That's absolutely been my experience. Females are often given things for cheaper or free. They are often promoted to officer positions. They are always given raid slots. They just tend to have a cozier relationship with Leadership than your average males do.

I remember at one point they started giving the girls in my guild officer permissions for the hell of it and we had a huge blowout/restructuring.

That's right...my first toon ever was a male human paladin. I learned the ropes then the guild I was in slowly split up and people stopped playing so I went to a different server.

I created a female night elf priest and my experience was so much different. I would heal instances and if we wiped I didn't get as much flak as I did on my pally. My first mount ever on the new server, this guy just gave me the gold to buy it. I didn't do anything for him, no sexual favors or flirting. I just told him I didn't have enough to buy my mount because we were in a group together killing things. I'm just so awesome at being a shadow priest that I'm guaranteed a raid slot based off of my skill alone. So from that day on...I only make female toons, I have one or two token male ones but they are both my bank toons.

Finally caved and bought Red Dead for 35 bucks instead of waiting to borrow it.

It's fuckin' sweet so far. not that I was expecting anything less from Rockstar.

That's really interesting about female/ make toons in WoW. I guess there's a lot of lonely guys on there who get excited when they can help/ please a female character. So far I've only made a female character and I've been treated pretty well by most of the population on my server, sometimes guys can be a little derogatory but you just kinda expect that and it doesn't really bother me. Once someone in my guild was looking for a group for an instance and I said I'd like to come but he declined me because I am a girl and he thought I'd be a crap player. But it's not something that really bothers me and I recognise that whatever gender you are there are going to be smartasses and *******s on the game.

Although, one advantage of being a female character in the game is coming across opposite faction male characters who don't kill/ attack you. I've come across so many Horde who are higher levels than me or who could easily get an honorable kill by killing me (I'm not very good at PvP...) But because I'm female they'll just wave or try to communicate via "/" and then just be on their way. Pretty handy. Ha.

But so far I've never been given gold or sold anything cheaper than what it usually is or anything... I wouldn't want to be given handouts, I'd rather earn my achievements myself. It sucks when you know other players are going easy on you, I'd rather it be a challenge.

The whole not killing you thing isn't because you are a female. it's just something that happens....if you /wave with a horde or /dance with them regardless of being a male or female they won't kill you. It also depends on the person and mood of the horde that you came across. Sometimes they have pent up aggression and want to attack, other times they just don't care and will leave you alone. Me personally though I always kill lowbies that I see but I only do it once, I don't chill there and camp the hell out of them.

Wow, I must just be really aggressive, I have a go at most horde I see, ha! I don't corpse camp either, that's just evil.

I played WoW for about a week before.

I remember being a level 8 orc or something, and making my way into the other faction's cities. I died quite a bit, but I finally made it. I remember riding a boat with a bunch of kids from the other faction (I can't recall what it was called) and I just danced the whole time. No one killed me, until I got into a big city.

probably gonna play Heatseeker later in the evening - not as good as Ace Combat but then again, what is?

not really, it's pretty standard for the internet. most people call it White Knight Syndrome. there is ALWAYS some lonely desperate guy out there just hoping for a chance to show some fair maiden just how honorable and chivalrous he is at which point she'll see how nice he really is and maybe let him touch her boobs while they live happily ever after. he's a 'nice' guy after all... right?

it's exactly as sad as it reads.



as for the studies about male to female gamer ratios you really REALLY need to establish what defines a 'game' in those situations. a lot of time they factor in stuff like Farmville or other very casual games targeted as a diversion from the primary reason for interaction (iPhone games / Facebook crap etc.) i mean really, Farmville has something like 30 million daily users, that's the entire population of Canada, is it REALLY that great of a game?

Just to make it clear, those numbers on the 60/40% ratio males to female gamers came from this demography pdf.

http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2008.pdf

It's not really a study, just a presentation of simple numbers. There's nothing in there on how the numbers were acquired or what defines a game or a gamer, but at least it looks like they've based it on quite a lot of data.