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Poll: Do girls have a higher affinity to healing than guys?
Neverdyne
Member Posts: 167
It certainly seems like it. From my own personal experience, I've known more female healers than male. Just in my last guild we had four girls playing as healers on our raid, and only one guy. So what do you think? Are girls more inclined to the healer's role than guys are?
Comments
I would guess they probably do, but not by a huge margin.
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.
I'm a guy and a healer player.
I have no clue. Especially since its rare I find out peoples real gender in the first place.
I voted no. I do play a healer a lot, but I also play classes just to murder people in PvP.
I think ideas like this come from a combination of ingrained stereotypes based on preconceptions about what each gender should do, and by both young girls and boys getting things into their heads about their gender roles through what society tells them their gender roles are supposed to be. So no, it isn't a naturally affinity, but it could be a cultural one.
I would be interested to see statistics on the matter, but with so many guys pretending to be girls and so many girls pretending to be guys, it might be hard to get a fair poll.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
WTF? No subscription fee?
Girls have a lower affinity towards many things that it takes to be a great MMORPG healer. More specifically, their affinity towards hand eye coordination and logical decision making is extremely low and those two things are the most important part of playing a healing class in an MMORPG.
So no.
<Runs away with arms flapping in air>
I don't know if they have a higher affinity for it, but from my own experiences they seem much less prone to blowing a gasket over idiots going out of range and they don't seem to get easily ego-bruised if someone slights their prowess as a healer. This is from a decade or so of PvP, btw, as I am rarely in Vent/TS/RW/BC/etc for PvE so I often don't know who or what the healer is in those groups.
Are they more prone to being healers? No clue.
Are they better at it? In my experience, they can handle the stress of it better.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Girls actually tend to be more emotionally reactive, not less. This gives the average male player an advantage over the average women.
Have no clue why a particular women might not say anything after the group wipes because of a line of sight issue, but it's less likely that they are emotionally keeping their cool and more likely they are reacting like a lot of guys and trying to avoid responsibility.
Basically Yes because girls in general have a natural disposition to want to nurture. This gravitates most girls into wanting to be a healer type class, but are easily influenced by male egos and can often times play melee type classes to try and compete or one up in showing they can handle with the guys. Most girls were drawn to the heal class but like I said the ones who felt like they were influenced or had to prove themselves would go towards the melee type of class. This had been talked about many times before, mostly on WOW forums.
Anecdotal evidence and non-scientific sampling = not generalizable
I'm shocked - bezado believes Pamela Anderson is a good girl.
(This is about his sig)
Its funny to read about this prejudices but unless somebody has hard numbers, I dont buy them.
Around here, I heal... my GF tanks :-)
Murder people? Yikes, dont think I ever heard that before.
Back on topic. I would guess yes as it is more passive playstyle. If you draw pararell to real life, there are more female nurses but then again there are equally amount of male doctors so, a tough one really.
I personally am a guy and I like to play hybrid healers that also do DPS/CC etc. Pure healers are not for me, way too passive.
My gaming blog
haha, expect some major flaming for this one.
My gaming blog
Should have made a poll with four options:
Male: prefer Healers
Male: prefer other
Female: prefer Healers
Female: prefer other
Then we'd get some actual numbers instead of just guesswork.
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
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I believe the question was do female gamers tend to gravitate toward healing classes, not necessarily excel at them. Some of the responses to this thread I thought were pretty sexist in that regard. If you are unconvinced regarding the gaming prowess of our female counterparts perhaps this may help.
"The Frag Dolls are a team of professional female gamers recruited by Ubisoft to promote their video games and represent the presence of women in the game industry. These gamer girls play and promote games at industry and game community events, compete in tournaments, and participate daily in online gamer geek activities. Started in 2004 by an open call for gamer girls with competitive gaming skills, the Frag Dolls immediately rocketed to the spotlight after winning the Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow tournament in a shut-out at their debut tournament appearance."
A shut-out... and did I mention no... they are not uggo's. Check the site.
http://www.fragdolls.com/index.php/gamer-girls
Now in a more purely psychological sense females 'tend' to lean more toward nurturing fields rather than destructive. This is of course not all encompasing but more an overall tendency. Males tend to gravitate toward aggressive, spotlight, competitive positions stemming from their need to let other males know of their prowess and alpha status. I recall one of the first things my wife said when she was introduced to MMO gaming. Upon receiving a quest to cull numbers of sick animals in a neighboring forest her first inclination was to ask, why can't we just heal them? It is that instinct to protect and develop rather than hunt and conquer that causes a lot of women to lean toward classes such as healers.
