Death Knights are bad, all Death Knights do this, all Death Knights do that.. I don’t know about you guys but I’m really tired of being seen as some kind of stereotype. Raise your hands if you agree with me.

Hi. I’m Jaedia. I play a Death Knight and unlike you I can play my class well enough to feel happy with myself as a player whilst being nice to people and coincidently enjoying the game a lot more than I would if I were a dick because I thought I was better than other people in a game. I also happen to be a girl which doesn’t affect how I play in the slightest. From the sound of it, I’m probably a lot happier than you are.

By the Way, I Haven’t Quit

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A few people got the idea from my last post that I’ve quit WoW. I haven’t, I’m quite adamant ((aside: just noticed adamant = Adam Ant, ahaha..)) that I’d like to keep playing, I just really needed a break apparently. I’ve finally found a guild I’m happy in, it’s a social guild with a nice mix of people. Some raiders, PvPers, alters, achievement whores. Casual. I’m finally at a point in the game that I’ve always wanted to be in, and I’m not quite ready to give that up, so don’t worry, I’m still here. I’d like to do a few heroics, work on some achievements, raid a little, and play a few alts. So, as I said I probably would in the comments of my last post, I did reactivate my account on the day it ran out of game time.

I spent a week or two being completely bored out of my brains because I was struggling to find a quiet moment to just sit and read and enjoy it, but I didn’t feel like doing anything ingame, believe me, I tried. I’ve managed to carefully weave myself back into having fun ingame in the past few days.

Firstly, I did a few mid-40ish instances with the other half on Terenas with my healy Shaman. He has a few alts over there these days, it’s quite nice to have somewhere to play around on Alliance alts with a guild tag, heirlooms, and a gold supply, though it would be nice if we knew a few more people on the server. In all honesty, I could do with recruiting a few people to ‘Pining for the Fjords’ but I’m not quite sure how to go about it without recruiting the kind of people we don’t massively want to play with, and let’s face it, who wants an alt guild with no guild perks? Not many, I’d wager. Anyway, I had fun being a space goat again, I missed the *waggle* and Mr. Plods the Elekk is absolutely awesome. He sometimes changes colour. I don’t know either, I think he’s magic.

Logged her out in the Badlands ready to quest a little and was pulled away to my Priest to see if we could 2 man Onyxia (10 man). We were a Prot Paladin and a Shadow Priest, which isn’t a bad setup for this kind of thing. He has a lot of self heals, I can always pop out and throw a few heals about the place, we’re also pretty good at damaging stuff until it dies – it will be perfect when my AoE isn’t shite, the whelps stayed alive for a lot longer than I would have liked. It was a little touch and go, Dan had a couple of close encounters with the floor, luckily we saved it though, despite my nearing oomnicity after the AoEing, but we killed it and got 50g each for our troubles and a pat on the back. It was a bit of fun – we had to pay attention to what was going on and make good use of abilities, it was tough, but doable.

I finally poked him into helping me get the last 100 justice points for my heirloom axe (I know, I could have used Champion’s Seals, but I still want a few mounts from the Tournament and sod those dailies. I’m done with JP, so I’m using those), and off we went to do randoms with 2 pug DPS and a pug healer (guild were raiding). It first thrust us into a Blackrock Caverns with a silent Moonkin, a floor hugging Hunter, and a healer whose catchphrase was “W8″. We got the first boss down.. after a wipe.. then to the second boss where I had little doubt that yes, we were going to wipe again. Basically, the Hunter and Moonkin were too stupid to say “yes/no I have/n’t done this boss before” and we wiped pretty hard after I was feared out of my beam. Nngh. So we left, desperate to avoid a bad mood, and got a Deadmines. I only needed 50 points by this point and was pretty scared imagining Deadmines heroic with a pug, though, we did it. The Druid, again, wasn’t very talkative but the Death Knight and healer were pretty good company, and everybody did their job well enough, the healer even asked us what the tactics were – that never happens!! On the last rope swing back to Vanessa’s corpse, the server had a massive lag spike and I’m pretty sure everybody in the EU went offline at the same time. People were courteous enough to hold on with the loot, and then off I went to get my heirloom axe and cloak to enable my Warrior to kick some serious arse.

So after I’d blinged her up, I decided to play the Warrior a little bit yesterday, and man, what a difference 35% increased experience and the one-shotting-axe-of-doom really makes. I levelled her fairly swiftly from level 4 to level 12. I don’t really have a time frame because it was quite fragmented, but wow. Fast.

