Musing: Gender Locked Classes: The New Sexism

I hate games that do this. I thought this world was becoming more progressive. Certainly doesn’t FEEL that way when you still got games that do this. This is ass backwards and as far as I’m concerned there is no feasible excuse for it. Mothers tell their little girls that when they grow up they can be ANYTHING they want and yet they can’t even get on a good deal of games and be what they want. Maybe little Susie doesn’t want to play a Priestess. Little Susie wants to go Xena on people and be a warrior. She finds out that only boys can be Warriors. Susie gets disappointed and uninstalls the game since girls can’t be warriors. Sure, the game LOOKED good, but she just can’t stand the gender barrier.

The problem also hits the male set too. Maybe little Timmy wants to be a Priest instead of a Warrior. He wants to play a boy Priest, but apparently only girls can be Priests. Timmy also uninstalls since he can’t be what he wants to be. Both Susie and Timmy think the developers are unfair and stupid for this choice, and so are a bunch of people. I had a talk with my mother that this was a practice in certain games and she was mortified. Sure, she doesn’t play any MMOs, but the very thought of this Gender Locking made her (figuratively) sick to her stomach. ALL THE CRAP women take and such a misogynistic practice not being halted in the virtual world. It could be a case of short sightedness on the developer’s part, but let’s face it…it looks pretty fucking sexist. The only time such a practice should ever be permitted is if the race only has ONE GENDER or you’re playing a premade character from the ground up like in Rusty Hearts. If it’s not a One Gender Race or a pre-made character then it can be argued that the person in charge of these things is either a wife beating man or some crazed man hating woman.

This sort of thing has stopped me from even checking out Aika, Prius and a few others that escape my memory at the moment. Why do people think this is good? Why aren’t people yelling at the development teams about these issues? Why are publishers agreeing to host games like this? WHERE IS THE MASS OUTRAGE!? Are people just so passive that they don’t think they can make an impact? Are these games really so good that anyone can just look past the underlying unfortunate implications of this? I know this sounds crazy to some of you, but I believe that more impressionable people will be left to believe that this kind of gender bias is actually an acceptable practice, and that frightens me to no end. I was hoping that sometime in my lifetime that we would be nearly finished sweeping gender bias off a cliff for good. This is just unacceptable.

I’m not going to go around chasing people off games that have gender locked classes, but I would at least want them to take notice of these issues. Even if I can get them to reconsider (no matter how briefly) supporting games with this “feature” I’ve done my job. This practice needs to stop. People need to spam the hell out of the inboxes of the developers and publishers of such games. Even if the publishers cannot do anything about it, you can be assured that they’ll get on the developers about it if enough people scream at them and keep screaming until it’s corrected.

I’ve heard some people reason that this is because they don’t want variety in classes is to ease up on the lag of the servers. I declare that these developers are lazy and cheap (you expect me to give you money and you can’t bother to give me a good amount of customizable options?), but that’s an issue for another time.

Tell me. What’s your stance on this?

P.S. I'll be starting this topic on as many places as I can think of to get some scope on this.

Aeria Games: Good Riddance to A Bad Company

Remember my Eden Eternal review? How I liked the games aspects, but was still on the fence about sticking around or not? Well, turns out I was pushed over one side of the fence. I wish I could say the grind broke me in half, but I didn’t subject myself long enough to the game to know that for sure.

What forced me out of the yard was the scandal I found relating to the business practices of Aeria. On a random Youtube binge I found this video.

Now this is just straight wrong. There is a link to his blog post recounting the events of this one victim from the video. What further added to this is that 100’s of accounts were banned under what appears to be under false pretenses. Since Aeria Games refuses to go public on this matter it only makes me feel more suspicious of them.

I had also heard that they (like Nexon) have horrible customer service from various forums and if that wasn’t enough, the bastards are manipulating their own Better Business Burial ratting to make themselves look good.

So I will no longer be playing anything from Aeria games. I will neither be reviewing anything from Nexon due to my personal experiences with them while trying to do the Mabinogi review. If you want to play their games, I won’t stop you. I won’t be going on some boycott against them either. I’m going to vote against them with my dollar. A dollar that will be going towards something more worthy.

I didn’t want this thing to run into too long, didn’t read territory (also they have not nailed me yet, so I don’t have anything more to add due to lacking first hand experience with their “methods”), so if you want to learn more here’s some reading material on the subject and other Aeria nonsense:

The Blog Post

Aeria Games is Super Strict

Stay Away From This Game (the first place I heard of the news)

Slow Company is Slow

Silencing the Masses

OH…and if Eden Eternal gets picked up by another publisher…let me know.

Eden Eternal: Not Sure How to Feel About It

Yeah, it’s another one of those Anime inspired MMORPG’s. Anime is pretty popular so why would it ever stop? Me, I don’t care if the game is made based off an Anime or Western culture. I’m only concerned about two things. Is the gameplay enjoyable and how big of a grind-fest it is before you can do the awesome stuff.

