Is the PPD sexist?

[MTeague]

2 minutes ago, MunkiLord said:

And that's not me criticizing the developers of the game specifically, it was just the norm at the time.

Yep.  A year ago I watched The Princess Bride with someone who had never see it before. I thought they'd love it, and they did, but she was also "OMG, Buttercup is completely USELESS!  She's pathetic, why is Wesley even trying to save her??"

 

And well, she wasn't wrong lol.

But that was the norm of the times when the movie was made.  

Doesn't mean we should keep it going forward, but we do all need to keep in mind, "When was this produced?"

[ZacKing]

Yeah it's weird to see mostly male PPD officers although I could swear there are a bunch of lower level contacts that are female PPPD officers.

[Zepp]

2 hours ago, CursedSorcerer said:

Well, last time I checked there are actually female police officers in the real world.

2 hours ago, ShardWarrior said:

Not sure where you are from, but the fantastic police officers we have in my area have some excellent women officers, including our Chief of Police.  The State Trooper barracks not far from us have many women Troopers as well. 

There are female police officers, and there are black police officers. That does not disprove the premise.

[ShardWarrior]

23 minutes ago, Zepp said:

There are female police officers, and there are black police officers. That does not disprove the premise.

Nor does stating opinion. 

[Lyris]

So, dumb question here: how difficult is it to add a new model into the mix?  For some of these, you could just re-skin an existing female model from another group which would mean you wouldn't have to re-rig something.  Is it a question of adding the model name to a selection of files that can be pulled for random assignment  or what exactly is involved in adding another option?  

 

Obviously changing the model on scripted areas would be a lot more complicated, but on randomly spawned patrols and events, it could work... right?

 

Forgive me, I know nothing about the game's internal structure so I'm not sure what complications there are.  

[Coyotedancer]

For what it's worth, I'm pretty well-versed at this point in making lady Circle mage costumes. I'd gladly volunteer to help out with a few if we had a way to add "female alternates" to the pool of casters and magi.

 

Of course, there are still a few costume bits that need to be ported from the male to the female base... The Death Mage bits, for instance... Bits that the guy-toons were given access to along the way, but the lady-toons weren't… But once that's done? Easy peasy. 

 

 

Edited May 13, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[MTeague]

1 hour ago, Lyris said:

So, dumb question here: how difficult is it to add a new model into the mix?  For some of these, you could just re-skin an existing female model from another group which would mean you wouldn't have to re-rig something.  Is it a question of adding the model name to a selection of files that can be pulled for random assignment  or what exactly is involved in adding another option?  

 

Obviously changing the model on scripted areas would be a lot more complicated, but on randomly spawned patrols and events, it could work... right?

 

Forgive me, I know nothing about the game's internal structure so I'm not sure what complications there are.  

As have been pointed out, there are female cops who are hostages you rescue. 

And there are female cops who are contacts (at least 1 in Skyway City for sure).

 

Now, whether that model is compatible with the existing animations, so that you could face them in Mayhem Missions and have them shoot at you, or toss flashbangs at you, I don't know.

It's certainly not a problem for female longbow. 

 

However, by all accounts, the internal code for City of Heroes is.... charitably speaking... a mess. I give the Homecoming Devs many props for trying to actually go in an refactor the guts of it to make it more supportable for the long haul.

[AerialAssault]

48 minutes ago, MTeague said:

As have been pointed out, there are female cops who are hostages you rescue. 

And there are female cops who are contacts (at least 1 in Skyway City for sure).

 

Now, whether that model is compatible with the existing animations, so that you could face them in Mayhem Missions and have them shoot at you, or toss flashbangs at you, I don't know.

It's certainly not a problem for female longbow. 

 

However, by all accounts, the internal code for City of Heroes is.... charitably speaking... a mess. I give the Homecoming Devs many props for trying to actually go in an refactor the guts of it to make it more supportable for the long haul.

Malaise and Mother's Lunatics (the old Praetorian enemy group) sometimes use those female police officers as bosses, as does the Crazed enemy group, so they can definitely use attack animations. The issue is that there are no others female police officers outside of them, and certainly no SWAT, Hard Shell, Psi Cop or Kheldians.

 

As far as I remember, the Psi Cops and Kheldians have very few unique costume pieces, so it shouldn't be too hard to include females in that level range while staying coherent to the costumes. I'm not sure if the Hard Shell costume pieces are on females, but if they are then that should be okay too. The beat cops are a bit trickier but should be manageable. SWAT use completely unique costume pieces that I do not believe work on female models. 

 

I could be wrong about that, I'm just going from my memory of using the developer functions on Titan Icon.

[MTeague]

8 minutes ago, AerialAssault said:

I'm not sure if the Hard Shell costume pieces are on females, but if they are then that should be okay too.

Honestly I'm not sure how much if any the Hard Shells would even need to change. 

 

 

A bit around the jawline, perhaps. 

Once you're armored up enough, there's very little left to visually indicate if the person inside the armor is male or female. 

Even on the most.... endowed... female, practical armor wouldn't have gender-specific curves.  (Despite a vast array of fantasy games that add them anyway....)

 

Agreed 100% on PsiCops and PPD Awakened and the like.

[Redlynne]

8 hours ago, CursedSorcerer said:

Why doesn't the Paragon Police seem to have any women in their ranks?

They do, actually ... however not as a fighting NPCs.  I've seen plenty of female PPD in Steel Canyon, but they're Civilians who (also) run away from crime on the streets (because they use the Civilian AI).  But they just walk the streets.

