Just seems odd that there's no Light Side points for flirting as a Chiss [regardless of how successful it is]... then again it seemed odd to get Light Side points for going to bed with a loose woman in a bar to begin with.

... I have a theory: this may just be because my second playthrough is as a Chiss, where my first was as a human! Can any non-human IA confirm Samara is un-seducable for them, and/or can any of you human IA's confirm that Samara still grants you the extra Light Side points and a romantic encounter? I'm all for racist NPCs that prefer or dislike other races, it just seems odd that it cuts off at the part where I'd get Light Side points. Are Light/Dark side points restricted by race, if so that seems a little ... unfair?

I remember in Beta when I played through the "High Society" IA Class Mission that choosing [Flirt] 3-4 times in a row when speaking to Samara Mindak in the Kaas City Cantina netted you 50 Light Side points and a romantic sequence. Now, when I get to the third [Flirt] option she immediately becomes agitated and it just veers off into the Neutral choices end of the conversation. It's not a "bug" because when you trigger the 3rd [Flirt] response ("I'm not interested in your father. Right now I'm only interested in you") I get a (new?) specific response from her: "No... no I don't think you are. It's him you're interested in, isn't it? Huh. He's with Lord Grathan these days." Unless there's some kind of "I'm not Light/Dark Side enough to [Flirt]" thing going on (previously I played through Dark Side, but now I'm playing through Neutral), that means Bioware sneakily changed this quest. Why would they remove something like this... and why not mention it in the patchnotes?

I agree... Instead it's "do we do something only 20% of our audience wants" or "do we do something only 80% of our audience wants" or "do we do something universally appealing to both". Two of those will be very easy to get money allocated for within a project, one will be post-launch "wishlist". It's not that they don't CARE about that 20%, it's that they're prioritized lower because that's just how business works. Look at what happened to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the bronies. Just because it's not now My Little Pony: 4chan is Magic doesn't mean they do not value that demographic. They just know the show is supported by toy purchases, which will be largely their target demo they originally aimed for. Likewise, just because there are not a lot of features that appeal to women, like the flirting, doesn't mean they do not value female customers, just that they had to design for the customer base that was going to be their main support first. The idea I'm getting at isn't that they're splitting the game down an 80/20% divide for features, it's that they're not going to work on features that they can't justify an appeal or necessity for 80% of their projected users. That's going to get shot down by production and studio management, regardless of the individual designer's desire to work on things for that 20%. That 20% is valued, but it's valued as a 20% weight not as an "equal" demographic. In a huge game like an MMO that typically means those things get relegated to post-launch, such as same-sex relationships. This is also why endgame is very slight when MMOs launch. Percentage-wise, most players will not be getting to end game content before they have time for the first real endgame content patch. So the end result is they don't get a lot of time / budget spent on developing it. They eventually DO, and it's not because designers are saying, "oh no I hate endgame, people who like endgame are dumb" ... it's just a reality of development that you design for the percentages you'll have at launch, then you expand. All I'm saying is don't cry sexism. This is business. If women take umbrage to the amount of features designed with them in mind at launch... they should buy more MMOs. [Not play them better... because apparently that EQII study showed women log in more hardcore PVE endgame hours played than men even though they make up considerably less of the total population. The women that do play are hardcore. There's just less of them in the total population.] And that's not sexism to design with that in mind.