My associate Aron wanted to try this game so I decided to try it myself. MMO’s aren’t exactly keen on story (there are exceptions, but this isn’t one of them) so I skipped mentioning it. This one is especially generic, so more reason not to touch it on these grounds. Let’s see if it’s worth picking up in terms of game play, shall we?

Gameplay: The controls are the standard WASD movement and or point and click. Combat it click and watch your character beat the crap out of the enemy, so nothing new there, then again it’s not exactly bad, for all we know the developers wanted to keep accessibility high so they made it like that.

One thing I have to say is that I’m surprised by (and impressed with) the fact that you don’t need to make multiple characters (of the same race) because of the way the games class system works. You pick between Warrior and Mage to start with, but from there you can change classes as you level up on the fly. So you could become EVERY CLASS IN THE GAME! As of writing this the game has 15 classes available for us to fool around with, so yeah this aspect I REALLY ENJOY. But it takes more than that to keep me amused/committed.

The combat is the standard “click and enjoy” prevalent in the genre, so nothing more to say on that. Weapons and Armor have durability and speaking of which this game, like any douche bag does will ruin this for you at the worse possible moment. When you die everything on you loses 10% of its current durability and if that wasn’t bad enough death is also murder on the experience points front. I have no clue what the industry standard norm is for these matters (quite frankly I would like this to be listed under the constitution under Cruel and Unusual punishment on games with lots of grind), but you lose 50% of you experience points. No matter how you come back from the dead (except if you get one of those leaves from the Item Mall, AND the death was not in a Dungeon (nice to know Areia Games aren’t complete dicks, but who knows how long that will remain true)) you will always lose these. Some of you might think that it’s part of the challenge and if I don’t like it then I’m a scrub, but to you who think like that I would like to state I’m not fond of masochism and fear to see how you plan on disciplining your children. Here’s hoping that it’s not possible to actually level down as an end result.

Speaking of grind, it does start to feel like a drag around Level 30. I will say that this is the first MMORPG I have ever played that I managed to get over Level 20 in under a week, so congrats on that, but I’m really starting to feel it after beating the Vile Shark HQ (a five player Dungeon) after dying who knows how many times and spending three days stuck on it, going through several groups until I found one that I could work well with. I did find it funny that an Illusionist could use Mind Control on a boss and have it work, so it was worth every single misshape in between to see it.

The game has Guilds, but as it seems to be the norm the cost to make one is fairly large. I’m part of one on the Emerald server called Kaze (it means wind), all part of the reviewing experience, also I was curious how it would be, so I went what the hell and accepted the random invite. When I did most quests part of my reward would be given to the Guild, and no I had no say in it, but I would have liked one. They give you an option to donate Silver & Gold to the Guild so this feels like overkill. To expand on the Guild feature, you can have Guild Towns for the low, low price of 5000 Gold (or 5000000 Silver since 1000 Silver coins equals 1 Gold coin)! While the guild town can give you a place to buy & sell stuff and other functions I’m not sure of, it’s really only a good investment for a Guild that has zero life. The Guild town only sticks around as long as people are active and if something unforeseeable happens in real life (like a relative dying, house on fire or choosing to simply take a break from the game for a period of time) they take the town from you. All that Gold, all that grinding gone, for nothing which why I would never start a Guild in this game.

Speaking of grind, there is a lot more of it than in most MMO’s I’ve played. You grind for your character level and grind for your class level. In order to use some classes you have to have a class level in one or two other classes AND your class level can never exceed your character level, which makes a lot of sense but just serves to make the grind even more…grindy.

The interface can be quite cumbersome at times, especially if in a Raid and if you need to click on a person to target them it could be somewhat of a delay, or if you have a sizeable quest screen (not sure if they can be adjusted) it gets bothersome moving it out of the way to click on those alerts like Legend Acquired, and when you click on a quest to go to its location your character seems to go all over the place.

Land mass can also be an issue like the Vile Shark HQ run. Sometimes a pile of bones got in my way (that my character could walk over easily in any other game) and I couldn’t Oni Rush the enemy, or intercept a foe soon enough to get the mobs off our Healers. Here’s hoping they address these issues.

One thing did bother me that seems to enforce grinding and pressure you into going into the cash shop is that you cannot Power Level anyone. If someone in your party is more than five levels higher than you then you get no experience points or drops. This means I can’t help a friend level up fast and I’m stuck waiting or they can’t catch up, get discouraged and quit.

If that doesn’t make you quit then the limited bag space sure will. Those slots fill up fast, and the storage house/bank isn’t any better. You can buy other packs to give yourself more room, but the gold they take to get makes things more grindy, but you could purchase from the cash shop for about $3 if you wanted to add 10 more slots to it. Bank is far worse since its extra slots are temporary AND CAN COST REAL LIFE CASH AND IS ABOUT $1 A SLOT.

Judgment: This game to me is rather luke warm. I don’t exactly hate it but I don’t exactly like it either. While I love the ability to become any class the grind and death penalties really suck that out. If you want to check it out, be my guest. If you like it that’s fine, if not that’s fine too. I just feel so neutral on this game. Who knows, something will probably come along sooner or later and make me go one way or the other.