July 7, 2010 Comments (0) Views: 11815 Internet, Nerds, Videogames

Are all gay guys healers?

That’s a common stereotype among gamers in MMORPG’s. In MMORPG’s there are usually 5 basic archetypes:

The Warrior is up front, dealing damage and soaking up hits. These “tanks” need to keep “aggro” on them to distract incoming mobs of enemies from attacking the weaker people in the party.
The Thief/Assasin hits fast and often but mostly evades any big damage. These characters often pile on damage and increase loot.
The Mage casts spells from far away and hits for a lot of damage. These characters stay at the back and are usually the most damaging classes. They are physically frail though.
The Ranger/Archer hits from afar with arrows. These characters tend to hit fast but not as fast as Assasins/Thieves but they can soak up more hits. Sometimes, they can also switch to the frontlines as necessary.
The Priest heals whenever it’s needed, buffs everyone and resurrects any fallen comrades. They can vacillate between being frail to very hardy depending on the game.

So, basically out of the 5 archetypes, the healer is the party bitch. Granted, they are the most integral character in any party, but people tend to view them as passive. In general, I’m always a bit skeptical of any sort of stereotype. I’m especially skeptical of any that can be construed as negative so I decided to investigate.
First, I tried finding some stats on the most popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. So I looked around for the largest gay guild in WoW in order to get some perspective on the numbers.Taint is in the top 50 of all the guilds. Big sample size, awesome-ness. They have an open guild policy, even more awesome-ness since it almost guarantees that the ratios were not messed with so it was the perfect start to my study. These are the statistics for their guild roster (as of July 4, 2010) (courtesy of http://www.warcraftrealms.com):

To understand these numbers better, I acquired the statistics for the entire network to form a basis of comparison. Here are the statistics for the Horde faction worldwide (as of July 4, 2010):

Here’s what we can glean from this:

Interesting thing to note, that gay people had a large bias for the Blood Elf race when compared to the overall percentage worldwide. There’s also a slight bias towards Tauren. I believe that this is because Blood Elves is the prettiest/most human looking race and the Tauren is one of the most empathetic/kinder looking races (relatively at least compared to Orcs, Trolls and Undead). Does this mean gay people are more superficial than average or do we pick according to whom we can empathize better with? Perhaps another thing to follow up on at a later date.
Now to the meat of the analyses. The numbers show that gay people tend to prefer classes with magic. We have to take into account different specs but as you can see, the classes that have specs that can act as healers all had an increase in percentage. The largest increase was the Priest class and the second was the Mage class. The jobs with the largest drops were the classes which were predominantly melee dps and tanks. There is a certain margin of error we have to take into account so I decided to corroborate the statistics with another well known MMORPG, Final Fantasy XI.
Looking for statistics was significantly harder. There was no public way to get logs so I had to depend on looking at guilds personally. When I checked a gay FFXI guild (Children of Altana), their guild’s members’ primary classes was comprised of roughly:
Magic: 32 (43%)
Buffer/Healer: 16 (22%)
Melee: 24 (32%)
Thief: 2 (3%)
There are no specific long range characters like archers and such (there are but the guild didn’t have any. Plus the percentage of classes that are traditionally long range is too insignificant (1 job out of 20 jobs are traditional archers/rangers)). Also important to note, is that there’s some overlap between Magic and Healers because Red Mages can act as Healers but I put them into the Magic Class. Also, the statistics for FFXI was very, well, sketchy since there were a lot of gaps in data. Members of the Guild of Altana were not forced to put in the jobs of their characters so I could only count those who had actually filled in information. But even with all these factors, it still remains that 65% of the characters were magical characters while 35% were physical characters. It’s hard to gauge whether or not this is normal for FFXI but the large gap coincides with the WoW data.
I was still not satisfied with the results so I decided to have an impromptu poll among gay gamers. The poll results as of (July 7, 2010) are the following:

With numbers like these, I can conclude that there’s a definite correlation between being gay and picking a magic class. Gay people are more likely to be magic characters.
The question is why?
Are we really passive aggressive and like plinking from far away? If that’s the case, why wasn’t there a similar correlation between archers who are also long range characters (as evidenced by the WoW statistics and the gay gamer poll). Do we really just prefer magic because it’s sparkly?
Why are support characters predominant among gay people? I think we need to take a closer look at the corresponding attitudes of MMORPG players in order to conclude something and I’ll tackle that in the next article!
What do you guys think?
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