 

All of the combatants in the PPD are male ... both in Paragon City and in Praetoria.

Of course, in Praetoria the females are Seers who SUMMON the male PPD officers.

Kind of curious how there aren't any male Seers ...

[SurfD]

Freaks are another one.  Literally the only Female Freak I can ever recall having encountered is Clamor, an arch villain with a unique model.  I don't think I have ever seen a "generic" Female Freak Lieutenant, Minion or Boss, with the sole possible exception of the "Meat Doctors" who I think all use the same Female model.

Edited May 14, 2020 by SurfD

[SurfD]

3 hours ago, Redlynne said:

Of course, in Praetoria the females are Seers who SUMMON the male PPD officers.

Kind of curious how there aren't any male Seers ...

The complete lack of Male Seers in public facing Praetoria is kind of interesting.  Especially when you get into first ward content and the couple of arcs that deal with the Seer Networks.  You run into a lot of the "Awakened", who are referred to as either Ex Seers or people who failed the Seer program conditioning, and there is a good balance of Male/Female among them.   Entirely possible that sweet, loving Mother is simply intentionally breaking the Men and preventing them from ever being complete Seers deliberately.

[krj12]

Those danged Carnies are so sexist,  you only see the occasional token bucket-head.   Something needs to be done about this. ;)

 

[MTeague]

44 minutes ago, SurfD said:

The complete lack of Male Seers in public facing Praetoria is kind of interesting.  Especially when you get into first ward content and the couple of arcs that deal with the Seer Networks.  You run into a lot of the "Awakened", who are referred to as either Ex Seers or people who failed the Seer program conditioning, and there is a good balance of Male/Female among them.   Entirely possible that sweet, loving Mother is simply intentionally breaking the Men and preventing them from ever being complete Seers deliberately.

Praetorian Vanessa DeVore calls Praetor Tillman a leech, and outright says she feeds on the psychic powers of others. She doesn't use the exact phrase, but it sounds to me like a psychic vampire.  Now, of course, DeVore could be WRONG... or she could just be trying to convince the player that Tillman is super-duper-uber-evil and you mustn't arrest DeVore to let Tillman take her power.... but I would find it very very plausible that DeVore only wants "daughters" as her seers and just ... consumes... the psychic powers of any male psionic turned over to her, leaving them an empty husk of flesh.

[MTeague]

39 minutes ago, krj12 said:

Those danged Carnies are so sexist,  you only see the occasional token bucket-head.   Something needs to be done about this. 😉

 

I don't know if the big dude carnies have enough confidence to rock the Master Illusionist's gown. 😄

[Redlynne]

1 hour ago, SurfD said:

Entirely possible that sweet, loving Mother is simply intentionally breaking the Men and preventing them from ever being complete Seers deliberately.

I'll see you your Devouring Earth and raise you one Devouring Praetor Tilman (with a maternity fetish) ...

[XaoGarrent]

14 hours ago, Blastit said:

The women all go for powersuit duty. Nobody knows why. It has baffled PPD statisticians for years now.

ＧＥＮＤＥＲ　ＤＩＭＯＲＰＨＩＳＭ　ＩＳ　ＲＥＡＬ

 

...It actually makes a lot of sense. I'd expect most of the women working in the Paragon PPD to either be using power suits or be trained as a psychic. Especially considering the absolute nonsense they're often up against.

 

What doesn't make a lot of sense is why there are no women Trolls! What, you think only men do performance enhancing drugs that turn you into a psychotic meathead? Pssshhh, what a bunch of misandrysts, those devs!

[Redlynne]

8 hours ago, XaoGarrent said:

What doesn't make a lot of sense is why there are no women Trolls!

Half of the Trolls ARE female ... they just don't LOOK female(-ish) anymore ...

[Sakura Tenshi]

Okay, I'm going to cut through this thread an just give my thoughts because I used to think I was so clever declaring any faction which lacked females as 'sexist' back in 2010 too. The answer is that every single damn model takes time and money to develop and effectively doubles the workload of making a faction. The Live devs even asked the playerbase "well do you mind smaller factions with less diverse powers if it means equal gender ratios" and people decided they didn't want another KoA or Croatoa mobs where there were only one type of enemy per-tier.

 

Now it probably got a bit easier as time went on when the Developers started to make some enemies operate more on player character models and costumes and copy and paste powers they needed, but that's if the look works for such things. PPD Hardsuits and so forth are really elaborate and weird pieces if you try the dev version of icon, and they only made a male version of it because a female or huge frame would have eaten up a lot of development time.

 

 

Edit: after checking a bit more of the thread and experimenting in the costume editor (and looking up the models on Paragon Wiki) I do realize it's easily possible, in theory, to make a PPD Awakened or Psicop as all their powers and 90% of the costume pieces do exist for players (especially now) and one of the pieces females lack is easily substituted with a monocolored CoL belt. That said, there's two things unique to the PPD Awakened and Psi Cops:

1. is Awakened have a unique glove pattern and Psicops similarly have unique sleeves, both of which are bands which presumeably are meant to be rank insignia.

2. and this is only true for the higher ranking awakened and an interesting limitation: neither men nor women can actually wear the epaulet shoulder details with the tights upper body. (and specially in the case of the psicops, most curiously only the Lieutenants: you can't have the PPD badge insignia on your hat

 

Included is my go at making a female awakened, using minion coloration for better color clarity as the higher ranks are really drab by comparison.

Edited May 14, 2020 by Sakura Tenshi