You're really not able to speak about "the storyline" at this point unless you have 8 level 50's. You can talk about the NPCs your character has encountered, and if you'd get into specifics that might help. For example, the first female that male Imperial characters can "romance" is force choking / murdering a man in midair when you first met her. She also seemed to be aroused by my Inquisitor basically promising to institute a Balmorran genocide just to spite the Republic. Even after we did the "fade to black" she held her authority over my character and kept her attitude the entire time. Meanwhile that whole planet was full of inept, whining, men who either A) couldn't do their jobs they were assigned (which I mocked them for much to delight of Khem Val), or B) were trying to weasel out of duty or manipulate me into doing their work. Fast forward to Nar Shadaa and I end up offing some whiny ineffectual female Imperial Intelligence agent to gain favor with some gangsters. It's been brought up in other threads that a lot of the NPCs are just whiny, weak-willed, cowardly, "helpless" characters. This was intentionally designed so that your character feels even more powerful, and a hero for your side, but it can get somewhat grating. If you approach the NPCs with a "females are weak in this game, I just know it" attitude you're going to find proof everywhere. You could also do that for male characters, there's a lot them too. You'd also ignore the vast amount of most amazingly written, awesomely voiced, and butt-kicking female characters I've seen in any game in... ever (play a Female Trooper). This is a prime example of you looking for something to hate your female character for, because it's identical in rigging to the way the males do it. That 80/20% statistic is based on an a scientifically peer-reviewed and published survey that used over 7,000 players worth of registration data sponsored by a major University. It's also similar to another study's results (84/16%) a few years earlier from another major University. Statistics are not wrong because you don't agree with them. Unless you're the head researcher on a new study, you can't really just say something like "oh I don't believe that". That's now how science, math, and the facts we derive from the evaluation of these two things, work. Again, you're really pretty wrong on your facts. What you just said is true for overall gaming - more 25+ women play games than teenage boys, that is true. But this is due to mobile / casual gaming. If you evaluate just consoles, for example, the split among sexes is 72% male / 28% female (according to NPD 2009/2010). Women predominately inflate numbers when Facebook and mobile games are accounted for. You should also be careful of studies about "online" games, because you may interpret that as MMOs, when in reality, that's Facebook and browser games. A lot of what you're saying indicates you, or someone you talked to, was referencing the overall or mobile/casual gaming statistics for women, in which case older women were much more prevalent (for example this study by Flurry: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/57219/Mobile-Social-Gamers-The-New-Mass-Market-Powerhouse). The scientifically proven studies / market analyses (read: not one person's anecdotal experience) about MMORPGs finds an ~80/20% split which is reflective of the console split among sexes as well. Eva - Metal Gear Solid 3. Bloodrayne - Bloodrayne series. The Asari - Mass Effect. Catherine / Katherine - Catherine (one of the most mature "adult" games I've ever played: dealt with commitment and settling down etc). Bayonetta - Bayonetta (designed by a woman). I could go on but this post is long as hell already... Point is those characters exist in plentiful supply, but that would make a pretty darn ADULT game that would have a hard time selling on a Gamestop shelf if it was the core gameplay... I could not agree with you more on this. But a lot of this isn't shallow sexist writers - the majority of this industry does not have writers. The few that do aren't involving writers from the outset of the process either. It's something that could definitely be improved on. I ... have no idea what you're talking about. You realize you get more than just the one companion right? I assume you're talking about Vette, since you mentioned you play Sith, or maybe Mako but most of the companions in this game aren't "teenagers". Sith Warriors eventually get Malavai Quinn, a Captain in the Imperial Army, a very grown up man. Then they get Lieutenant Pierce, also a grown man. I dunno about Broondark or Khem Val, but they're both "grown" monsters. None of the Inquisitor companions are teenagers, the closest would be Ashara who's 20-something. The rest are older male characters like Talos and Andronikus (Xalek FTW). Bounty Hunter gets nothing BUT super awesome male characters after Mako - Gault, Skadge, Blizz (you get a friggin' JAWA with a rocket launcher longer than he is). I can go on, but I think you get my point... not a whole lot of "teenagers". I'm getting the impression you're basing your opinions on way too little of the storyline. Also that Thrall storyline was abysmally boring, a slap in the face to Alliance who had to stop saving the world and help the Horde leader get married, and also that character has been in games since 2003 - that's almost a DECADE - so of course he's got a lot of "growth". This game has been out for a month. What you've just described as "non-sexual" flirting is just a woman with no interest in a man preying on his sexual interest in her. Just because women are essentially lying about their level of interest in that sexual interaction doesn't make it non-sexual - it just makes it disingenuous. That's not the same thing. I can't laugh while I punch my friend's kitten and then wonder why they don't find that funny because I was laughing. Flirting with no intent of having sex with the man doesn't make flirting non-sexual. It just makes you kind of a manipulative person... The hormones that determine sexual desire are cyclically fluctuating in women due to their fertility cycles (that's why women cheat more during certain phases of menstruation). For men it's a constant "on-switch" that gets flicked on during puberty. That's all I was saying - I'm not in any way saying women do not want to have / pursue sexual activity or they're not "equal" etc etc. Just that men sexualize things way more and are typically going to be way more interested in flirting on a video game. Women also cycle hormones on a much larger scale and go through many shifts between puberty and menopause, hence the biological clock starting to tick and the girls who used to just want to "kiss all the boys" are now driven by their hormones to "oooh" at every baby they see. Men do this too, just more subtly and less often than women. Not sure... exactly ... why you brought it up... unless it's to make the point that by their late 20's to early 30's womens interest in sex (which is already much less frequent than a mans) takes a backseat, while men's stays constant. Which just reinforced what I was saying earlier that the statistical probability that a woman playing this game (which you attested as well are "older" moms) would want as many flirting options as the average male player eventually trends down to a point where it's not worth monetary investment. Thanks, I guess? lol whut? You realize that at no point do the male characters in this game go to the gym and have "guy talk" either, right? This game is built around a 3-choice dialogue tree - you can't really get into complex layered social manipulations and all of that in 3 choices... I don't think you realize what you're complaining about / for. Imagine that if the choices for female characters were 1) Be good, 2) Be bad, 3) Be disingenuously sexually interested in this guy to manipulate him. Then all the female characters would be "lying *****" and we'd have a whole other type of forum thread about it...

