Gender bias in MPQ

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

So I was kind of stoked for Lazy Storm going into TaT, but after grinding hard for those covers, it felt a little anti-climactic after details of her fully maxed version were revealed. They soft-nerfed her so she went from weak health, but OP to make up for it, to strictly weak health, and only average otherwise. In principle, the reasoning behind this is that red would be too OP, but really they needed to either keep it as original (5ap at max red) or increase her relative health to make up for that, and make her more viable. They didn’t, and while I’m sure the devs didn’t intend it to be this way, it conforms to the pattern in MPQ of female characters who’re pretty easy to beat-up, making them ideal targets in PvP.

One of the things that screwed me in prologue was leveling MBW (she was the only one I had covers for at the time) without realizing that you needed damage tanks in this game, and that specifically only 2 of the female characters in this game (that you ever get covers for - iw doesn’t count) can soak any damage without getting instantly downed.

Looking at the other Lazy characters:
Thor went from top-tier 2* to top tier 3*
Daken went from bottom-mid tier 2* to top-mid tier 3*
Cap went from bottom-mid tier 2* to mid-top tier 3*
LStorm went from top tier 1* to mid-tier 3*

More generally:
Iron Man went from mid-tier 2* to mid-tier 3*
Mags went from mid-top tier 2* to top-tier 3*
Spiderman went from bottom tier 2* to top-mid tier 3* to bottom-mid 2*
Wolverine went from mid-tier 2* to top-tier 3*
Black Widow went from top tier 1*/2* to mid tier 3*

[Edited on account of She-Hulk release]
It’s kind of problematic IMO when there’s only ever a token presence of female characters in MPQ to begin with, and the few that there are get soft-nerf’ed when they’re converted to 3*.
1* - 3/7 women (43%). 2 useful, but low health, 1 completely useless
2* - 3/13 women (25%). 2 useful, but low-health, 1 decent health, but generally a second-class hero
3* - 4/22 women (18%). 3 mid-tier, but all low-mid health. 1 possibly mid-upper tier (I don’t know enough about how She-Hulk plays to make a definitive comment there)
4* - 1/3 women (33%). No real usable 4*'s at this point so irrelevant

So in summation, 11/45 of all characters are women (24.5%), and none of them can be seen as strictly-speaking badass (okay, we have a token “she-hulk” character with high health, but we still don’t have any damage dealers like Rogue, Storm - as she was presented in the tv show/comics, Phoenix / Dark Phoenix, etc..). Almost all the female characters are pushovers on D and have a target on their back for easy wins in PvP because they’re all stereo-typically weak (except maybe Psylocke who has decent health, but is by no stretch OP) and won’t generally mess you up like their male counterparts will. Yes, it is subtle and there’s far worse instances of gender bias out there, but is this really the message that Demiurge wants to be sending?

[For reference, the ratio of women to men globally is ~1:1 or ~50% of the total population]

2

so, what you are saying is that in MPQ women are weaker than men… and you have issue with this because its accurate when compared to real life?

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3

M. Storm is by far the best 1*, and despite not being so great for defense, OBW is probably the best 2*

4

I’m not sure I necessarily agree with that assessment and to be fair, if we’re going to compare it to real life, there should also be 21-22 female characters (~50%) instead of only 23% (less than a quarter). {Edit: updated OP with percentages to make point clearer]

5

They should add Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers)

6

I agree… not sure how much she ties into the Dark Reign comic storyline which could be a factor for or against this happening. Emma Frost is also likely an upcoming character given the storyline.

theHappyDance: I agree that there is bias (whether unintentional or not), but a few comments:
For announced characters, it is 11/44 when She-Hulk and Nick Fury are fully in the game. Taking only unique characters and not counting different versions and golds, the number is worse: 6/29 (7/31 when Jen and Nick are added).
She-Hulk is a more interesting character than Hulk, to me at least. I get the impression you are not familiar with her given what you said, but she is not merely a female version of the original Hulk.
As Spoit said, M. Storm and OBW are arguably the best characters for their rarities and I would not go so far as to say either one is a pushover on defense.

7

20-ish% isn’t really a token presence though. If there were say only 2-3%, sure, I would call that token presence. A full 5th of the characters though? That’s a minority, not a token.

