I will admit that I'm not as concerned about it as others, but then I've always had a "tomboy"-ish attitude to things my entire life.
The attitudes that have been in game can easily be summed up by certain armour types - I have chosen this one to illustrate the differences:
Same gear, but startlingly different as to the gender of the character wearing it.
Mostly, the gear styles and the attitudes date back to a time of when female gamers were a rare thing, and of course everyone knows there are no girls on the internet.
Attitudes have since changed and there a lot of women playing games these days.
The current debate has been kicked off by a statement from Chris Metzen at Blizzcon - a statement I fear he may have come to regret, but I believe was made in jest, a spur of the moment comment related to the questions being levelled at them.
"That honeymoon is over, it's more of a boy's trip."
Personally, with the information released so far regarding Warlords of Draenor, it didn't bother me in the slightest that all the Warlords are male. I don't necessarily need to see strong female NPCs in the game to feel included. However, I appreciate that others are feeling left out, and worried about the example this is setting to the new generation of players they are trying to shepherd through the vast universe of Warcraft we like to call home.
As I tweeted yesterday:
Now obviously, I know we could do with more female role models in game. Attitudes do change and hopefully as we hear more about WoD we will see what is coming. I can partially understand the Warlords being male as an expansion is set in the past, yet I wouldn't be too upset with what we know so far. Mostly, because we don't know a lot yet and we could be pleasantly surprised.
The other argument circulating at the moment is the amount of people upset that there will be no flying in WoD until patch 6.1. The amount of QQ has been phenomenal with people saying they are done and leaving the game.
This is something that I just don't understand. With the exception of Cataclysm (because the new areas were mixed in with current content so it would have been weird), every new expansion doesn't have flying until you reach a certain level, or until a certain point. I enjoy exploring a new area, and I feel that flying around it you miss a lot of things that you would find by just travelling along the ground.
We can't fly until we reach level 90 in Mists and I can definitely say it hasn't impeded my gameplay at all. Now I'm not saying that I would like flying taken out completely (like some people seem to suggest) but I have no issue with not being able to fly until I reach a certain level!
Last night, I attended the Friday Fun Run with a few people from Twitter on an alliance character - solo healing ICC25 at level 86 is an interesting thing to do!
Plus Rinike stayed alive at the Lich King! (Haxx0r :-p)
Much fun was had by all!
Character wise, my Shaman is progressing through the Legendary quest line and is currently working on getting her 3000 Valor - yes, I must be mad to be doing this again! Shammy healing is a lot of fun though!
I have stopped going to normal 10 man raids on my hunter - I don't enjoy raid leading (red: am not very good at it!) and the team is sorting out which days people can actually attend. I'm still going to flex runs however and got the heirloom strength two hander last week!
