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All Vabbians are heterosexual now?


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FWIW, I was able to get 3 same sex wallflowers today when I did the heart (and one guy they courted was bi!). I did have to run around looking a bit though, and it did feel like less than previously.

For whoever was looking for more m/m representation, weren't there males in Joko's harem? And I believe the djinn/human pairing in one of the living story maps was a gay couple. But you're right--the representation isn't front and center like it is with Caithe/Faolain and Marjorie/Kas.

(I will not endorse any Canach/Faren pairing!! Canach obv has the best rapport with Rytlock.)

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Thought this community is full of cool players, then u see post like this and suddenly the ugliness of humanity surface up, this is the reason Anet should start looking into this more, introduce more diversity messages to the game and educate people, maybe it will help the game’s future

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@"Danikat.8537" said:I just did the heart again, spoke to 8 nobles and every single one wanted an opposite sex partner. I don't remember how many homosexual couples there were when I've done it previously, but I know it was enough to draw my attention. If you pay attention to the random NPCs homosexual couples are not unusual in Tyria, but several of them together surprised me.

If it's random - with a 50/50 chance for a straight or gay couple - then getting the same result 8 times in a row seems highly unlikely (I'm very tired so I'm not going to try and work it out exactly). If it's weighted to make straight couples more likely then 8 is too small of a sample.

If it's 50/50 then the probability of getting the same result n times in a row is 1/2^n, so for 8 that's 1/256, which is about 0.4%. That's low enough for most statisticians, in most circumstances, to infer that the chance of getting a same-sex pairing is lower than 50%. And unlike the OP, your sample doesn't suffer from bias.

Edit: I did the heart on a second character (not realising Funerary Incense from each vendor is limited to 1 per day per account, not per character) and 2 out of 6 nobles were looking for a same-sex partner.

Again, assuming that it's 50/50, the probability for your whole sample (i.e. getting 2 same-sex pairings out of 14) is about 0.56% - a bit higher than before since you got some "successes", but still pretty low. The calculation is a bit fiddlier for this one, but Wolfram Alpha will do it for you!

EDIT: Whoops, the relevant calculation here is actually the probability of getting 2 or fewer same-sex pairings, not exactly 2; that's about 0.65%. (Working here.)

If you want to actually estimate the probability that it gives a same-sex pairing, you'll need a lot more data and some more sophisticated methods. I think it's really interesting that it's not 50/50. When I first did the heart, I just assumed that it paired each noble with another randomly (and uniformly) chosen other noble, since that seemed like it would be the easiest way of doing it (and also I got about a 50/50 split that time) - but it appears that they actually programmed it to have different proportions of same-sex and different-sex pairings.

@Ashantara.8731 said:

@"coso.9173" said:so it shouldn't matter, but it clearly matters to you because you're complaining about it.what's next? people complaining about PoC characters being needlessly celebrated in PoF and LS4? pff

They (people of color) are there, as they should be (!). And so should gay and lesbian characters and other minorities as well. We are all people, so we all deserve to be represented. Because that's the normality of life, so why should games be any different?

I agree with you about representation, but there's another important purpose that the presence of homosexual characters serves: I particularly like this heart because it very clearly communicates a notable feature of Tyrian (or at least Vabbian) culture. Homosexuality is so unquestioningly accepted in Vabbi that these nobles are comfortable telling an armed stranger from another culture, who may even be a different species, that they are gay/lesbian. That's pretty significant from a worldbuilding point of view.

That would be as stupid as saying, "Yo, I'm a misogynist, so I don't care to have women featured as player characters in my game." It's not okay to ignore the diversity of people, not in the real world and not in Tyria.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who say that kind of thing - although they probably don't usually admit so openly to being misogynists.

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@Aza.2105 said:

@Aza.2105 said:Why is it each time something gay comes up that it must be on the stage with a spot light and saying look at me!! Its a video game, a fantasy one at that. How about we get some midget representation, some albino people representation, some representation for those who are born with six fingers instead of five. Why are you looking for representation of yourself in a video game? Why do you need a game to verify how you feel about yourself in a game? I'm a black guy and I never looked for Anet to create characters that "represents" me in a video game. Absurd!

just because it's not important to you, doesn't mean it's important to others.
is just a link to how much it can make a difference.

