I’ve been wondering this for a while and when I noticed that eyewear is mysteriously exempt from the apparently pointless division of the sexes for attire it made this distinction seem even more arbitrary so I’m assuming there’s some hidden or technical reason I’m not aware of.
Most items have a male and female counterpart anyways, but this division means that it’s twice as hard to find a cosmetic you’re looking for since there’s only a roughly 50% chance your character will be able to wear any item. When you get cosmetic rewards from promo codes or from Project Discovery you get two items, one for each gender. I know I can just pass off those items to an alt, and one of the characters on my account is a man specifically just so I can offload all my duplicate cosmetics onto him, but it just seems a bit awkward.
I understand that a lot of people who play EVE are older and wealthier (ergo, more conservative) so in a more toxic environment I could see CCP catering to the sensibility that gender is extremely important and that everything must be perfectly divided, but if your demographic thinks there really needs to be “male” and “female” baseball caps I don’t know why you’d even bother to make female avatars in the first place.
Perhaps CCP has a cunning plan to increase the number of alts and extra characters, like you have, by making two types of every clothing. More alts is more fun!
Or perhaps CCP wishes to address the gender divide by making all the clothing in EVE exactly equal in number.
Or perhaps it’s to help for ingame fight events like the StreamFleet event on the launcher now, Girls versus Boys! It would be hard to tell players apart without the gender specific clothing.
Without getting into the debate over what people identify as…
I agree, it would have made inventory and such easier if they had left most items universal.
However, the point is mostly moot. Prior to Captain’s Quarters (CQ), we were nothing more than a driver’s license photo on our character sheet. Because the true “characters” of the game are the ships we fly.
Then CCP picked up the rights to a World of Darkness MMO. And they decided to use CQ as a test bed for physical mechanics. Things like wearing clothing, walking around environments, interacting with furniture, etc. So they gave us that little studio apartment, with the promise of more “eventually”.
And then they gave up on WoD, and also gave up on CQ. It sat around for a long while in case anyone wanted to go in there. But nothing else came of it, and they eventually turned it off entirely. Now the only reason to buy outfits is to customize your driver’s license photo again.
Wow you’re totally right, you’ve got me. I’m totally convinced that I’m wrong now. Thank you for showing me just how ignorant and uninformed I am, it’s insightful and informed responses like yours that make the EVE forums such a welcoming place for positive and earnest dialogue which discourages sarcasm and conflict.
While I personally would love to have all cosmetic items be gender-neutral, and can’t see how it would be a difficult thing to implement, in case it wasn’t clear the real motivation for my post here is more about the huge number of cosmetics that do work on both male and female avatars, but which for some reason have been separated into two distinct items.
There are male base models and female base models. Each item needs to be modelled to fit each base model. Thus there is two versions of each item shared by both types of base model.
There is no point to pretend the different models are just one.
Wrong, various characters are created and customized differently by players, some are thin and other characters are fat yet the Apparel items are created to fit all. The NES isn’t like a Clothing store with various sizes of the same pair of pants available.
As @DeMichael_Crimson said, EVE’s models are among the most malleable of any I’ve seen, especially those with a rather large library of cosmetic items, and all of the clothing I’ve tried has no problem adapting to what are probably thousands of variations of waists, torsos, arms, legs, etc. If women and men were locked into fixed waist and torso sizes that would be one thing, and while the developers have limited the body-sculpting features to maintain at least somewhat of a distinction between the two models, the flexibility already allowed is quite another thing.
The face is also the most malleable feature and yet eyewear, which sits on the face, is gender-independent.
I’m just asking why the distinction has been made on so many items that have both male and female counterparts. Now, I would certainly love to just have every item be available to everyone no matter what their avatar’s sex is, but I’m not really expecting that to happen anytime soon and it’s not really the focus of my question here, since I understand that there are a few items that are only available to one gender, such as dresses.
But in my experience the vast majority of cosmetics are available to both genders, just for some reason separated into male and female versions, which just seems arbitrary because the existence of gender-neutral eyewear and the ability of all clothing to form-fit to a wide range of bodies proves that the character creation engine is more than capable of handling gender-neutral items. And it is rather inconvenient when these items have been split up and it is therefore harder to find the one you’re looking for or share it with others since there is a chance you won’t be able to find the version that fits your avatar.
Huh…I was about to say, “Fine, make them all gender neutral, if a player wants to put a skirt on a male avatar, fine by me.” Honestly, I just don’t care. If it makes you happy, feel better, whatever…I’m good with it.
So it is more of a convenience thing then. You want your baseball cap or whatever and one version of it vs. two so you don’t have to go rummaging through a pile o’ stuff? Well…Okay, I suppose.
Of course, there are these things call containers and you can dump stuff in them so you can more easily find what you are looking for. Just a helpful suggestion…unless you already thought of it, then forget I mentioned it.
How about changing the character creator at the beginning.
Instead of choosing male or female, make the model neutral and ad a gender slider as a first choice after the race decision and then let everybody decide how female or male they feel.
And non binary people could leave the slider at neutral. If they want to.
My slider would be about 75% male btw. Whatever that means.
