New Emoticons

Message Rating: Topic Search Topic Options Post Reply Create New Topic Printable Version Translate Topic

 GM Luna wrote:

With relation to the gender of avatars showing in the emotes, this has absolutely no relationship to the gender of the person sitting behind the keyboard. Just as all of our players who choose to play orcs should not be concerned that people think they are green in real life based on their emoticons. This is just another representation of the avatar you chose when you signed up for the game. It is not meant to be a representation of you as a human being.

There's no doubt in my mind you didn't want to force people to shout out their gender in chat but that doesn't mean that's not what you're doing. While it's entirely possible or a male to play a female character or a female to play a male character and thus people should always take the profile gender with a grain of salt, more times than not, they don't. They see the male or female picture on your profile or now, your emoticon and they assume you're either or. Something that takes less than a second during the creation of your account instantly defines what gender you will be perceived as.

 GM Luna wrote:

This concern makes the huge assumption that someone should feel uncomfortable or unsafe in our game based off of the gender of the avatar they've chosen. I hope you'll understand why I (female gamer, woman in the video games industry and primary moderator of our community) might find that a little bit frustrating. 
In other words, rather than being concerned about a potential imagined increase in sexual harassment based on showing gender in emoticons, report all cases of actual sexual harassment and there will be no problem with the emoticons showing gender. Creating a safe environment in our game for all players is a top priority, and pretending that gender (both in real life and in our game avatars) doesn't exist isn't really a very good solution from where I sit.

Luna

Given there are still members who for more than a year have had bouts of racist and/or sexist outbursts on the forums or in chat, that eventually drove some people away from the from either the forums or GC altogether, I have to say that I don't really take that comment too seriously. There have be far too many people who I would have marked as BoS (ban on sight) ages ago that are still free to play the game. As such it's no wonder that female gamers don't feel comfortable telling people that they are female. 

I don't really care about the emoticons themselves, I don't use them but I think it's absolutely ridiculous that those who do use them are forced to display their profile gender to everyone in chat. I actually wouldn't mind an option to change the gender of your account or choose to remain "unidentified" if I so choose but that gets into the topic of gender identity which is probably better for another topic. 