Has the treatment of developers gotten better?

Saying there's no big problem and saying it doesn't exist AT ALL are very, very different.

The huge majority of people here in the West are not gender-policing bigots like feminists tend to be and tend to try and make women think we are.

No. The recent gamergate scandal didn't cause these asshats to appear out of nowhere. They've always been there, and they will continue to be there.

Decent Developers make decent not-expensive expansion packs for their successful games.
Or a DLC so big that can be considered an expansion pack.

While I think they deserve some shit I just think it goes too far on many occasions. Palmer Lucky didn't deserve all those articles slamming him, Bioware devs don't deserve doxxing and so on.

Why can't more young women be as reasonable and logical as you are??

You are aware that I'm responding to someone else with that post, yes?

In most cases what I think what happens is a developer releases a game people have issues with and they just fling whatever shit they can come up with at them. It's not exactly a secret on the internet that a troll will make misogynistic comments at a woman simply because that's something they think they can attack to get a reaction out of them, which the reaction is what trolls are after.

The same sort of logic applies here: It's just a means of attacking them, and they'd attack the developers for being male if they thought that would get under their skin. I don't think that it becomes significantly more or less depending on them being male or female. For as much hate that got thrown at that one BioWare writer, keep in mind how much we've thrown at Mac Walters as a community. Even just people on this forum and BSN prime before it, we've given him a lot of hate for his role in ME3.

I mean, one of the Call of Duty developers got death threats because they made a minor nerf to one of the guns in the game. Blizzard routinely gets shit flung at them because <insert whatever class beat you on damage meters here> is "overpowered and obviously played by the devs because they favour that class".

As far as the games themselves go, I never understood this notion that a female character is only "strong" as long as she never gets help from a man. Especially as stories get more advanced than the "Here be baddies, go murder" of the 90s it's become increasingly rarer that even a male protagonist does everything 100% on his own. Even more so in RPGs, where you often have an entire party of people and stories tend to be a lot more developed than in say, FPS.

The whole making them look sexy thing is never going away though, as we simply enjoy looking at attractive people of our preferred sex. Kaiden walking around shirtless for the first half of ME3 wasn't for my benefit and Cullen being a romance in DA:I was almost certainly because of the legions of fangirls that he has. Both of those things are perfectly fine as I got my own eye candy.

Except BioWare never gave me my Kasumi romance. That's the real issue here =P

Um

Was that sarcasm??? Like... reasonable and logical just arent words that have been used to describe me... ever im one of the most illogical people I know haha

But um if youre serious (which im guessing you are) ohmygodthankyousomuchthatssoniceofyoutosay


I agree with like all of that

My thoughts on strong female characters arrreee:

As I said about Morrigan before somewhere... the fact she can murderize darkspawn is completely irrelevant... a strong character isnt about how many people they can kill or how many lives they can save or anything like that... a strong character is about complexity. Even if you had a character who, if they were in a fight, wouldnt survive a second because of physical weakness... that wouldnt make them a weak character. Im a firm believer in that flaws are more important than strengths when it comes to creating characters no matter what gender they are. A strong female character isnt someone who could slay an entire army with her bare hands and who often makes remarks about how she doesnt need men. A strong character is someone who has thoughts and feelings and hopes and aspirations and dreams and flaws and quirks and personality. Whether theyre tall short male or female fat or thin dependent or independent... those things dont matter in determining how strong a character is, only how strong they are as a person. You can have a strong character who is a weak person and you can have a weak character who is a strong person. So to sum up: being a strong character isnt about physical or mental strength, its about how complex and real the character is. Real people have flaws. And if you want to make a strong character they need flaws also.

I suppose it comes down to if they're being attacked because they're a woman or for something else and their being a woman is just being used. Not that either one of those is okay behaviour, but it seems an important distinction in this kind of a discussion.

Unfortunately which it is one can be hard to separate out. For example with Jennifer Hepler I believe what triggered the response against her was statements about how she doesn't even like playing games and how she wished more developers would let you skip combat gameplay, a notion which would probably still see plenty of response were Jennifer a man. Of course, I also have no doubt in my mind many of the people who did attack her did so simply because "She's a woman trying to influence my video games!".

I will say that I don't find the overall treatment of Mac, Casey, or Jennifer to be reasonable by any sense of the word. As the admin I'll also say that BioWare employees on these forums is something that's been discussed by myself and the other mods and we're in agreeance that while we don't want to give them special treatment and criticism of their games is obviously fine(I tend to heavily criticize any form of entertainment that I love, so I'll be joining in on this one =P), we wont stand for personal attacks being made against a BioWare employee.

I can understand people not caring as much for his writing style, but I do agree that he probably didn't wake up and go "You know what? Fuck everything I've been working on, let's piss everybody off" and wanted Mass Effect 3 to be as successful and good a game as possible. The same goes for both Casey and Jennifer for all of the games they worked on.

Also as a straight guy I'd just like to say I find it very weird that we're essentially trying to push women out of getting into gaming. I for one would certainly not mind more ladies around sharing my interests.

As for my hands, I make no promises about where they end up when it comes to Kasumi =P

@cyonan: Agreed

@generalx: I was not being sarcastic. But I am ... starting now

The only way I will say the treatment of developers has gotten better is when the treatment of regular garden variety shitheads everywhere in society and across the internet, etc, gets worse.