I'm a pale skin black guy, literally a shade or so darker than a white person. I don't see any representation of me any where in games or movies. The cast in black panther does not "represent" me. In fact, the black person often present in games do not represent me since I look nothing like that. But you don't see me complaining, it would mean that I'm looking for externally for self verification instead of internally.

I'm a white guy myself but my race/gender etc does not define me in any way, What I am is irrelevant, Who I am is what defines me.The views, opinions, beliefs etc that do define me as a person have rarely if ever been represented in a video game, and i've been gaming for almost 3 decades of my life.I have never held a grudge about that, never felt like I needed to make a big deal out of it and make demands to company to represent me and my feelings.. to do so would make me incredibly uncomfortable in all honesty, I'd hate that kind of attention.

I believe Anet has done a great job representing a wide variety of people in GW2 and they've managed to do it at a very realisitc and reasonable level imo without getting to that "shove it in everyone's face" point that some other games some could argue have gotten to.I'd really hate to see Gw2's community torn apart over any political controversy, despite the mixed community of diverse beliefs and opinions I think we've done a pretty great job at keeping the game civil for the most part.

I'd really hate to lose that.. Gw2 imo stands as one of the few united fronts and an increasingly divided world.. and all because despite all our differences, We all still love this game.

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  • ArenaNet Staff

I'm closing this thread momentarily so that we can clean it. Let me be very clear: there's a lot of off-topic posts on this thread that are derailing the thread but also being disrespectful of other players. The Guild Wars 2 forums are a place for every Guild Wars 2 player, irrespective of their gender identity or sexual orientation, and talking about these aspects when it comes to our game is fine, as long as you are respectful to the ArenaNet studio and other players, including those with a gender identity or sexual orientation different from yours.

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  • ArenaNet Staff

Re-opening this discussion, with 3 comments:

  1. This topic is about an in-game event, please stay on topic.
  2. We've removed a lot of posts, and issued warnings and bans whenever appropriate, but we've also left some comments that are a reflection about the difficulties of talking about issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. This content in Guild Wars 2 includes a variety of NPCs. We expect everyone on the forums to respect other players and that respect needs to be mutual, but please do not use this thread to talk about the topics of gender identity and sexual orientation in the most general sense.
  3. From now on, any off-topic will be deleted and bans issued if there's a sign of disrespect to others.
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@Hoover.6394 said:Thought this community is full of cool players, then u see post like this and suddenly the ugliness of humanity surface up, this is the reason Anet should start looking into this more, introduce more diversity messages to the game and educate people, maybe it will help the game’s future

That is the great irony here. The game's story is about diversity, with five distinctly different races coming together to stand against a greater threat. Even when the Pact was formed, the three orders were eyeing each other warily but ultimately set aside their differences to work together for the good of all. To my mind, at least, that's always been the game's message and it is an excellent one.

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Update: Another day, another 7 NPCs matched up and 1 more gay (or specifically lesbian) couple. So my total is now up to 21 couples and 3 homosexual. I'm still not sure of the exact probabilities, but it looks like heterosexual couples are more common, so it's not completely random, but homosexual relationships are definitely still in there.

(At this point I'm more surprised that everyone is always matched up with someone who is already interested in them, but I guess that's one of the things the Analyser does.)

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Looking at actual statistics and not personal groups or beliefs, upwards of 11% of people are homosexual, and this is on the high end most percentages are actually lower. So why exactly should it be 50/50 split? That's over representation of an actual social group not true representation at all. If you are a member of any group, and you surround yourself with people of the same group, you will always overestimate group size because you're surrounded by it all the time. The reality is that no way near 50% of people are homosexual compared to heterosexual. So 50/50 representation is actually against true representation entirely.

