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

Bug?

[computerman413]

Are we sure it's a bug, and not just the work of some sexist programmer?

Re:Bug?

[RetroRichie]

If there was a sexist programmer on the team, male party members would be receiving damage over time.

Female characters should be weaker

[MikeRT]

It's a well-established fact that women have much weaker upper bodies. Hollywood has done a great job of propogating the myth of the ass kicking woman who can take on a bunch of athletic men in combat, but the reality is that even if most athletic women went up against a normal, decently in shape man, they would get badly hurt in one-on-one fighting.

Re:Female characters should be weaker

[Chris Burke]

A friend of mine teaches women's self defense classes. He (my friend) taught his student's that they WILL lose if they try to fight an attacker unless they get the element of surprise in a strike to the balls, throat, or eyes.

Yes, that's very good advice for a self defense class, where the idea is to teach a woman how to defend herself from an attacker, and the attacker isn't going to wait until she's a 5th degree black belt before assaulting her. Most women taking the course aren't trying to become bad-ass warriors, they're trying to make it harder for some dude to rape them.

I mean really, for the vast majority of cases the best self defense advice is simply "kick em in the nuts and run like hell". When your goal isn't to win UFC, that's all you need, especially if you don't want to limit your students to those women who actually have the potential to be fighters.

It's simple physics, a 200lb man needs only swing his arm clothesline style to take out nearly any woman he would attack.

Unless you're assuming a 90lb waif trembling because she hasn't eaten in two days, that's pretty funny. If we're assuming a woman who is in shape, unless this ridiculous clothesline swing actually connects with a fist to the head, it's not going to do much.

I'm 5'11, 190lbs, and I've had girls I know who are all I AM WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR and take karate/self defense classes say they are just as strong as a man/can take one. Every single one ended on the ground with me mounting them quite effortlessly. All the karate and self defense shit you learn means shit when it's the equivalent of a mac truck running over a motorcycle.

Person Taking Karate Thinks They Are Bigger Badass Than They Really Are, I think would be the Onion headline for that amazing story.

If "all the karate and self defense" doesn't mean shit when some mere 190lb dude is coming at you, then you didn't learn shit, and that's probably a terrible class. Karate might be a bad choice, since it's a very direct style. Judo would be perfect, it's a style designed around using your opponent's momentum against them, and a "mac truck" has a lot of momentum. But really, just about every style deals with methods of redirecting an attacker who is larger and stronger. These girls you beat up on just didn't know crap about that, so they lost.

For an actually skilled woman, which I readily grant tends to be a rarer thing than for men, your 5'11" 190lb as ain't even close to a "mac truck". I have personally witnessed such a woman drop a 6'6" 250+ man who bench pressed 400lbs like he was a sack of potatoes. And he himself could do a little better than clothesline swings and mad bull charges.

It's fair to say that on average women have less strength and less mass, and therefore the physics wins out. That's what your friend's self defense class advice is based upon, and it is sound advice. But your general statement that a woman can't beat a man unless she's ridiculously strong, or the man is drunk, is silly and wrong.

Re:Female characters should be weaker

[Chris Burke]

Look, when you're talking about the "average" woman and the "average" man, of course the observation that the average woman isn't as strong as the average man is true. The "average" man could beat up the "average" woman, yeah, especially since the "average" woman has no training. Big surprise there.

But you can't apply the average to any particular example, and it's not nearly as automatically lopsided as you contend. You're claiming that unless the woman is extremely skilled, and the man has never so much as play-wrestled in their life, the woman loses. That's just wrong. The physics is not a powerful as you think, and sometimes works in the opposite direction. This notion that a simple clothesline is going to drop a woman who is in shape and not themselves inept is nonsense.

(if she's >140-150lbs, atleast from my experience with guys I know who weigh 130-140 and even they workout, it's simply too little mass to contend with a much larger opponent unless you know how to fight)

See, the whole point of discussion is people who know how to fight. When I was a 120lb wrestler I could beat 190lbers who also "knew how to fight", I was just better than them. They weren't inept, but their mass was simply not so great an advantage that it couldn't be overcome. Leverage works wonders, you know?