In no way is choosing a feature that appeals more towards 80% of an audience versus 20% and going with the 80% considered throwing away 20% of your audience, it's just not catering to it. That said, 80/20% is insanely slanted and something that is LAUGHABLY unbalanced when you compare it to other media. Women buy the majority of movie tickets in America (55% to 45%), but how different would our 2012 film lineup be if they knew only 20% of moviegoers would be from women? There certainly wouldn't be two Sex In the City movies and counting... How many hunky doctor shows would there be on primetime television if only 20% of the viewers were women? An 80/20% sex breakdown would DRASTICALLY change any media's content. I'd agree with this (not your numbers, which you clearly made up, but the basic premise), I'd have planned to make them way more close together in frequency. That being said, development cycles are bizarre and unnatural with how many weird and surreal things that can go wrong or come up. I can very easily see it being a matter of scheduling, voice actor contracts, Lucasarts regulations, market research / focus testing, or any number of things that prohibited / encouraged them to slant it more towards having the majority of flirt options on male characters. For example, if you notice there's a lot of "repeat" lines. My Inquisitor gives the exact same "murder and mayhem" line at least once per planet now. Clearly they'd like to have an originally recorded track for each option. But they either didn't have time or didn't have the budget for enough lines to fill out every storyline, so I understand if maybe they had planned on including some "extra" flirting options and literally ran out of time or money for the voice budget and had to use "filler" lines instead. It might also explain why the Sith Inquisitor I play hasn't flirted since the mid-20's and my Imperial Agent literally can't stop flirting. But then again, players have never been up in arms about how "loose" and "****ty" the male characters of a game are, so perhaps it's a desire not to step on a minefield by including too many flirt options and insinuating that female characters are apt to navigate across the galaxy on their backs. True, buuuuuuut... I don't want to paint too wide a swathe here, but the reasons a heterosexual man plays a female character, and the types of love interests he pursues with that female character, are not going to have a whole lot of overlap with a heterosexual female playing a female character. All I'm saying is that I doubt the men playing female characters are noticing when they can't flirt with male NPCs...