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@"Danikat.8537" said:Update: Another day, another 7 NPCs matched up and 1 more gay (or specifically lesbian) couple. So my total is now up to 21 couples and 3 homosexual. I'm still not sure of the exact probabilities, but it looks like heterosexual couples are more common, so it's not completely random, but homosexual relationships are definitely still in there.

Hey, thanks for the update. :)

(At this point I'm more surprised that everyone is always matched up with someone who is already interested in them

But, isn't it like this in real life as well? (scratches head) ;)


P.S. No one was asking for an "over-representation". Also, LGBTQ people don't exclusively hang out with other LGBTQs. Just thought I should put that out there to correct the misrepresentation posted earlier. Thank you for your time.

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I don't know where I can even talk about this so I'm trying my luck here. Maybe I've been crude in my quoted reply but the philosophy still stands: Things such as homosexuality and other differences are not to be brandished as a weapon to undermine people who aren't. First because it is not the ultimate goal of the original movement, second because it is pretty much reversed homophobia which is also an insidious evil, just concealed by the views of being played the victim.

I'm pretty much on the verge on dropping a couple of tears here because I feel powerless in debating this properly with people freely calling me uneducated comparing me to human droppings because I'm not like them, it sounds familiar somehow? Well... Add the threat of a ban on top of that should I point that out. I'll toss it and have whatever happens to me happen. I've always been taught to respect all of you, but now I realize I'm even insecure in talking about it in fear of being labelled with a very nasty name.

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@kabourophobia.7354 said:

@Stephane Lo Presti.7258 said:Re-opening this discussion, with 3 comments:
  1. This topic is about an in-game event, please stay on topic.
  2. We've removed a lot of posts, and issued warnings and bans whenever appropriate, but we've also left some comments that are a reflection about the difficulties of talking about issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. This content in Guild Wars 2 includes a variety of NPCs. We expect everyone on the forums to respect other players and that respect needs to be mutual, but please do not use this thread to talk about the topics of gender identity and sexual orientation in the most general sense.
  3. From now on
    , any off-topic will be deleted and bans issued if there's a sign of disrespect to others.

What is the topic?

The topic is originally concerns about a part of a meetic style heart having been changed. It's been proven afterwards that it hasn't been, so technically, the thread is solved.

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@"Delta Dawn.4970" said:I know this is a minor detail, but recently I've been on a map completion spree and have been doing the Vabbi hearts on a bunch of characters. I remember that in the past, using the affinity analyzer at the "Be the life of the party" heart in Seborhin had an equal chance of prompting npcs to state they were looking for a same- or different-gender partner, but the last three times I've done it this month I noticed that none of the npcs asked for same-gender partners. I know it's just a silly detail in a random heart, but I was wondering what the reason for this change was - as a Gay myself it was just kinda nice to have those interactions not be heteronormative, and I'm sad to see it changed for seemingly no reason.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Be_the_life_of_the_party

“Palawa Joko's Amusement Authority demands that our citizens possibly find love and definitely procreate. Your efforts in entertaining have resulted in an uptick in potential population, helping supply rise to meet demand. Well done, and praise Joko!”

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@RoseofGilead.8907 said:

@sephiroth.4217 said:She is old enough to play but not old enough to understand what sex is yet let alone sexuality choices and lifestyles.

Some things in life like this, she doesnt need to know until shes ready or at the right age.

if you show a 6 year old that they can kiss and suck willies, guess what they go and try with another 6 year old? not saying mine is 6 either but thats the repercussion of exposing this content to children. it's an adults topic or a topic for mature ages.

This also means the games classification is wrong in my country and needs to be updated.

Guild Wars 2 - MFantasy violence, gambling and alcohol themes, online interactivity

absolutely nothing there about sexual content which would up the games classification rating to MA and may need to be reported actually.

Displays of one's chosen sexuality (ie. a woman and man holding hands or a man and man holding hands) is not the same thing as sexual content. There is pretty much zero sexual content in GW2, outside of a couple of bawdy jokes. The existence of homosexual relationships or heterosexual relationships in the game is not sexual content. And when I said your child has been exposed to sexuality choices, I simply mean that she has already been around people in heterosexual relationships (and probably people in homosexual relationships, as well).

