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[Reelya]

So I just found out about the 3 month old “no girls allowed” BF5 controversy today.
Pop my head into some other game threads- seems like it’s everywhere.

Not gonna share an opinion, just finding the whole situation very WTF

From what I heard the main complaints were actually that the character customizations were cartoonish and unrealistic, and a big move away from the historical emphasis of the rest of the series

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2018/05/23/battlefield-5s-reveal-trailer-has-me-more-confused-than-hyped/#31f889d456f9

Also, is this an alternate history WWII? The British lady has a mechanical arm. Another soldier has a katana strapped to his back---but we're clearly in the European theater of the war, not Japan.

The tone here is all over the map. The trailer is big and bombastic and crazy. At one point a soldier tosses a grenade back the way it came and the 'player' shoots it in mid-flight, blowing up a low-flying enemy plane in the process. The characters are all outlandish looking. Lots of face paint. Colorful uniforms.

Half-robot ladies with facepaint in WWII. This is what almost everything I've read was upset about. The change in tone from a fairly realistic war simulation to something cartoonish and Fortnite-like. "Too much like Fortnite" was one of the main complaints. And it's not because people don't like Fortnite, it's because fans are worried the entire tone of the series is being changed. This got filtered down to "neckbeards don't want to play with girls".

Straight up: almost nobody gave a shit that there were female playable characters. Sure, you can fish around and find some comments about that, then misrepresent the entire backlash by singling out those comments and ignoring all the relevant criticisms, and that's what a lot of the media did, because it's an easier and lazier narrative, and Battlefield is made by EA, a huge company who spend 100s of millions per year of dollars advertising in those same media outlets.

Despite what the media that panders to the company that created the game wanted people to think, it was actually the robot arms, facepaint, cartoonish uniforms and outlandish hair colors that did it. People just wanted Battlefield to maintain a fairly serious war setting and not turn into a gimmicky cartoony thing.

[CABL]

I mean, they're already removing the more outlandish customization choices, so what's the point to continue the nontroversy?

Also, it wasn't a robot arm, it was prosthesis. They've existed even before the 20th century.

[Reelya]

I don't even know if anyone was continuing the controversy, it just came up as "no girls allowed" so I was providing a different perspective.

EDIT: And the fact that they did in fact remove many of those same cartoonish things kind of proves the point that the backlash was not in fact about the female characters.

[TamerVirus]

This got filtered down to "neckbeards don't want to play with girls".

Isn't something similar going on with Total War Rome 2 right now?
Seems like a lot of criticism is dismissed whole cloth nowadays by labeling it the work of bad faith actors. Racism/misogyny etc. 

[CABL]

This got filtered down to "neckbeards don't want to play with girls".

Isn't something similar going on with Total War Rome 2 right now?
Seems like a lot of criticism is dismissed whole cloth nowadays by labeling it the work of bad faith actors. Racism/misogyny etc.

It's currently being discussed in Total War thread on our forums.

[Reelya]

My mind boggles that such as thing can be a thing in a Total War game.

[CABL]

My mind boggles that such as thing can be a thing in a Total War game.

I mean, there are units like Screeching Women (women did accompany Germanic warriors, but didn't fight), Head Throwers (Completely ahistorical), and Burning Pigs (somewhat plausible, but the existence of them is debatable among actual historians) in Rome 1, so the franchise as a whole isn't really a replacement for history classes/books... Assuming you're talking about female generals.

[Reelya]

A quick google brought up a steam discussion in which some people are saying that after a patch for Rome 2, 50% of all faction leaders in a new game became female. Some people liked that as they claim it is alternate history, some said it's ahistorical and breaks immersion. Now, I don't own the game to verify this, but nobody in the discussion was claiming it wasn't true that the patch did this, they were only debating whether they liked the change or not.

