Things need to explain: Bunny Ears

[Laerune]

I give up, its pretty obvious that SE will cater to female avatars, making this realm of waifus fighting evil. They said in January that they were going to balance gear for both genders and since then they have only been adding female exclusive items and some uni-sex gears. I wont trust them on their word. Making the bunny ears uni-sex would have been a great gesture that SE cares about their WHOLE CUSTOMERBASE!

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Its great that you dont care, but you are playing a female avatar, the option to use those glamour and receive extra glamour is there for you. The players with a male avatar do NOT have this option. They care and I care, so I wonder why so many (this is not directed only at you) care so much about what other players care? Majority (95%) of the players who say that this is not a issue have a female avatar, so afcourse this is not a issue for THEM, yet they come here and defend SE against something that does not bother them at all (their words not mine).

I hate when people do that, when coloured people wanted equality people were against it, yet what they were asking for does not affect them, when the LGBT community wanted equality people were against it, yet once again, they want the same things like any person. I know it is trivial to compare what real people are lacking to avatars in a mmorpg. But it does not change the fact that majority of the NAYSAYERS are not affected and the only thing that will change is that other players will be able to wear the same armour or get exclusive gear.

Call me crazy, but doesnt anyone find it odd that 50% of the playerbase is paying SE to make items that only the other 50% can wear? What is wrong with Square Enix?

[Mature]

Lots of Bunny ears lately... VIERA incoming

[Reinha]

Would you be happier if we went several patches with a bunch of male-only gear and no female-only equivalent until we had equal amounts of both in order to make things "fair"?

Since they usually release at least 2 sets at once, they could make one for males and one unisex. Anyone who's happy with the current imbalance should be fine with a reverse situation as well, right? A nice bonus for making male-only gear without a female version is that the devs could focus on making really masculine stuff without worrying how to properly translate the look and feel onto a female body. Y'know kind of how they gave up on making a male version of the Thavnarian Bustier and the bunny suits.

[ElHeggunte]

Its great that you dont care, but you are playing a female avatar, the option to use those glamour and receive extra glamour is there for you. The players with a male avatar do NOT have this option. [...]

Yes, I realize I could take advantage of the gear if I wanted to (figured someone would say that immediately after I posted, but you know... I'm always too lazy to edit arguments after I post). I understand caring about it. I care about it too. It would be nice if there was more gender equality in equipment. What I don't understand is why people are making such a massive deal over it.

Some posters are taking this so personally you'd think SE pinky-promised to add X or change Y, but instead of delivering SE broke into their house and made them watch as they boiled their family alive (probably while Yoshi-P himself wore the Thavnairian Bustier and Mandervilled around the cauldron). Even if I played a male character I still wouldn't see what the big deal is about. It's just strange to me to fixate on such small percentage of gear out of all the other stuff we have to wear.

Since they usually release at least 2 sets at once, they could make one for males and one unisex. Anyone who's happy with the current imbalance should be fine with a reverse situation as well, right? [...]

That would be nice, but in a lot of these threads I get the sense that people are primarily upset just over the difference in numbers so some of them would still complain that females still get something. Hence my admittedly smart-assed suggestion that SE only adds male-only sets until the genders are even.

[Laerune]

Yes, I realize I could take advantage of the gear if I wanted to (figured someone would say that immediately after I posted, but you know... I'm always too lazy to edit arguments after I post). I understand caring about it. I care about it too. It would be nice if there was more gender equality in equipment. What I don't understand is why people are making such a massive deal over it.