I also think you’re reading far, far too much into this if you think this encourages aggression toward real women. Are you bored, rabble rousing or just looking for a cause to wave a flag on?

8

It feels a bit like cherry picking data-points to try and build a case that doesn’t exist here.

Let’s actually just address the characters in-game.

1*
With only 7 characters in this tier, it doesn’t seem like it’s worth creating generic sub-tiers, so let’s just give them a number ranking.
Black Widow - 4
Storm - 1
Yelena - 7
Turns out that we can call them exactly middle, top and bottom, in that order.

2* (12 characters, split into 3 tiers of 4)
Widow - top tier. The fact that she’s still viable long into the 3* transition makes a strong case for her being the best 2* character.
Storm - mid tier. I’d rather not worry with past performance or theoretical future performance (as that’s completely inconclusive). Storm sits in the upper limits of the middle 2* tier. Still a viable pick.
Moonstone - low tier. Not much to say. She’s let down by poorly designed powers.

3* (21 characters, split into 3 tiers of 7)
Widow - mid tier. Probably still the best targeted board disruption.
Psylocke - mid tier. Self sufficient, can be adapted to many teams.
Storm - mid tier (Suggested). It might be too early to call placement. Perhaps the once and future Queen of board disruption.

For funsies, I’d rate the top 7 best 3* characters (in alphabetical order) as Daken, Hood, Hulk, Magneto, Patch, Punisher, & Thor. She-Hulk would need to replace one of them to make it into the top of the 3* tier. IMO Hood, Mag, Punisher and Thor are safe, so she’s got a bit under 50% chance, so saying she’s mid tier would be a safe call.

4*
IW - no competition from Wolvie and Fury isn’t fully covered. Default best is still best.

So women are best in tier for 1,2 and 4* characters.
They are targeted because they represent significant threats - you deal with the threats first, and then worry about the rest later.

9

1* tier is more or less gender balanced, both by percentages and relative strength (although there still isn’t any strong, high-health woman in that list)
2* tier is slightly less so. True, one of the two strongest (OBW + Ares) in the tier is a woman, but female characters still clock in as only 25% of the characters in that tier, and Moonstone can’t really be seen as comparable to Thor / Ares / Wolverine. Also, Hood supplants her in the 3* tier.
3* tier is woefully lacking in anything bordering on balance. Even after they release Shehulk, it’ll still only be at 18%. And in your own words, none of the top 3*'s are women.

For funsies, I’d rate the top 7 best 3 characters (in alphabetical order) as Daken, Hood, Hulk, Magneto, Patch, Punisher, & Thor. She-Hulk would need to replace one of them to make it into the top of the 3 tier. IMO Hood, Mag, Punisher and Thor are safe, so she’s got a bit under 50% chance, so saying she’s mid tier would be a safe call.**

4* tier doesn’t really count, because the consensus is IW is more an annoyance than legitimate threat, and none of the 4*'s are particularly powerful. So saying she’s best in tier isn’t really saying anything.

Now to your comment about them being targeted for being significant threats. I’ll categorically disagree with this. Lets just think about which matches people play and which people skip, BW, Storm, Moonbeam, Yelena - I seriously doubt anyone skips these characters ever, unless they’re paired with a strong 3*. The only current female character(s) who might warrant skips are Psylocke (depending on who she’s paired with), and maybe IW (because it’ll be a long, annoying match if she’s high level, and 4* match damage has to be contended with, but overall she’s mediocre for her star rating, like the other 4*s).

Now think about the male characters, and which ones you’re likely to skip. If you’re honest, I think you’ll agree that 15 of them (71%) are at least somewhat intimidating. GSBW is hard not to down before she gets off any abilities since they’re so expensive, and 1*storm was highly dependent on low AP mistress of the elements for survivability. W/o that, she’s just another low-health female character that can be easily taken out before she deals any damage to you.

So yes, there are unarguably powerful female characters, but outside of Psylocke (and maybe IW - which doesn’t really count since you have to be playing for about a year before she gets usable), there aren’t really any that constitute a significant, consistent threat on D. It’s important to be clear on terminology here. For PvP, I’m going to call a significant threat a character that encourages you to skip them. The only attainable characters that serve that purpose (outside of Psylocke, depending on pairing - and again IW doesn’t count), are male. If a character has powerful abilities, but you can consistently down them first, and then take out the rest of their team, they aren’t a significant threat. A character is only a significant threat if they pose enough of a threat that they encourage you to skip them.