We don't make out or have sex in front of our child and my friend and his boyfriend have the same respect.

it is sexual content, doesn't have to be a porno to have sexual content.

And there isn't a single instance of making out, sex, fondling, or anything like that in the entire game. I'm pretty sure the closest thing to sexual content I've ever seen in GW2 is Marjory and Kasmeer having one quick kiss, and then a White Mantle mesmer creating an illusion of a half-naked Lord Faren. Neither of those things would count as sexual content with any rating board.

a game was banned in my country because a car shook while 2 people were in it... They could have been dancing to the music.

Another game was banned because you took "drugs" to refill your health.

another was banned because of not displaying the correct classification.

mortal kombat was too violent and got banned too.

The list goes on, my country has a loooong history of this.

Now I dont want to get into an arguement about it because there's nothing to argue really, the classification might need updating (ill leave it to them after I send it off later tonight) and I personally dont like singling out single communities in real life in an attempt to make them feel welcomed elsewhere or accepted. Thats just me and why I don't personally like this political stuff in fantasy video games.

this is in regards to classification.https://edge.alluremedia.com.au/m/k/2018/10/2018-10-08_121727.jpg

it explains that even innuendo, anything implied and even clothing would fall under sexual content.

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@MrForz.1953 said:

@Stephane Lo Presti.7258 said:Re-opening this discussion, with 3 comments:
  1. This topic is about an in-game event, please stay on topic.
  2. We've removed a lot of posts, and issued warnings and bans whenever appropriate, but we've also left some comments that are a reflection about the difficulties of talking about issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. This content in Guild Wars 2 includes a variety of NPCs. We expect everyone on the forums to respect other players and that respect needs to be mutual, but please do not use this thread to talk about the topics of gender identity and sexual orientation in the most general sense.
  3. From now on
    , any off-topic will be deleted and bans issued if there's a sign of disrespect to others.

What is the topic?

The topic is originally concerns about a part of a meetic style heart having been changed. It's been proven afterwards that it hasn't been, so technically, the thread is solved.

Unless we get an answer what the original percentage was...if there was one to begin with or the script was just completely random...then it's not really solved. The simple solution would be for someone from ArenaNet to either confirm the parameters where changed or confirm that no code has been changed and the OP is just on an unlucky streak.

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@Danikat.8537 said:Update: Another day, another 7 NPCs matched up and 1 more gay (or specifically lesbian) couple. So my total is now up to 21 couples and 3 homosexual. I'm still not sure of the exact probabilities, but it looks like heterosexual couples are more common, so it's not completely random, but homosexual relationships are definitely still in there.Actually things have been roughly like that for me since the early days of PoF. I remember noticing one or two same-sex couples even in my first play-throughs of the heart way back when, but never more in the course of one character/heart. I still suspect that it's just random, with the off chance that a fix someplace else might have influenced the random number generation in unexpected ways.

I also see no reason for anyone at ANet to go through their source control logs to figure out if any of the basic code involved in the heart (most likely some system-wide library rather than the specific heart itself) has been changed to influence this. Depending how their source library is built (and I suspect it's fairly expansive at this time in the game's life) that could be considerable time investment for no benefit at all. We know matches of all sexual orientations still happen, that should be all the answer we need.

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I'm personally gay, it's whatever. But I really don't feel the need for any special representation in a game I've been a player of for essentially 10 years now...

My point was is that this type of topic usually just causes some civil unrest and it isn't really worth the negative exposure it causes, much like the guy talking about banning his daughter from playing it and oddly enough, reporting it to his community board to be reviewed? (Honestly this sounds like a personal problem of his and a threat to dissuade Anet from anything in the future, and ideally I feel those comments should be removed.)

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@Rasimir.6239 said:

@"Opopanax.1803" said:I would like to see a heterosexual relationship in the gw2 story. All of the prominent ones are lesbian.

