Can we please get more cool looking outfits for male characters?

[Clover_Blake]

I don't need ever skanky female set to have a 1:1 male counterpart, but if "sexy wizard" is the theme and one set is a unique revealing coat and panties while the other is a regular coat and pants that look near interchangeable with dungeon drops, you can kinda tell which set got a liiiiiitle more thought put into it, no?

But that's what I meant, I don't think there's more thought put into one outfit over the other; that you might have a personal preference for one doesn't make the other less good.

Using the Saints Wake wolf attire as an example, some people complained (perhaps it was in this thread) that females got "the better" outfit because they got a mini skirt and high boots, while males got trousers and short boots. But the thing is that both outfits are cool and equally good, and both are adapted to what many males and many females wear. As I said, you can't force every male player to dress his character in a mini skirt with high boots for Saints Wake, because that's not what the vast majority of them wants to wear.

Yet with all this, males still do have many feminine and cute looking gear in this game. Surely it's not as bad as some people are trying to paint it?

[Hestzhyen]

But that's what I meant, I don't think there's more thought put into one outfit over the other; that you might have a personal preference for one doesn't make the other less good.

Using the Saints Wake wolf attire as an example, some people complained (perhaps it was in this thread) that females got "the better" outfit because they got a mini skirt and high boots, while males got trousers and short boots. But the thing is that both outfits are cool and equally good, and both are adapted to what many males and many females wear. As I said, you can't force every male player to dress his character in a mini skirt with high boots for Saints Wake, because that's not what the vast majority of them wants to wear.

Yet with all this, males still do have many feminine and cute looking gear in this game. Surely it's not as bad as some people are trying to paint it?

It's not about having more feminine gear, really. Like Rokke's been saying, it's equality in what we do get. I made a post a little while back in Lukha's thread about how much of an afterthought designing gear for guys is in this game. Here are the pictures...

Note the character on the far left wearing the maxi dress:

https://imgur.com/pz1vAmL

And this is the same set, for guys:

https://imgur.com/p4MaIGT

That's not equality in the slightest. Girls got a cute brand-new themed maxi dress and guys got a re-coloured crafting set sans pants. If it had been the other way around with guys getting the cool new thing and girls getting some incomplete recolour, do you think you would have been okay with that? Especially if it kept happening over and over again?

I loved XIV back in 2.0 because it wasn't like the pandering Korean MMOs I had tried. There were no gender restrictions on races, everyone wore the same stuff with minor differences, and there were equal quantities of gear for everyone- sexy, cute, cool, bad-ass, whatever gear was in the game existed for everybody and had matching counterparts for both genders. Then after the glamour system was implemented, things slowly began to creep towards what we see today. Over time females got an outfit here, an outfit there with no comparable male equivalent. It's come to the point where if you want quality AND quantity, you should play female characters. That shouldn't be.

It's easy to see for most of the people posting ITT that female gear gets the majority of the design love and attention from SE's devs. Whether or not girls have more variety IRL isn't a factor in this, really- SE just says "look at this cute outfit we made for the girls! Oh. What should we do for the guys?" and the answer is almost always 1) plain pants/shirt 2) don't adapt it at all. Do you know how hard it is to find shorts as a guy? Just shorts, coming above the knee, that can be worn by any job/race. It's way harder than it should be, considering how versatile they are. I feel like if SE really had people on top of this who cared they'd realise that shorts are a thing they can use sometimes. And if there are super feminine tops they can't adapt, guys... can go shirtless! We could use more stuff like the South Seas Talisman that add body paint instead. Edda's frilly gothic dress could have been adapted into a gothic suit for men. Lyse's outfit could remove the strip of cloth covering her boobs and lengthen the shorts. And so on. They just choose not to put the work in to make things equal.

We're not asking for girls to get less stuff or for all guys to be forced to "wear mini skirts and high boots". We're asking for SE to stop being lazy with our designs. If girls are getting a unique outfit that hasn't existed previously, we should too. Or at least equally flip-flop between who gets the special new stuff if resources are too strained to do two new things at once. We're paying customers too.

[Clover_Blake]

We're not asking for girls to get less stuff or for all guys to be forced to "wear mini skirts and high boots". We're asking for SE to stop being lazy with our designs. If girls are getting a unique outfit that hasn't existed previously, we should too. Or at least equally flip-flop between who gets the special new stuff if resources are too strained to do two new things at once. We're paying customers too.

Um, I'm sorry, I just can't share the same view of females getting better things than males in this game, as I'm too in love with tons of the outfits males have (>_<) Believe me, this is a matter that has bothered me greatly in every other game I've played, and I'm the first one to complain. I just don't feel that way in FFXIV; I think that both males and females get very nice things.

The Saints Wake samples you gave are both modified versions of crafter gears. The female one was modified into having a skirt, a detail you can't add to the male one because the majority of males don't want to wear skirts (as I mentioned, it's not SE's fault that male fashion is a bit less versatile than female one when it comes to skirts/trousers). The bottom part is supposed to be chosen by you in both the male and the female case, which makes them the same. For the record, I happen to like the male version of that outfit more than the female one *falls over*.

So I don't know, I really don't get the impression that male designs are being made carelessly or have less thought poured into them. FFXIV males look extremely good to me @_@; (just my opinion, though)

[Hestzhyen]

I really don't get the impression that male designs are being made carelessly or have less thought poured into them. FFXIV males look extremely good to me @_@; (just my opinion, though)

If you play a male character you'll understand pretty quickly how it is. We have good options. But we don't have as many as females (you guys really do have sheer quantity on us), or in as many possible varieties as we could and it's been a few years since the glamour system was introduced. It's definitely not as bad as a Korean MMO, but considering that this is a sub-based game, there's no real excuse for the disparity in my mind. I hold XIV to higher standards than games that rely on fetishizing female player characters and pandering to horny teens to stay afloat.

[Lukha]

I really don't get the impression that male designs are being made carelessly or have less thought poured into them. FFXIV males look extremely good to me @_@; (just my opinion, though)

Okay, so you might like the male version of the All Saint's Wake suit better, but you can't seriously argue that it didn't have less thought put into it than the female one. In that case, the male top is a complete 1:1 recolor of an item that already existed in the game at that time, with a decoration on the bowtie. The female version is a new model which, while similar to a preexisting item, has a unique touch (the skirt) which no other version of that model has. It's not equivalent at all; the appropriate male equivalent would have been to make it, say, a tailcoat rather than a short jacket, maybe with tails shaped like bat wings to give it that Halloween flare. Do that, and the lack of matching pants goes from rage-inducing to hilarious, because we still got a unique piece in the deal. (Though we could still use a dyable pair of short-shorts for guys, since the matching boots look a little odd with anything else...)

It's not a matter of liking or not liking, it's a matter of the male version objectively having less effort put into it, and by less we mean absolutely none.

[Rokke]

It's not a matter of liking or not liking, it's a matter of the male version objectively having less effort put into it, and by less we mean absolutely none.

These topics always lead to tangents, but ultimately this is my beef.

I play male and female characters- when I flip between the two regularly, the wardrobes become hilariously disproportionate. I just want all my virtual barbies to have nice clothes.