Accipeter

lollll yes no surprises here

this

@Solaris:

Let's say someone mentions, I don't know, say, Belgium in passing. You have something to say about Belgium, so you say "Oh yeah, a few years ago my girlfriend and I took a vacation to Belgium and we..."

Boom! You just told everyone you're straight (assuming you're male)! Why should anyone ever need to tell anyone their sexual preference? Well you know, because stuff like that always comes up in casual conversation.

"Hey, what did you do last weekend?"

"Oh, me and girlfriend did x"

"Have you seen x movie?"

"Oh yeah, my girlfriend and I watched it on Netflix the other night..."

Hell, lots of people think it's perfectly acceptable and not rude at all to ask people they've just met whether they're married or have a boyfriend/girlfriend.

It's completely unavoidable, unless you choose to never, ever talk about your personal life, or unless you choose to lie/omit huge parts of it. Most folks would rather not have to do that. I don't understand why people don't get that. Seems simple enough to me.

@Degu: I'm sorry that happened to you. It sucks. I'm not religious myself, but I very much dislike it when people bash others just for their religion. I do wish people were more cognizant of that as an issue, and I'm glad to see you and Dblade speak up about it.

I certainly have my own personal judgments/biases about various organized religions, but I do my best to judge individuals on their own merits, regardless of their professed beliefs. And I certainly would never dream of interfering or protesting about a group of people forming a guild around being Christian or whatever else.

To be honest, I worry much less about overt discrimination that's easy to call out and report -- slurs and such -- than I do about the unconscious discrimination that pervades our culture.

For example, if I were to use my real name in a forum, it would be obvious that I'm female. In my experience, that usually results in my words being taken less seriously than a male poster's would be. People are far more likely to ridicule or ignore words when they come from a female then they would the identical words coming from a male. People generally aren't being malicious or doing this on purpose by any means -- it's just the way our culture shapes our perceptions.

I remember reading about a study where a group of high-level symphony orchestras instituted a new way of doing auditions, in order to remove all prejudices not related to music that the judges may have had. The orchestras had the musicians audition behind a screen, so the judges couldn't see them as they played. The auditionees were identified to the judges only by numbers rather than names. Thus, the judges had no clue about the gender, race, ethnicity, age, etc. of the musician. Surprise, surprise, the proportion of women among the successful auditionees increased considerably.

So in MMOs, I almost always play male characters. This is easy and comfortable for me, since I don't identify personally with my characters -- to me, they're more like puppets or characters in a story I'm telling. In fact, it's more fun for me when they're nothing like me at all.

I find that when I play male characters, I get much less crap/unwanted attention. Also, when I play well, I get complimented and appreciated for it more often when I'm on one of my male characters than when I'm on a female one. When I play poorly, I get a lot less shit for it, and the shit I get is a lot less personal/nasty/gender specific than it is when I'm on a female character. Weird, since I tend to assume most female characters are being played by guys, but people still treat male and female toons differently.

I guess people assume anyone playing a male character MUST be male, whereas someone playing a female character MIGHT be female irl. Little do they realize how many of us women play males just so we can play in peace, lol.

And yeah, I absolutely hate the stupid "chainmail bikini" fantasy convention. I prefer my characters be wearing proper armor/clothing, thank you very much, so that pretty much forces me to play male characters. Plus, there's usually no option to choose a female avatar with normal proportions, lol. Huge silicon-looking balloon-titties just look stupid, imo, so that precludes most female toons for me.

I suspect Nuit is making a fair assumption. And, more to the point, Seraphina is also making an assumption. In order for there to be a "double standard," the same people must be both happily buying the mount and qqing about MTs. She doesn't know that that's the case any more than Nuit knows it isn't.

I suspect Nuit's assumption is closer to the truth, given the echo chamber nature of these kinds of forums. I seriously doubt that the same people ragequitting over Allod's item store and ranting about it on game forums are the ones clamoring for Blizzard's new pony.

Yes, I've only recently started playing, but I'm finding it a very engaging game. The plans for "walking in stations" sound exciting -- I hope they get implemented. It would add tremendously to the game, in my opinion

That's a shame.

Graill, you are clearly not the brightest crayon in the box.

I agree with most of the previous commenters. This is a generally unappealing idea, with too many potentially negative repercussions for game play. Something fairly low-key, like WoW's heirloom items, seems to work okay, though.