Can you give some examples? Because the only prominent one i can think of is that of Majory and Cass. All the other major ones i can think of are logan and the queen (i would consider them in some sort of romantic relationsship although not an healty one) and i can't think of any other major romantic relationship in the game.The ones that I can think of right now are mostly off screen so to speak. The most prominent is probably the former relationship of Caithe and Faolin (same sex, but already history at the time the game starts), but there's also Braham and Ottilia, Zojja and Snaff (possibly very one-sided, although the novel isn't exactly clear there), Taimi and Blish. Then you have Ellen Kiel flirting with Zalambur in the PoF epilogue as well as some human married couples (Minister Caudecus, Minister Wi).

Come to think of it, relationships don't seem to be much in focus at all where the non-human races are concerned, but I suspect even the ones that are there mostly go un-remembered since the non-human members of DE and DW don't have any ongoing romances, and the others are mostly just "normal background noise".

There's also Ceera and Tonn if you pick the appropriate personal story path, but I guess you'd count that as "off screen" since you never see them together. Also, Erran and Emara in the Deadhouse event, and Ralena and Vassar in Ascalonian Catacombs. And if you count GW1, there was Mhenlo and Cynn (to my mind, a much more prominent relationship than that of Marjory and Kasmeer), and Gwen and Keiran.

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@Tommo Chocolate.5870 said:

@"Opopanax.1803" said:I would like to see a heterosexual relationship in the gw2 story. All of the prominent ones are lesbian.

Can you give some examples? Because the only prominent one i can think of is that of Majory and Cass. All the other major ones i can think of are logan and the queen (i would consider them in some sort of romantic relationsship although not an healty one) and i can't think of any other major romantic relationship in the game.The ones that I can think of right now are mostly off screen so to speak. The most prominent is probably the former relationship of Caithe and Faolin (same sex, but already history at the time the game starts), but there's also Braham and Ottilia, Zojja and Snaff (possibly very one-sided, although the novel isn't exactly clear there), Taimi and Blish. Then you have Ellen Kiel flirting with Zalambur in the PoF epilogue as well as some human married couples (Minister Caudecus, Minister Wi).

Come to think of it, relationships don't seem to be much in focus at all where the non-human races are concerned, but I suspect even the ones that are there mostly go un-remembered since the non-human members of DE and DW don't have any ongoing romances, and the others are mostly just "normal background noise".

There's also Ceera and Tonn if you pick the appropriate personal story path, but I guess you'd count that as "off screen" since you never see them together. Also, Erran and Emara in the Deadhouse event, and Ralena and Vassar in Ascalonian Catacombs. And if you count GW1, there was Mhenlo and Cynn (to my mind, a much more prominent relationship than that of Marjory and Kasmeer), and Gwen and Keiran.

So in conclussion their are way more straight couple then gay ones?As i see it it seems we get a fair representation. ( But i don't really know what the real life statistics so i'm not 100 percent sure)

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My wild guess would be that the same sex conversation options were only a bug since I didn't notice anything similar in the game or PoF somewhere else - other than Kasmeer and Marjory of course - (although I have to admit I couldn't care less about story and NPC interactions and stuff so I'd have missed it with like 100% certainty) and some random fix to something else fixed an "issue" with spawning the correct model. Like it now spawns the originally intended male model if the NPC is looking for a woman or the other way around.

Honestly.. You can never be sure about something not being bugged. Just remember the change to thief's heartseeker where the leap range got decreased when you angled the camera down. This has been a known and widely used mechanism when playing d/p thief (it was actually thought of as being an actual feature) yet Anet figured that they had to fix this bug after like.. 7 years of persisting.

Or maybe even since you said "but the last three times I've done it this month I noticed that none of the npcs asked for same-gender partners", maybe there aren't ALWAYS same gender options (why would they all be gay, it's at least as unlikely as nobody being gay) and it just happened that you simply got 3 hetero only options in a row. Unless Anet specifically gives a statement about the intended behaviour or changes to the implementation, or we have A LOT more data points we shouldn't just assume Anet had put in work to remove same-sex interactions.Like I said, it could also be just a random change to something unrelated which caused the previously intended behaviour to bug out, or it was previously bugged and now an unrelated fix also fixed this issue. Really creepy side effects can occur in software. We simply don't know.

