Here's a suggestion: Walk the talk

[Redd (DayZ) 0]

The devs claim they want to take the game in the direction where the players have characters that are a unique, one-shot deals, i.e with the permadeath element characters exist only for as long as you can keep them alive. So why have stuff carry over from one life to another such as gender, reputation, name etc? Obviously name and rep have been around for a while so it's the move to make gender a 'once per cd-key' thing that's been the catalyst for this post. To be blunt, the way the devs have made this change belies either a lack of direction/foresight, or of commitment to the stated goal.

I expect people will be tempted to counter that "adding female characters does increase the uniqueness of characters", but then they'd be making the same mistake the devs have in conflating uniqueness of characters within the overall set of players with uniqueness of characters within the set of the player's characters. See the difference?

Most of the fun of role-playing is taking a break from the norm. If your norm is playing a bandit, you might want to play as a survivor next life. With skills implemented, you might choose to put your efforts into being a mechanic instead of a medic. This freedom of play, still within the one game, is what extends its value to the player. With a change in play style, you might decide a change of name/face/gender is a better fit for the character you had in mind. It seems foolish and counterproductive for the devs to go to the trouble of implementing gender for characters and then lock the choice down to the players account.

I was hoping the devs would unbind (the already god-awful) humanity scores from accounts and set them to individual characters at some point, demonstrating commitment to the goal of allowing players to role-play unique characters in a sandbox, and was willing to sit quietly by until that happened organically over the early life of the project. But when they make a move in the opposite direction, by tying more things down, I felt I should speak up and draw some attention to the disparity between words and action.

Tl;dr The devs are working to implement freedom of play for each of your characters with one hand, as choosing skins has now been implemented, and skills and such are coming down the road, and yet they're taking this freedom away with the other; choose your gender, one time only, for all characters. This, along with other things mentioned in the body of the post, seems to suggest they're approaching development from the mainstream mindset of permanence of character whilst simultaneously trumpeting the ephemerality of your character in a permadeath world. There's such a big disconnect here one can only hope it's an oversight.

[hazdude222 0]

Can't understand the whole locking gender type down thing either tbh, I'm sure it will come right though.