I think a big part of it is that this was delivered via a patch rather than in the base game, and people were telling those who didn't like the changes either to not have the patch at all (unacceptable) or just "mod it back the way it was". "you can just mod it away if you don't like it" isn't a very good justification for forcing a change into everyone's game, since that works both ways. People who wanted the change could have used a mod to get it, by the same logic. Or, it could have been included as free DLC. A choice to support more progressivism and options in the game would have gone down a lot better, and by making an active choice to include the DLC people are making a statement. Trying to shoehorn ahistorical gender fairness into everyone's games, including those who play historical wargames because they like historical accuracy is in fact heavy-handed and patronizing.

It's a fine line obviously. The argument against it isn't that women cannot be leaders, it's that a game set in a historical time period should adhere to the norms of that time period even if they don't gel with modern norms. I for one would be upset if the latest Hearts of Iron game decided it was going to implement a 50/50 gender ratio for all generals and politicians, because Hearts of Iron is all about historical accuracy. Sure, highlight female political, military and scientific figures that actually existed and give the player the choice to promote them, even if they weren't promoted in real life. But turning the models of actual historical nations into feminist nations is just silly and unhistorical and immersion-breaking.

[Parsely]

Right. You can represent a historically misogynist society accurately without celebrating its norms. Really this shouldn't be a problem, couldn't there just be a leader gender ratio slider somewhere?

[CABL]

Well, I do own Rome 2, but I thought it was kinda 'eh' overall. Besides, it could be that men/women ratio is set at random, and some people might have gotten a perfect 50/50 because of RNGesus' mysterious ways.

A read I've found on Total War reddit regarding the ratios.

[Reelya]

These two quotes seem to sum up the issues:

So about the first point, female generals have a 10% spawn rate. 10% of your generals are not women, every time you recruit a general, you have a 10% chance of getting a female one.

So, 10% of new recruits are women, which seems low / reasonable. I would have put it a bit higher myself if I was designing a game, to give the player more choice to decide whether to recruit female characters. 1/10 means you need to cycle through too many to get a core of all-female leaders, which you might want to do sometimes.

However, a rebuttal in the first comment suggests that the current issue isn't related to the spawn rate at all:

The spawn percentages are completely irrelevant to the current issue. There's a reason why people are complaining now as opposed to when female generals first appeared.

The problem is that for eligible factions, everyone's wives and daughters are going into the general pool. This is why people are able to post screenshots of only female generals. Something that would be extremely unlikely if the spawn percentages were driving the issue.

If you think it's dumb to be doing shit like giving every general's wife an army of their own, your general pool is going to be progressively taken over by female relatives

So, eligible characters for leaders are near 50% female because all named characters children and spouses get added to their respective leadership pools, and 50% of them are girls for obvious reasons. And, if you don't want to arm up your general's wives and daughters, then they end up clogging up your general pool eventually. All of which isn't SJW or feminist, it's just a poorly thought out and buggy as hell system which gets in the way of playing the game.

EDIT: So, again, the core complaint turns out to be something else than the much-mentioned "neckbeards don't want female characters in the game" thing. Sure, some Nazis jumped on the bandwagon later, but there was a legitimate complaint about unintended consequences of the new patch in there, originally.

[CABL]

Well, I've really got nothing to add to conversation... But what if you marry off the daughters, or it might be that even married women can be generals?

[Reelya]

The guy did saves "wives" get added into the general pool. It seems like all they actually needed to fix this complaint was to say you can exclude people from the new general pool.

[Teneb]

The guy did saves "wives" get added into the general pool. It seems like all they actually needed to fix this complaint was to say you can exclude people from the new general pool.

Not necessarily. They only get added to the general pool if they become faction heir or leader OR have a specific trait.

It's actually really hard to get a large quantity of female generals unless you are playing as Kush (that has a 50% ratio). Also it's not a flat 10% for the rest, it varies from 0% (Romans) to 15% (Celts).

While there are quite a lot of people who are being dragged along on misinformation or a misguided sense of "historical accuricy", this whole thing was started with a heavily-manipulated screenshot produced by ArchWarhammer (a youtuber notorious for blaming everything on "SJW", "Political Correctness" and minorities in general) and pushed by The Daily Stormer (AN ACTUAL NAZI NEWS SITE).

[dragdeler]

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