Let me tackle this piece by piece... Abhorrent logic there... Not sure what your job is, but nobody in game design "bothers" with any aspect of their budget. The budget is a limiting factor - you're treating it as though it's free money the developers got handed at the beginning of a project and they spent it wrong. It also doesn't, by necessity, have to go into what you're insinuating as a "male feature". If time crunches down to the point where money can only fund A or B, that money is always spent on features that are going to be utilized the most. If the predominate amount of your playerbase is male, then odds are the raw number of times an average player will access content designed with females in mind is lower, thus funds are harder to justify being allocated to that instead of something universal, like say bug fixing or additional animations or model customizations. This doesn't mean the designer doesn't want them, they just prioritize it lower and sometimes those things don't make the ship date. It's true that more females play games now that teenage boys, but this is largely due to casual and mobile gaming. MMORPG demographics are much more "old school" - 84% male / 16% female (Yee: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php) or 80% male / 20% female (http://dmitriwilliams.com/LFGpaperfinal.pdf). [There's an article on the BBC about 60/40% but it actually is misinterpreting the data in the article listed above by Dmitri Williams which clearly found an 80/20 divide - it also refers to "sex" as "gender", big indicator of it's scientific accuracy] You couldn't even make it two paragraphs without telling me what my own opinions of women were (without really knowing anything about me). You are also drastically overestimating the actual numbers of female MMO players. In my opinion, you want the designers to be sexist for the same reason you want me to be sexist - it makes you right and justifies a position you had BEFORE you played this game. But the statistics just aren't there to back up your most likely pre-determined opinion. Neither is an English language, as the word subset doesn't imply inferiority: 99% of players is a subset of 100% of the players. But again. Games are a business. If these numbers keep repeating themselves in market research then the game is going to be designed with that statistical slant in mind whether it was designed by a team of nothing but women or a team of sexist males or a team of relatively socially conscious and feminist-minded men. The fact that you just said that equivalent dialogue options is a "right" that Bioware's developers have infringed proves you're taking this a little too seriously. I'm a male gamer and I don't really have any problem with paying full price for Cooking Mama despite it's lack of male avatar or "Cooking Dad" feature. Nor do I call this sexism. It's a game, aimed at an audience, and I also like it. But the key is I like it for what it is instead of resent it for not being what I arbitrarily demand of it. And the answer is a lot. Voice acting is expensive. Especially since you realize that not all of this was dubbed in one giant 48 continuous segment. That's airfare, hotel fees, food / dinners out for the talent. They got Steve Blum and Jennifer Hale (Female Troopers FTW) for God's sake. That is EXPENSIVE. And calling them BACK to the studio, processing the audio, etc, would take a LOT of money compared to the cost of say, adding new model customizations or fixing bugs. My personal experience, and the personal experience of others who I work with, some of whom for Lucasarts... has proven this to be patently false. Play Dragon's Age II - a game in which they got flak in the forums for how easy it was to be homosexual and how forward some of your homosexual party members were (also look up the awesome response from their head writer). What you're describing sadly was the case with, say, Mass Effect 1, but Bioware has learned from their past experience, and has really shown a level of dedication in social progress that very few companies have. If anyone in this industry DESERVES the benefit of the doubt, it's Bioware and it's writers. The fact that they're spending your subscription fee to add in male/male homosexual characters tends to indicate that yes, there's a lot of content they want to include that isn't designed 100% for heterosexual males (who by the way can also enjoy playing homosexual male characters BTW). Typically, if you're looking for proof of something you already feel before you even see evidence of it, then no matter WHAT they do you're always going to find something wrong with it and be unhappy. Stop WANTING to them to be sexist / unfair and start being happy that they're doing so much more than any other MMO has in HISTORY - my female tank isn't in a metal bikini for the first time in ... ever? How are you not as stoked as I am about that?

What you're talking about isn't sexism. Game designers did not sit around and dismiss a full set of flirting for female characters because they do not value females as equals to men. Making game is about making money, and market appeal is one of the key factors - the wider your appeal the more money. No modern AAA-title game developer has narrowed their game's appeal purely out of spite for a subsection of customer because that would be out of spite of MONEY and games are a business. There's only three real reasons why there's a disparity and neither have anything to do with sexism: 1) Bioware didn't anticipate that players would want their female characters to be as flirty so they focused their time / budget on other aspects of the game instead. 2) Bioware did want to include as many female flirting options, but flat out ran out of time / budget - their voice over budget must have been well in the 7-digits based on what I've seen. Instead of writing and recording alternate NPC sequences for both sexes they decided to pick just a few sex/class combinations they thought would be the most popular and fit the best with their storylines. 3) LucasArts said no, and since they own the license, their hands were tied. I'm doubting it was 3. Since they've already promised to add in same-sex relationships post-launch, I'm guessing it's more like 2 - something they wanted but ran out of time / budget to accomplish before launch. If you want more flirty options, let them know and keep paying them your subscription fees. Based on Bioware's past customer base relationship, if enough people ask for it they'll gladly add it to the game when they can.

This is because ultimately... when you pick Sith Warrior you are stuck with a Sith Warrior. This is not a game that supports transition from one class to another - though I would wholly support that feature, it's probably so technically daunting and insane that it might just be impossible. As a Sith Warrior you did Dark things to get to where you are. You submit yourself to the Dark Side. You can relent, and meander, and start to see the error of your ways but all of your abilities, powers, attacks... those are all based on the Dark Side. The fact that you won that fight WAS because of the Dark Side - otherwise all your abilities would have been the Jedi Knight abilities, which are based on the Light Side. Understand, even though you want a compelling Light Side option in every dialogue, that's just not possible / probable. I think you should be ecstatic that it let you get as far as it did. In fact it's a testament to how many choices you were given that you only really hit one brick wall during a post-fight conversation towards the middle of your character's progression.

But there's no way to get the codex on a character that's not a level 1? From what I can tell, you can only trigger it before you do your first Sith Academy storyline quests - afterwards whatever trigger there was supposed to be is gone. I'd try and verify this but I have a 1.5 hour queue time...