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@"sevenDEADLY.5281" said:Looking at actual statistics and not personal groups or beliefs, upwards of 11% of people are homosexual, and this is on the high end most percentages are actually lower. So why exactly should it be 50/50 split? That's over representation of an actual social group not true representation at all. If you are a member of any group, and you surround yourself with people of the same group, you will always overestimate group size because you're surrounded by it all the time. The reality is that no way near 50% of people are homosexual compared to heterosexual. So 50/50 representation is actually against true representation entirely.

I don't know about anyone else but I assumed it would be 50/50 just because that would be easier to program. There seem to be roughly equal numbers of men and women present, and I think it would be easier to set up the dialogue as a 'fill in the blank' format "I'm looking for a who " with 'man' and 'woman' as the options for the first blank and all the variations like "makes me laugh" or "challenges me intellectually" for the second one and then the computer would drop build a response from the options.

Setting it up to actually have an accurate percentage of gay couples would involve a lot more programming and more steps for the computer to go through, which for heart quest flavour text which (as this topic shows) many people don't read at all seems a lot of unnecessary effort. I'm happy to see Anet will go for that level of detail, I just didn't expect it.

@sephiroth.4217 said:It would be nice if the classification on this game was updated in my country to contain sexual content because I wasn't aware of this until now.

That's not actually something Anet has any control over, it's down to the ratings board. If you think the game has been mis-classifed you can contact them and ask that they review it in light of the additional information. Maybe link to the Wiki as a quick reference for the content you're concerned about?

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@Danikat.8537 said:I don't know about anyone else but I assumed it would be 50/50 just because that would be easier to program. There seem to be roughly equal numbers of men and women present, and ...

I come to this below, but first:

@Danikat.8537 said:...I think it would be easier to set up the dialogue as a 'fill in the blank' format "I'm looking for a who " with 'man' and 'woman' as the options for the first blank and all the variations like "makes me laugh" or "challenges me intellectually" for the second one and then the computer would drop build a response from the options.

This is most probably how it is done. But before the text is displayed, the pair is chosen, and that is probably what you meant.

What you most probably meant is that when implementing this heart it would have been simpliest to put all NPCs to the same list, and then pick the match randomly. Assuming equal number of males and females, that would lead to 50/50 ratio between same and opposite sex matches. But without doing anything else, that would also mean that sometimes the love interest is the NPC her/himself, and even that it would be hilarious (the lonely NPC realizes that the best match is her/himself), I am pretty sure that this case is prevented to happen, and thus you can't go that simple.

Quickly thinking the easiest solution would have two lists, one for males and one for females, and for each NPC you pick the match from the opposite sex list. This would automatically prevent that the match is the NPC itself, but it would lead to 100% hetero matches, which would be bit boring. Because of that, would it be me making this heart, I would definitely go for bit more interesting couplings by creating temporary lists where the match is picked up. I wouldn't be surprised if there is NPC-specific differences in the ratios, that is, some NPCs have higher tendency to opposite sex matches than others. I am pretty sure I would not make any NPC having 100% chances for same or opposite sex matches, because it would be bit boring.

@Danikat.8537 said:Setting it up to actually have an accurate percentage of gay couples would involve a lot more programming and more steps for the computer to go through, which for heart quest flavour text which (as this topic shows) many people don't read at all seems a lot of unnecessary effort. I'm happy to see Anet will go for that level of detail, I just didn't expect it.

Like said, I am pretty sure that because of things I explained, implementing different ratios for same and opposite sex couplings(*) has not required any big efforts, because most probably you couldn't use the simplest possible approach, and because anyways in the game you can put some effort to the quests players are taking. It would not make much sense to me to try to go "cheaply" with content, especially when it would not require much.

EDIT: (*) Or between any two NPCs. It would be interesting to study, if there are two NPCs that have unlikely high chance to be matched, and if this is symmetric or not, that is, for NPC A you get higher chances to match it to NPC B, but in the opposite case it is rare :)

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