Though I do not play MMO’s, I tend to notice a similar trend in online shooters. Many games and mods (Counter-Strike and the Source mod Insurgency immediately come to my mind) feature terrorists, insurgents, and other low-tech armies squaring off against the United States military or European special forces. If a server does not have team auto-balancing enabled, more often than not the ‘good guys’ will have the numbers advantage. This is especially true at the beginning of the game or mod’s life cycle when it is fist released.

I used to attribute this to the fact that less people wanted to play as the ‘bad guys’ and more as the ‘good guys’. But now I realize that maybe the game’s art design is to blame.

The ‘good’ 1st-world-country forces are always sporting camouflage, helmets, body armor, and other military-supremacy apparel accessories. On the other hand, the ‘bad’ 3rd-world insurgents tend to wear jeans, bandannas, and t-shirts. Heck, sometimes they even run around bare-chested.

I can certainly understand a new player’s attraction to the superior look of modern military technology.

In City of Heroes/Villains, I noticed that the characters I would stick with were always the ones that I gave the ‘Huge’ body type to. I think because their animations /looked/ so much more powerful than the standard male and female body types, even when that didn’t match up at all to their capabilities (e.g. Unending Sickness, who had no hitpoints at all, and did crappy damage)

I’m currently working on an app that scrapes the Realm War site to collect exact statistics, but in my 200 member guild, only 18% of us rolled High Elf. I can’t help but believe that it’s because every non-Shadow Warrior class is indistinguishable but for weapon until the mid-20′s or so.

In addition to looking the part, I think all players also want to look “unique.” I just don’t think that’s really that possible as a High Elf.