After a break and a realisation that I really can’t read through that much frigging noise, I figured I’d give dailies another crack. I have a few achievements to go for, still, and some rep to grind, guild rep especially – I’d like to make it to exalted with the guild. So we did those, and later on, raid time happened. I’d signed up. I figured, well, I don’t know if I want to raid unless I do it, and I got an invite. I won’t go into too much detail, but nomnom new bracers, and I believe I will try again next week after a little break if I can squeeze into the group. My confidence was pretty low by the end of the night, I’m pretty positive my performance wasn’t stellar, and I’m hoping that swings back around because I’ve always been quite good at damaging stuff til it dies whilst moving out of the fire. We got the first two bosses in Bastion of Twilight down. The first boss was easy, but I kept fucking up on the second boss. It wasn’t just me causing wipes, of course, but I think I’ll have to grin and bear game sounds in future, if I can get over the headaches.

After all of that? I don’t feel entirely like quitting. Maybe casual alting, and a little bit of raiding is the answer.

I do have a few goals, which I’d love to reach. I want to level every alt on Vashj to 85. Eventually perhaps on Terenas too. I’d like to get my achievements to over 9000, collect a few more mounts and pets, particularly the Ulduar drakes which I’ve been struggling to get a group for since the raid was released, finish levelling Archaeology and collecting the rare items I’m after, and when I feel comfortable with the game again, clear out my bank and restock with gold making schemes *plots*. I’m sitting on about 185k gold at the moment though, so I’d say I’m safe to hold off on that one for a while.

Keeping the Mould Unbroken

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Today, I cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription. The thing is, I don’t want to quit, I really don’t. This is a game I love and have felt passionate about for 4 years now, and I’ve made so many friends and embedded myself in a community and finally found a nice guild, and I don’t massively want to leave that behind. But what is there to do? I mean, honestly, what?

After the disappointment that Wrath of the Lich King ended up being, I was so excited about the release of Cataclysm. There would be new content and Archaeology and things like that! Woo! They revamped low level questing, and for about a month it interrupted my NaNoWriMo and reading and I was really enjoying levelling lowbies and checking everything out. And then we ordered a Collectors Edition and played through the new Cataclysm things and it was fun, the new quests, and epic feeling, and new instances, but wait a second, what exactly is new here? We’ve got dungeons and heroics, yep, dailies, a PvP island, raids…

Whilst I agree with everything they’ve done, when the thing that killed the game for me before was the grind, they haven’t done a great job of trying to fix that. Grind heroics, grind raids, grind dailies, grind pets, grind mounts, grind Archaeology. Yes, Archaeology is just one big grindfest. I’ve so badly wanted to enjoy this expansion but the candle burnt down so fast that there isn’t much of a flame left. I just don’t really enjoy much any more. I enjoy playing with friends, but friends aren’t always around when I want to play, obviously.

In the end, I figured I’d log in to battle.net and just cancel my subscription until I felt like logging in again, because even the low levels aren’t grabbing my imagination these days. I’ve been wishing I was an RPer, so I could create my own fun, but I’m not. I’m not quick enough to think up decent RP on the spot.

The problem for me is that Blizzard just haven’t broken the mould at all. Questing is fun but so linear that it gets boring very fast. Heroics are still pretty new and fun but require the right people to be online and in the mood to heroic.

This isn’t me quitting, I’ll probably be back in a couple of days anyway when the house is once again filled with the sound of a TV set to volume 40-50, much too loud to be able to focus on reading, and have nothing else to do, but I suppose it is polite to explain why I’m not blogging over here so much.

I literally have nothing to say except that I don’t like grinding, and hopefully I’ll be back soon. If, on the other hand, you do have any suggestions towards making the game fun again, I’m all ears. I really don’t want to end up quitting just yet, not until I have something else to fill the time.

Edit: I should probably have added that I do have another blog that I tend to post at from time to time, more so when I don’t have much to say here. The Rant Page. Writing a fair bit about books and reading at the moment, but it’s not all I write about there. Hopefully though, I’ll find some fun in the game again and come back here, touch wood.

Quick Warning

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Incase I haven’t quite got the word out yet, I’m planning to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I babbled a bit here, on my Rant Page, but I know a lot of you don’t read that so, yeah. I’m doing NaNo this year. I don’t know how long I’ll last or how far I’ll get but of course I aim to get to 50,000 words by the end of November and I’m damn excited to be trying! I believe my novel is an Urban Fantasy, it begins with a girl clawing her way out of her coffin and wondering where the hell she is, ending up in another world, and she befriends a talking cat. That’s all you’re getting.