Some posters are taking this so personally you'd think SE pinky-promised to add X or change Y, but instead of delivering SE broke into their house and made them watch as they boiled their family alive (probably while Yoshi-P himself wore the ThavnairianBustier and Mandervilled around the cauldron). Even if I played a male character I still wouldn't see what the big deal is about. It's just strange to me to fixate on such small percentage of gear out of all the other stuff we have to wear.
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We all have stuff that we care about, its fine and your right if you do not care about it, but many do and that is why we are making threads about this. All of us are customers, we pay SE to play this game and this includes the content that is being released. Imagine if SE decides that the players on the JP Datacenter get two new dungeons, the NA Datacenter one gets one and EU Datacenter gets none. Now imagine is if someone from the JP Datacenter came here and said this to a complaining EU players "Some posters are taking this so personally you'd think SE pinky-promised to add X or change Y, but instead of delivering SE broke into their house and made them watch as they boiled their family alive (probably while Yoshi-P himself wore the Thavnairian Bustier and Mandervilled around the cauldron). Even if I played on a EU Datacenter I still wouldn't see what the big deal is about. It's just strange to me to fixate on such small percentage of exclusive dungeons out of all the other stuff that we get". Yes, dungeons and glamour items are two different things, but to some they are of the same value. There are players who do not raid, but craft to collect glamour items, its their way of enjoying this game. SE should not as a company be unfair on this matter.

Players with male and female avatars pay (aside from legacy sub, entry sub etc.) the same amount of money to enjoy this game and support SE in making content that we all can enjoy. If someone does not want to raid then that is their choice, but atleast SE has given them the choice to raid or not. The players who love to glamour their male avatars are not given this choice. Yet players (who are mostly posting with a female avatar) do not seem to understand this. So to all the players who do not care, GOOD FOR YOU! But this still does not mean that we DO NOT CARE ASWELL.

@ElHeggunte this is not only directed at you, so do not take it as a personal attack. I love to glamour my male character and I hate that I am not given this option.

[Serilda]

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I care because the gap never used to exist, and since it started it's been steadily growing in one direction (data). Nobody would make such a fuss if there wasn't an established trend; that's why it's been blowing up more recently as the bias becomes harder and harder to ignore. When are we allowed to start getting upset about it? When there are 20 additional items for female characters? 30? 50? 500? What's the arbitrary point where it's suddenly an actual problem instead of a storm in a teacup led by a bunch of guys with nothing better to do than whine?

Then we've been given strange feedback from S-E like comments about it being harder to make clothing for male characters (which inherently makes no sense, especially with things like hats), and comments which imply all gear is designed on female characters first then adapted for males if they feel like it (a separate issue which some players finds upsetting for different reasons). The fact is, complaining works. Since we started banding together and complaining we've received feedback from the community team that they understand our concerns, whereas we heard nothing at all in the months since that first response acknowledging that there was an issue. S-E aren't snubbing us out of spite, they just don't (didn't?) understand how upset people felt. From that I have taken the message that we should keep campaigning, and keep speaking up when people try to tell us we're being silly.

The campaigning will also help make players with female characters aware of the problem, so if (when?) steps are taken to make more glamour available for male characters we'll have plenty of background information to point to when people start complaining from the other side. I personally like the idea of making the existing female-locked items unisex until the balance is restored, as nobody has to lose anything for that to happen, but I'm also happy with a solution of giving us a new male-only items to even things up. Bunny ears in particular should be something anyone can have as they are useful for all kinds of fun glamours, including festive ones during the springtime. However, if S-E insist on keeping them female-only I would be more than happy with an equivalent male-only 'fun' item - perhaps something like fluffy bear ears.

I'm personally campaigning because I do like to dress my male character up nicely and having fewer items means I have fewer mix-and-match options when constructing glamour sets. Other people are campaigning because they specifically want certain items. It doesn't really matter what our motivations are though, does it? It's a hard fact that there's a gender bias in this game, and it's something that's currently easily rectified. It's also true that the longer they let this situation persist, the harder it will be to undo the damage. Why not just get it fixed now, without having to deal with people questioning our motives at every step?

(Thank you so much to Laerune and Reinha for making those fantastic understanding posts, even though you're not personally affected by the imbalance on the characters you're using on the forums.)

There's one other thing I want to address because it personally bothers me.

Want some cheese with your whine, guys? Though honestly the more of these whiny threads I see the more it seems to be less about glamour and more about men having just as much or more than women even in fiction and the opposite is just outrageous (apparently).