I don't think so.
There is a certain type of player that becomes good at healing, the kind that can keep the rest of the gang monitored while playing, but I havn't noticed that ladies should be more prone to that.
Guys who play female avatars seems to take healers often however. I think it is something psychological, they make a male tank and a female healer as alt. But it is more based on how guys think ladies are, not on any facts.
Most women and men for that matter play DPS.
Uhm, I would argue that in RL males would, for sure, be better tanks (knights in plate require strength) and females better healers. Last one is questionable as healers are usually a magic class which does not exist in RL. Closest I can think of is a combat medic, not sure what the gender disparity is for those but as males heavily outnumber females in any combat team, it would be next to impossible to make any correct calculations on gender disparity.
My gaming blog
Nice troll bait. What the heck does my sig have to do with this?
The early years of mmorpg gaming, most if not nearly 95% of healers were girls. I remember back to EQ1 my raid guild, all the healers were girls except a couple who played a shaman which was understandable. As time went on more and more girls started to play online games and had then really started to compete with males. Not saying girls never started out not playing any melee type class but most have started off as a healer back then. This was the same experience in DAOC early on when most girls in the guild were healer classes.
Of course all this means nothing if we aren't comparing apples to apples here. In that the apples here are the pure heal class or heal specialization. We all know healers can go damage type, using alternate specializations or skill sets in mmorpg's they can make a healer class go damage and little healing. So we have to compare pure heal types here. Otherwise the basis of this whole argument is flawed.
So basically the answer is Yes, but this could all be different by now with all the variables set. If you strictly take this question and asked it from 1999-2005 I would bet it to conclusively be Yes. So I am still saying yes just based off of girls traits, being more nurturing and sensitive and the whole wanting to help keep people safe and caring for them.
The variable I mostly consider to change all this though would be are these girls new to gaming in general or new to MMORPG's. That question could change things because girls over time would likely change anyway, either to be more part of the majority of male type classes which are melee or to simply compete on a girl vs male mentality.
I said yes, cause typically when we raided, there was a few girls on our raids, in most cases they were healers, the odd DPS and very few ever tanked. This is what i experienced anyways in several game, and a few different guilds/
So, if I play a healer, it's because I have an inborn desire to take care of others, unless I want to prove to men I'm strong because I'm "easily influenced by male egos?"
Is it just me, or does this sound really chauvinist? Somebody please tell me it isn't juts me.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
WTF? No subscription fee?
Combat medics would be mostly male. Most countries do not allow females into active combat roles. Only various Euro countries, Canada, New Zealand and Israel do. The US and UK allow females in artillery roles.
In addition to that even if females were allowed to serve in active combat roles everywhere a large percentage of them would probably not pass the requires physical tests nor have the interest in joining the military.
It's probably best to leave RL comparisons out of this as warriors and soldiers are, on average, almost always male.
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
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I don't know. I don't usually get to know if I am playing with a guy or a girl as I don't ask. All of my in-game friends are guys so can't really say.
Can you guys stop with the whole nurturing thing. Nurture? Really? This word is disgusting....
Plus would be nice if people stopped with the sexist remarks about girls capabilities etc. Only girls opinions would matter here as otherwise people are just throwing random assumptions based on the 5 girls they've met ingame.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
All I know is that,
Players who have a higher affinity to healing are more likely to roll a female character.
As for real gender, take a guess, saw to quote somewhere before
"MMORPG = Many Men Online Role Playing Girl xD"
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW?
As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
I'm a guy and love playing healing class, so this is just my opinion based on observation. Btw, my gf loves DFO and she plays the fighter and i play the priest. I've noticed that there is a small group of women players uniting and talking about their favorite games on youtube. Mainly WoW. A few of them seem to love their priests but they do have tank or dps alts. Ratio of women playing healers to men? No idea. Maybe 2:1.
Didn't you get the memo?
this is female:
this is male:
end of story.
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
''/\/\'''''/\/\''''''/\/\
( o.o) ( o.o) ( o.o)
(")("),,(")("),(")(")
Holy Trinity Tanks, or anything like them, don't exist in real life anymore than magic does. Anything with a lot of armor has a lot of killing power.
Anyhow, this whole thread, as someone mentioned, is troll bait. Studies generally show that the differences between men and women are pretty much always trumphed by the differences between individuals (e.g. whatever gender differences there are make up a small component of what makes one person different from another). This thread is like a rorsach test...it says a lot more about the people answering it than about the topic.