And as I just said, I saw an ~130 lb woman drop a 250lb man who knew how to fight. Yes, she had to know how to fight herself, but she wasn't the greatest fighter ever, I saw her get schooled by very skilled men closer to her size. In this case, though, the man had some serious physics working against them -- namely that big objects move more slowly.

As to 'the girls I beat up on' they asked me to spar with them every time

I was just saying that you kicked their butts, and that they sucked. I assumed this was a consensual sparring match, thus my mock Onion headline about them thinking they are tougher than they are? :P

They never learned how to deal with a larger attacker. It's not that it's impossible or even really that hard, it's that they didn't know what to do in that case but were nevertheless overconfident.

What I'm trying to say is, for the most part in a man vs woman situation, barring weapons and such, the woman loses almost every time unless she has top notch training (or a surprise disabling move to one of the only 3 weak spots that really count) and he is completely inept.

You keep saying there are only 3 weak spots that matter. Someone should introduce you to the knees and elbows. The best thing about them is that unlike the 3 you list, these aren't very well defended (by either innate reflex or intention) and are relatively large targets since you don't need to be precise. Not to mention that while even the worst kick to the nads is a temporary setback, kick the side of somebody's knee with the meager force required and they aren't going to be chasing you until they get out of their cast. But this is straying off topic (though it might be worth mentioning at a self defense class).

My point is, your extrapolation from the statistical averages and a few overconfident women that the woman loses unless she is top notch and the man is inept is simply wrong. A top-notch trained woman could be most men, especially those who think their size gives them an insurmountable advantage. However for a top-notch man vs a top-notch woman, then any difference in mass and strength could be telling, but even then not automatically. It's just not that simple.

And venturing back to the actual subject of the article and the OP, any female character in AoC can be assumed to have been trained in combat well enough that inherent gender differences should have no appreciable effect (and any other way of designing the game is silly).

Re:DPS

[bishiraver]

That's because the power curve of the game moved as the game matured, and settled at 60, then 70 or whatever. 80% of the characters are utilizing 20% of the level range, if even that.

The fix for it, of course, is to somehow keep the power curve a distributed bell curve with a majority of the people being average. There are many ways to fix this, but the problem is coming up with a solution that won't piss the ever loving hell out of everyone who plays the game. One way would be to make the "heritage" of the character important, where you gather stuff for your line of characters instead of for your single one.. but the flip side of that is each character you make can permanently die.

It's the big conundrum so many MMOs face as they age. And nobody has put something out there to fix it. Except maybe - maybe - Eve, where corporations are bigger than anything else in the game, and the game is about, well... looking at spreadsheets.

Shiney factor?

[Fozzyuw]

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.

Formally know as "the honeymoon period", this is just par for the course for all MMO's as well as human behavior for a lot of things (including marriage apparently, as the name suggests). AoC isn't really any different than any other MMO I've seen, including WoW, which suffered greatly from server crashes and lag issues in the first 2 weeks that prompted them to give time credit to all accounts. I think I have 8 days of "free" time to play beyond the "free" first month.

The only MMO I've played at launch that I recall having the least issues was LOTRO. However, they had plenty of server issues and quest bugs as well. Just a lot less than I've seen normally. WoW's problems stemmed mostly from unprecedented demand.

Re:Shiney factor?

[Ikar_rb]

Honestly, AoC had a *remarkably* smooth launch on the "server stability" end of things. One of the smoothest I've ever seen. There is a lot of things which remain unfinished, but then again there have been a TON of things enhanced in WoW since launch. My major complaints about AoC include: "Feats" i.e. wow talents descriptions are utterly useless, to the point that a person cannot make reasonable intelligent decisions about which ones to pick based on their descriptions. Not to mention there are numerous feats which simply don't work. Combat mechanics are very nearly a black box, again hampering decision making & optimizing effectiveness. Class balance is utterly broken- the "pure" tanks (guardians) do more damage than the "dps" tanks (conqueror) by nearly a 2:1 margin. Funcom chose to shorten the levelling grind, so it's a lot shorter to get to 80... but that also shortened their window to actually get an "endgame" together, so unless further development of an endgame shows up fast, a lot of folks will get to 80, and realize there's not much to do at 80. Those are pretty much the most egregarious problems I see. I'm putting AoC down and waiting 6 months to take another look, as it's clearly not ready yet.