I’ve stuck up a word count widget in the sidebar which should show my progress and also link to my NaNo profile page, so if you want to friend me, please do! I’m interested to see how everybody does. Wish me luck :)

PS. I do have a couple of blog posts I plan to write which hopefully I’ll get down to today/tomorrow. And yes, I might go a bit quiet again in November, sorry! At least you know where I’ll be this time.

The Problem With “Trade” Chat

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For ages I didn’t think this needed a post, because everybody knows how idiotic trade chat is, but the more I read the stupidity in /2, the more I wish there was something we could do to.. well.. tone it down a little. Usually I just don’t read it, but last night I saw something that really got to me, and no, it wasn’t what I linked in the screenshot above, that is stuff you see all the time, sadly, it’s something I didn’t screenshot, something that made me instantly ignore the person responsible for it.

In the trade channel, you can usually expect to see people looking for crafters, things to buy, things to sell, the things that the channel is intended for. It’s also used as a guild recruitment channel, and a looking for group channel, because it is the global channel that you can see from any city, and you can guarantee that the majority of people in cities will be able to see it unless they have it turned off. The other thing you see in trade chat is conversation. Whilst it’s not intended to be a chat channel, that is what it has become. Sometimes the chat is fine, sometimes it’s full of idiots. A bunch of people who don’t know much about life going by their derogatory statements about how all girls who play WoW are fat, how if you have less than 5k gearscore you’re a crap player, insults being thrown around, so and so is a retard, that guy’s a fucking noob, and so on, I’m sure you know how it is. I’ve also noticed a difference between the 3 servers I’m on. My main server always seems to be full of these idiots, and trolls who think they’re so very clever. Argent Dawn has always seemed more friendly than Vashj, though with the odd troll. My Alliance server always seemed to be a little bit witty, until recently, when one person took it upon themselves to constantly tell people about their day and their owning a vagina. From what I can tell, they’re half trolling, and half flaunting their supposed femininity.

The trouble I’ve found is, whilst trade chat spent hours discussing weight, and how to lose it, and generally doing the stupid dance, the perpetrator of the entire crap came out with a statement, “I wish I was anorexic.” Making light of mental health and disabilities really is where I draw the line. I’m used to the dickheads insulting female gamers, I don’t like it but female gamers can stick up for themselves. People with mental disabilities generally can’t, and the more people make light of mental health issues, the less they become issues (the same argument with the use of the words “rape” to mean “kick ass” and “gay” to mean “bad”).

I may be guilty of using the word ‘retard’ once in a while, but that doesn’t mean I agree with it, and I am trying not to use it so much because it’s a word that’s as lazy as the word ‘noob’. They’re insults people use to insult people when they can’t think of anything else to say, it makes me cringe a little. I guess growing up around people who are mentally handicapped gives you a little more tolerance, I always remember the time I went into town with a friend from the other side of the city, a guy with Down’s Syndrome walked past shaking a pot, trying to ask for some spare change. My friend started laughing, and I couldn’t understand why. I’d like to hope this is something that changes with age, but watching trade chat worries me a little bit. Admittedly, it has got to the point where most people seem to be de-sensitised to the word ‘retard’, but one that really gets me is the use of ‘downy’ as an insult, because that hasn’t become ‘just an insult’, that is very specific with what you are calling them and why, and it makes me feel ill when I see insults like that.

When it comes to mental health, admittedly I haven’t seen much. Somebody once told me that they “didn’t believe in” depression, they felt that people who said they were depressed were just lazy and looking for an excuse, that they have no reason to feel that way and should just stop it. That was a conversation I backed out of pretty swiftly, being a sufferer of depression myself, I know how hopeless you can feel, how difficult it is to go on some days, hearing somebody think that it’s not a real feeling but a bunch of lies designed to get you attention? Yeah, I was a little mad, but I forgot about it and moved on. When I saw that person say “I want to be anorexic” in trade chat, it made me realise how people haven’t necessarily become de-sensitised to mental health issues, but in fact, they don’t know a thing about them. This is something that needs to be taught in schools, to make people aware that people with these illnesses, in fact, can’t help it. Anorexia is a horrible illness that is not something I would ever wish upon anybody, seeing that in trade really made me wish that it wasn’t so futile trying to change it.

Bats and Tiger Whales

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Insert long boring ramble about how it’s pre-Cataclysm and I have nothing particularly interesting to post, and sorry for that, here.

I really adored the Troll invasion of Echo Isles, it was so epic and introduced me to a bit of Troll lore, but I don’t really want to spoilerise it for those of you who haven’t seen it yet. And, did I ever tell you how much I’d love a Bat mount? Gief!