Forgive me if I have misinterpreted but the 'even in fiction' implies that you are annoyed that men are dominant in the real world and trying to have equality (or dominance?) here too. Please reread your own signature and reconsider your stance; as we have said, repeatedly, many of the people demanding this are not male in real life. This is not a gender superiority debate, it's simply an issue where players are limited based on aesthetic decisions made during character creation with no in-game warning in advance. If anything, producing extra sexy outfits for female characters is an imbalance favouring a subset of straight real-life guys who want to enjoy scantily-clad female characters in a videogame. Equality benefits everyone; anything else sets a bad precedent for the way this game is being designed.

[ElHeggunte]

[...]

I haven't taken a single thing you've said as a personal attack and I agree with much of what you've said*. It ultimately comes down to personal opinion I guess. I love to glamour myself more so than raid these days, I just can't get flustered over something being inaccessible to me because of gender. Some of the (rare) male-only items would let me build nice looks, but since I can't wear them I deal with it and go try to find a female or neutral equivalent (which is admittedly more difficult for male-to-female looks, but I digress).

And the bolded part of your comment is what I said because some people really are taking this ridiculously personally. Though not just in relation to this topic, I see that kind of reaction in any thread where someone feels SE didn't do something they wanted or in the way they wanted. Some might perceive it as passion, I see it as a gross overreaction in most cases.**

S-E aren't snubbing us out of spite, they just don't (didn't?) understand how upset people felt. From that I have taken the message that we should keep campaigning, and keep speaking up when people try to tell us we're being silly.

This is what's been so hard for me to grasp. A lot of posters have been acting like SE isn't adding male-only gear solely out of spite. And as mentioned above it happens in a lot of topics where people seem to think SE is out to get them. It's just really strange to me.

*I actually like adult debates like this that don't devolve into name-calling and derailments.

**I'm going to overreact right now and demand that SE remove this ridiculous 1000 character limit! There's no point if you can just edit around it and it's really difficult to hold conversations when the forums get mad at you for trying to post more than a few sentences!

[Serilda]

This is what's been so hard for me to grasp. A lot of posters have been acting like SE isn't adding male-only gear solely out of spite. And as mentioned above it happens in a lot of topics where people seem to think SE is out to get them. It's just really strange to me.

To be honest I think a lot of the hyper-sensitive reactions are because of the abuse - and it is abuse - that crops up from other members of the community every time the issue is raised. A read-through of any of the longer topics about the imbalance issue yields countless insults about 'boys in dresses' and 'whining', not to mention direct insults aimed at people who want to dress their imaginary alter egos up a certain way (and bizarrely, insults directed at real transgendered people, even though they have literally nothing to do with the topic at hand). That and the general silence from S-E about the issue has made it a frustrating one to deal with; every time we seem to be getting somewhere, someone new flies in and calls us all a bunch of weirdos for no real reason.

(I'm not saying you're being abusive here, of course! Some of the things that have been said in other debates about this topic have crossed the line and doubtless caused the original complainers actual distress, which in turn leads to a more defensive attitude.)

[ElHeggunte]

[...]

You aren't wrong there and I do think that people making personal attacks only exacerbate the situation. It's one thing to argue, and it's something else entirely to make personal attacks that are completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. Most of them are the same kind of dickbag that fights gender equality in real life based on who knows what and I think they can go [redacted]. That's another topic all together though that I could go on for days about and that would only derail this one.

Well you, Laerune, and Reinha are some cool cats. I'll still probably not quite see what the deal is, but you've all given me a lot of insight into the workings of the other side so there's a lot more understand there. And I am still of course on the side of more gender equality (always have been even if I'm personally indifferent in the grand scheme of things). I just want people to chill just a tad and to stop acting like SE has a personal vendetta against them. SE isn't perfect and they've gotten a lot of things wrong, but I promise that they aren't out to get anyone... probably. You might still want to check under the bed for Yoshi-P.

[Ghastly]

Lots of Bunny ears lately... VIERA incoming

We're not only getting bunny ears and clothes but we're also involved in Sky Pirate quests. Yoshida, we want Viera!