Re:DPS

[Bloodoflethe]

Newcomers to WoW are increasingly finding that it's very hard to find people to run low-level instances with, and as a result, when they finally *do* catch up with everyone else at level 70, they don't have the instance-running skills they need to successfully contribute to end-game instance runs Frankly, that's BS. All these people need is some attention and guidance. That is, in other words a guild that actually cares about their development in the game. I personally trained some newbies (husband and wife) in instancing. The husband took to it pretty well and I taught him higher level tactics that over half of the raiding guilds never seem to achieve. His wife, more of an artist than a statistician and tactician, was also able to keep up and do well, in fact.
We picked up a few more of the same along the way and ended up with quite a motley crew of individuals that work together with not nearly as much raiding experience as most raiding guilds, but with a combined effectiveness far greater than most of them. Why? Because we communicate effectively.
A simple solution but so very overlooked. Quick example. Gear checking sides say that we were barely ready for Karazhan in WoW, but we felled the Curator on the second attempt.

Subscription question.

[antdude]

Does one require credit card to to play 30 days trial? I'd like to check out the game, but I don't want to give the company my paymeny information before my trial expires.

Re:DPS

[Chris Burke]

This is do to primarily to the inflation of money injected into the economy with daily quests. It's very easy to farm money for any level 70, and as such, they transfer that money to alts. Not wanting to spend endless hours leveling up trade skills (again), they just purchase the trade goods off the Auction House, and they're willing to spend 5g-10g for a stack of 20 wool cloth, to save them 20 mins farming it.

Likewise, some nice class stat green items are selling for several gold for levels in the teens. However, the main point is the same. This is a major disadvantage to new players. Players whom I've come to hand out 100g to just so they can buy some decent stuff.

The thing is, it's no harder for that low-level character to gather the trade items than it was before, so if they themselves are trying to craft things, it's the same as before.

But on the other hand, the trade goods that the low-level character gathers are now worth much more than they used to be. This means things whose costs are fixed like skill training and the level 40/60 mounts are now much easier to afford. I started a brand new character on a new server after the expansion hit, and that character was swimming in money by the time they hit level 60. Another new character started after the dailies hit was also swimming in money, even loaning some to my level 70 to afford their epic flying mount, and was also able to frequently buy upgrades.

So there are plusses and minuses. Mostly plusses, I think, if you know how to work the system. But for a new player who will probably want to try everything and not know the best ways to make money, yeah, it's probably tough.

Re:DPS

[Omestes]

For the optimal MMO experience, you want to get in while there are still plenty of new players coming in so you'll have people of the same level to quest, hunt and trade with, but after the major bugs have been worked out.

Amen, I started WoW about 2 weeks after launch, the early game was pretty fun, finding your market niche, playing the AH, exploring new instances with fellow newbs. I played my ally druid to 60, and promptly quit (school, and the fact that Raiding sucks) shortly after they opened Silithus up. I started playing again a couple weeks after BC came out, and rolled a new horde toon... It was much less fun, every item under 30 was massively overpriced thanks to twinks, but there was no market in ANY trade skill items, except high level stuff, and mid-level potions/enchants. Finding people to do most instances is impossible, unless there is a twink drop. That and the fact that all the 56-60 content is dead, which is a shame since some of the best instances are in that range (scholo and strat rocked, as did Onyxia/MC raids).

I quit about a year later, after leveling my shamie to 70, and getting a couple 60's. I didn't want to do the pigeonhole raid thing.

I miss it when there were very few cookie cutter builds, since people were still figuring out their classes, too.

I'm planning on trying WAR about a month after release, when the rush dies down, and some of the dire bugs get quashed. I might migrate back to WoW for a month or so after WotLK, just to see what they added, and join in some groups whose never actually run any 70+ instances. Being confused together leads to better grouping.

Re:DPS

[zlexiss]

what would it take to get people to (repeatedly) switch to a new character after they get to the highest level?

Aging? You start losing stats after the character gets too old. Been done in RPG's before.