10

Strange thread but i’ll bite.

Firstly I want to make one thing VERY clear… NO-ONE is a SIGNIFICANT threat on defence unless you are fighting a team with higher levels than your own. Instead you have hero combinations that provide no threat, hero combinations which use up your time and hero combinations that are a slight threat.

Next, the reason OBW doesn’t get skipped is she is in pretty much EVERY 2* team. You get the occasional storm + MMN team and every sane person will tell you they are overjoyed to see that compared to OBW + anything.

As far as how powerful female characters are the most powerful 1* and 2* heroes are undeniably female (M.Storm and OBW) as seen by the fact they transition into the tier above. 3* female heroes are underwhelming but so are a bunch of the male ones. The 3* tier is significantly unbalanced and IMO it’s simple pot luck that no female one is the the OP bracket.

Do I look for female heroes to attack? Answer: No. I look for ppl worth lots of points which reinforces my point about no-one being a significant threat.

Why are there more male heroes/villains than female? I imagine it’s because there are more male ones to choose from (off the top of my head but couldn’t swear to it) but it’s definitely because the most popular/prominent Marvel heroes and villains are, in majority, male.

11

The story actually doesn’t really dictate much as to which characters that will be included. Sure there are some in which we expect like Sentry(released) and Iron Patriot but we missing a good number. Instead we got multiple variations of characters to begin with. Seriously, did we honestly need 5 character covers in the game with the exact same poses?

12

Storm having low health is how she’s portrayed in the comics – godlike abilities, but some random baddie can sneak up behind her and punch her out.

Black Widow has no superpowers so that might be why her health is lower. Hawkeye is also just some guy and his health is even lower.

There is a real trend, especially in Capcom fighting games, to give female video game characters lower health. I dislike it and I hope MPQ is careful with this.

13

With the exception of OBW + Hood + damage dealer, I really don’t see how you can consider OBW a serious threat. If you know how to play against her, she really is quite easy. Storm+MNM are actually slightly (though not hugely) trickier on account of needing to take her out with tile damage or else one-shot’ing her to avoid tempest.

I doubt many, if any people playing this game are going out of their way to target female characters, and I’m sure anyone who does tend to target them more does so because they have points they need for PvP and are easier matches, rather than because they’re female characters, and that’s sort of the point I was making. It’s structural, rather than an explicit choice people are making.

My percentages agree with you that they’re reasonably well represented in 1* and 2* land (maybe slightly less for 2*'s but not horrible), but 3*'s are considered the “power” category of heroes. I doubt it’s an explicit decision on the devs part to try and make female characters weak, and is more due to the statistics of them only releasing 14% female characters in the “elite” 3* category. I think if they released more female 3* characters to the point that they’re numerically in line with their male counterparts it might correct itself. But the fact remains that as it stands, they haven’t really put much effort into putting out an equal amount of female characters, and no strictly speaking strong female chars with a lot of health.

While your assertion that there are more male characters in the Marvel universe to choose from MAY be correct, I think there’s a sufficiently large pool that they could easily release them 1:1 if they really had a mind to. The fact that they don’t doesn’t mean that they hate women, but it does mean that gender balance is low on their priority list.

It’s also possible that they look at sales metrics and male characters are more popular so they release more of them. I really don’t know because that’s dependent on the overall player-base and spending habits, but if so that’s one of the reasons their short-term absolute profit-first design mentality is deeply flawed (on top of all the direct gameplay problems they’ve never fixed in order to get more money out of people). Does it break the game if they don’t release more female characters? No, but it should be one of the things that devs keep in mind when choosing new characters to release, as well as making sure they put out some female characters that are a bit less “delicate”.

14

I once let a Moonstone live because I figured everything else was a threat besides her. icon_e_sad.gif
She set me straight. OBW can get a lucky cascade and just wreck with AP steal. It’s pretty much game in 2* land if she gets a 4 AP steal off. Bad boards be damned. Storm, kill her first, always, even if you have to take the AOE. GSBW, she’s still trying to find her gun. Did I miss any females? I think that’s all we have.

