AoC Bug Penalizes Female Characters?

Massively is reporting that there may be an unintended (according to FunCom) bug in the new MMO Age of Conan that would cause female characters to do significantly less damage over time. It seems that as the initial "shiny factor" wears off for the new darling MMO, the bugs and complaints just continue to pile up resulting in a fair bit of buyer's remorse. "In the meantime, some ingenious players have provided fixes along the lines of the 'unsheath your weapon to fix your mount speed' trick. Poster Dnotice even provides evidence that variation in listed attack speed may be down to the gender of the first character you log in when starting AoC, and not the gender of the character you may be playing at the time. Curiouser and curiouser: although the listed speed can be altered by changing the first character's gender, the actual animation speed apparently can't."

Comments

Re:Female characters should be weaker

[Dr_Barnowl]

That's a statistic ; not a fact.

Statistically speaking, yes, women are not as strong as men ; but this is more to do with male and female culture differences than actual physical makeup.

On the tissue level, both sexes are built of the same bone and muscle materials. Even if you take into account the effects of higher androgen levels in men, there is no reason that a woman cannot achieve musculature equal to a man of similar height.

Women DO tend to be shorter than men, because their skeletal structure matures earlier, so statistically speaking, their mass will be less than a man. Again, this does not account for any particular individual.

As for your assertion that an athletic woman would be beaten by a "normal, decently in shape man", statistics state that "normal" does NOT mean "decently in shape" in most western nations.

I dated a Phys. Ed. teacher once ; she was an ex-member of a national swimming squad. While I was in my school rowing team and worked out regularly, she could probably have kicked my ass. Her upper body was most definitely not weak.

Strength is a minor part of combat ability anyway. As Firefly fans will know, it takes less than a pound of force with a sword to break skin. It's far more important that you choose a weapon appropriate to your build, and learn to wield it properly.

And most people will get badly hurt in one-on-one fighting, especially if their ability is reasonably matched to their opponent... on BOTH sides of the fight. It's only highly imbalanced fights where the "hero" has a level of ability far higher than the "henchmen" that the hero gets off scot-free while the henchmen eat dirt. Which is presumably just the sort of dichotomy that escapist media like RPGs are meant to represent.

Wrong fantasy series, huh?

[Valdrax]

Age of Conan? More like Age of Gor. Amirite?