Also, I decided to share a bit of my art with you. Now I know, I’m pretty amazing, so please don’t be too jealous of my high skills, and don’t mock Henry, he was bullied a lot in school (get it? No.. I guess that doesn’t work.. /sigh).

Yeah, I posted some filler, and I don’t care because I got to post Henry! He’s so happy.

WTB Friendly Tanks

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The way I figure it, all tanks are dicks. That’s what my time on the Argent Dawn battlegroup is proving to me at least. Last night, the rest of the guild’s 80s were busy in the 3 Icecrown 5 mans on normal mode so I figured while I did a few quests to get some money and my Argent Crusade rep up a little I’d chain some randoms.

The first one I got was Drak’tharon Keep, I figured great! I have a quest here and King Dred drops a pretty nice trinket upgrade. I asked if we could break a few of the webs in the spider room so I could find the Troll for my quest, which surprisingly they did for me, that was nice, I picked up the next quest, and then the tank ran through the room saying, “skip”. Well, I need the emblems but I can’t solo it, so I ran through, killed some bats, realised I needed that boss for my quest but figured oh well I’ll get it next time, at least I was able to pick it up. Running past King Dred, “skip”, yeah okay now it’s just annoying, so from the whole instance I got 3 emblems. Whoopidoo, what’s the point in doing it as a random if that’s all you get?

The next one was Utgarde Keep, yay a nice quick, easy one. Can’t skip anything either. We zone in and the tank immediately says, “buff”, and after a few seconds, “buff priest”. This pushes my buttons. No hello, no please, and I’m pretty sure the Priest wasn’t called ‘priest’. Either way, we carry on, get to the room with the proto drakes, the tank skips a load pulls the pack at the end, I accidentally pull one more proto drake which is easily Tricksed onto him, and I believe the Priest’s Mind Sear pulled another pack, which of course wiped us. Then the Priest left. This is an attitude I never understood, the guy who causes the wipe always seems to blame anybody but themself, usually the tank or the healer. When you mess up, you recognise you’ve done so 9 times out of 10. Anyway, he was replaced by a Warlock who was fairly decent, but twice pulled things by accident and got us wiped. The tank felt it necessary at this point to say, “ebay lock” which was entirely pointless of course. Oh well, we finished and the Warlock ninjad the blue legs from the last boss (he had Tier 9), I didn’t quite get that either.

Then Utgarde Pinnacle popped up and as expected, the tank skipped all but 2 bosses. He was quite up himself, but nothing out of the ordinary to report, just the usual, “WTB DPS”, and “chop chop I don’t have time for this”.

I believe I then grouped up with a couple of guildies who had either come online or finished their instances. We queued up while I murdered some spiders and bats in Zul’drak, and luckily got Forge of Souls heroic! Great, I’d already done this one earlier as a specific, this gave me an extra chance for the trinket. We zoned in, killed a pack, and our healer left, we fairly quickly got a new healer, carried on, and everything was going just fine until I disconnected. My net went down. I knew my guildies weren’t about to vote kick me, but I didn’t want to hold them up, so I reset it, was offline for maybe 5 or 10 minutes, and came back online to an argument. Now, I’m not particularly fond of elitist bastards, especially when they’re being nasty to people I like. I came back online part way through something I think, but:

I did try to vote kick him but apparently the healer didn’t like this so we had to finish the instance with him and queued for one more, hoping to actually get lucky and have a nice tank. Might I add where he says “you dont know tactic”, we hadn’t even reached the first boss yet and did kill the adds and move out of the shit accordingly, whilst he was running the boss around the room in circles meaning it was pretty difficult for 2 of us to get any dps off on the boss for the first phase. At least after this little exchange he shutup and continued being punched in the face.

This time we got Azjol Nerub and the tank and healer didn’t seem too bad. We killed the first boss, and then the tank started asking me to reset the second boss. First off, I’m not comfortable with this method. I’m not hot on how to do it, and there is a risk of me fucking up and dying. I might have given it a go just to make the tank happy except he started being a bit bossy about it. The second he said, “just do it”, I decided no, I really won’t ‘just do it’. With a “fine”, he pulled the boss, we moved on, and around the part of the instance where you jump down the giant hole (which I always always angle my camera down to avoid water walking or path of frost death from the TotC 25 days), one of my guildies disconnected. Either the tank or healer tried to vote kick him but that didn’t pass. He didn’t come back so I guess his net went down. We had one wipe on Anub’erak because the healer and other dps was hit by pound, to which the tank replied, “you guys fail”. Then ran back in, killed it, and decided at this point that that was more than enough dickheads for one night.