Moonstone is the only one in which I’ve seen really make me wonder what I was doing when I get hit by her Photon Blast, and she usually can get off some damage if you don’t run a team with quick special tiles with her purple. Most fun games I’ve had in MPQ happened to have her on the team though.

15

The game’s storyline has vaguely referenced the Illuminati, and Magneto having altered memories, which both point to Frost.

As for the poses, art asset reuse was likely a big factor in picking Dark Reign to adapt for this game. Secret Invasion could have worked too.

16

I get what you’re trying to say. However, that the game encourages aggression towards women is - sorry to be so blunt - plain absurd, IMO. First, there are male characters with pretty low health (like Bullseye and The Hood, both with lower health than the females of their level). Second, this game does not encourage aggression against anyone. It’s just a game based on comic books (where women do quite a bit of fighting too). By the way, like some others have said already, there are some pretty popular female characters you see in lots of PvPs, like 2* Widow and both 1’ and 2* Storm.

If you want to see gender bias in anything, look at the outfits. Now this can be pretty close to sexist in comic books. I mean, I like a girl’s curves as much as any other (straight) guy, but the way they’re regularly overemphasized makes me roll my eyes.

17

Kind of seems like a lot of people are nitpicking that one sentence fragment and ignoring the rest of the post. Anyway, deleted that from the OP now so hopefully people can stay on topic. The fact remains that female characters in this game, by and large, are weaker than their male counterparts, and they’re woefully absent in the elite/ 3* range. This is a fact, and yes I get that it’s just a game, but of all the comic universes out there, Marvel has a really huge /vast range of characters to pick. It really shouldn’t be hard for them to put out characters 1:1 M/F instead of putting out 4 male chars to 1 female one. There’s no practical reason why they can’t, unless male characters actually generate greater revenue, but if that’s what their metrics say (I have no idea on this point), it’s because there’s only one (Psylocke) who has decent health and strong powers.

18

I am glad this is a discussion being had, and I agree that there should be more female characters at the 3* level and a wider variety of female characters in the game generally. Of the 10 covers of female characters 6 are versions of Storm and Black Widow. There is not going to a 1:1 ratio but only having 3 soon to be 4 at the 3* level is very under-representative. Generally there are more male characters in Marvel that are popular and have an active role in combat situations and looking at the characters that have gained popularity in the movies they are almost all male. But there could be much better effort put towards introducing some of the great female heroes and villains that do exist.

However, I disagree with the health argument. I acknowledge that the “because that is the way it is in the comics” argument can easily be an argument leading to limiting diversity, but in a game adapting characters from existing material, generally for fans of that material, it would be strange to significantly change the powers of those characters. The prominent female characters in the Marvel Universe do not include very many that it would make sense to give high enough health to make them must skip characters. Which in this case is not a problem because health is only a small part of what determines character strength in this game. As many people have noted defense in this game is a very limited in effectiveness, personally LT, Sentry, and Hulk are the only characters I really think are deterrents. Even if Captain Marvel or She-Hulk are introduced at Captain America or Black Panther levels of health without the right abilities they are going to be attacked as frequently as pretty much any other character, but, that doesn’t make them weak characters. Of the characters that are considered top tier most of them are offensive forces with low to medium health (Patch, Punisher, Magneto, Pre-Nerf Spidey). As many people mentioned 1* Storm and 2* Widow dominate their tiers and that shouldn’t be diminished just because they are on every team and get attacked frequently.

What female characters would you want to see?
For high health characters all I could come up with were Rogue, Captain Marvel, Gamora, and maybe Emma Frost depending on her build.
For low health characters: Spider-Woman, Jean Grey, Kitty Pryde, Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Maria Hill, Mystique

19

Squirrel Girl. That little sweetie has beaten some of the most powerful Marvel beings to date, including Doctor Doom, Thanos, Galactus (I think?) and Deadpool (who considers her to be one of the most dangerous superheroes to face).

20

Agree with bias in mpq.

In term of drawing art for men and women. Just look at daken and mohawk. Daken looks stylish, mohawk look like some kind of joke with that hair style.