I really hope the entire battlegroup isn’t like this, because gearing my Rogue is going to become quite a chore without guildies soon if this continues. Aside from all of this, I am enjoying it. I’m able to join in with guildies now we’re at the same level and play something new. It’s nice to be able to chill and take a break from grinding reputation and mounts for a bit. Oh, and a note, I don’t honestly think that all tanks are dicks, I think I’m damn unlucky, but I did grab your attention didn’t I?

Gender Roles In Gaming

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This is a 2 part post. The first being over at my personal blog, the Rant Page. The second being a little less about gender roles in society, and more about how males and females are perceived in a gaming environment. As I said over there, this post has been a very long time coming. I believe I have been planning to write a post about gender since maybe May, perhaps even a little before that, and it was in fact listening to the Obscurecast that reminded me about it and finally made me decide to get my thoughts down. I’d like to thank Pewter, Gazimoff, and Stu for the inspiration.

The general consensus amongst and about gamers seems to be that games are for boys and girls don’t play games, but that’s just not the case. I guess most female WoW players, or indeed players of any online game, will experience “Omg you’re a girl?” at some point in their gaming experience, which to me has always felt strange, I mean, yes I am female, and last time I checked there are a lot of us around here. What’s so amazing about owning a pair of breasts? Even girls who perhaps don’t enjoy console games, or MMOs, can be found gaming these days, there are games such as the Sims and Farmville around that make gaming much more accessible for everybody.

In WoW, females are often treated differently to males, and there are different aspects of it. Sometimes they are treated with much more respect, given the benefit of the doubt for messing up, given gifts, easier guild access. I always hated guild applications that asked for real name or gender for this reason, and also the other reason, much more difficult guild access.

There is the belief amongst WoW players that “girls cause drama”, and on this basis, a lot of guilds will be very sparing with the amount of female players they accept. The trouble is, this creates a self fulfilling prophecy in that the majority of us don’t care for drama much at all and just want to play the game. I’ve been on the receiving end of sexist remarks ingame. In my TBC guild, if I tried to join in with guild chat, very often I was met with, “Get back in the kitchen lol,” which hey, they may have found funny, but I don’t. I’m a female, so therefore I can’t join in with stuff without being made to feel that I’m inadequate as a player. Of course, I don’t personally come across this too often, but some girls get it quite bad and that’s absolutely horrendous. A lot of the time, females are seen as lesser players which simply isn’t the case, there are some excellent female players in this game, it’s all down to the individual. There are some awful male players too.

I’ve seen this happen more publicly too. Comments in trade about girls not playing WoW, they’re all fat and ugly, and so on. People advertising for pugs either stating that they have a girl in the party, or requesting more girls for the party. There was a guild back in TBC on my server called <Sapped Girls Can’t Say No> which I found utterly disgusting, and I immediately reported the name – they didn’t last long thank God. The worst part about all of the derogatory things that happen, is that more often than not people laugh at them! Like women aren’t important, they’re just there for shits and giggles, and you know what, that actually hurts a bit.

The way in which gaming companies portray women and men doesn’t help very much either. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely against the skimpy armour they make women wear, the ass shots you see in a lot of console games, how butch and muscular they design their men, and the differences in strength, how weak and weepy they design their women, and how macho they design their men. None of this really helps matters. What the game needs is women who kick ass, and don’t seem to be there merely for sex appeal. I think the best female protagonists this game has to offer is Lady Sylvanas and Keristrasza. They kick ass, and they lead. Shame about the bikinis. These women show people that females are powerful, and aren’t to be messed with! Although, it’s a shame that often women feel that to stand up for their gender, they can’t be feminine, else they’ll only be mocked for being female, because that’s not true in the slightest. I can sit on the lawn in a skirt, reading Hitchhiker’s, and telling a man to go make me a sandwich if I want.

It would be nice to think that things are slowly improving, I mean, I notice a lot less “Omg you’re a girl” style comments these days, but I still see sexism popping up in guild chat. There are some real chauvinists in this game and it’s a shame I cleared my screenshot folder because I had a couple of excellent examples in there I’d taken for this post but cleared it to make space on my PC. I do think the gaming culture has come a long way, but there is still a little way to go to get things to be a lot more equal. Also, this image confuses me. I’m not sure whether it’s great for showing that girls are powerful too, or horrendous for basically being fanservice. I’m inclined to lean towards the latter, sadly.