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

Simple explanation

[greg1104]

Obviously this is because the female characters are off-balance due to their breasts shrinking.

Re:Simple explanation

[IBBoard]

I love the update quote about that:

Funcom has responded to the complaints ... The team is "working on a fix for this and your breasts should be back to normal soon."

Re:Simple explanation

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've seen, that is for very large values of "normal"

Re:Simple explanation

[Original Replica]

Breast resizing is used to balance the the FLGWTYRLLT* bonus so male and female characters level at the same rate.

*Free Loot from Guys Who Think You Really Look Like That

Re:Simple explanation

[ultramk]

Stuff like this is why it's a matter of time before AoC goes tits-up.

What? What did I say?

Re:Simple explanation

[Savior_on_a_Stick]

While I understand that your tongue was firmly in cheek, there may be some truth to this. The only mmorpg that I play currently is Two Moons, where to be an archer, one must also be female. I constantly get invitations to join guilds, trade, etc. Not for a moment do I attribute this to my gaming skills, which are meager at best. No, I'm not undervaluing what I personally bring to the table. I'm old and chit - so my reflexes are slow. I play from my laptop, which puts me at a display and reaction disadvantage. But my character has t&a. Exactly the same t&a as every other female archer, which makes it even funnier. It's just a continuation of the old irc warez channel trick of formulating a female personna so that peop0le would share freely. In most cases, I could garner op status within a week, unlike my male persona which had contributed to the channels for months or years. So....if there is a penalty to female characters - perhaps there should be. In 2Moons, there is an advantage to being an archer - ranged weapons with pushback rock at lower levels. But I digress.... The question isn't really whether there should be certain penalties against male or female genders, it's how those penalties play out in game play. If social interaction plays a significant part, then penalize the females on strength and the males on charisma (or whatever you want to call it.) I'm not even sure the playing field should be level anyway. I mean really - how many female barbarian warriors have ever existed - and could they ever go toe to toe with their male counterparts? Make deception and sexual manipulation part of the game play if you want it to mimic real life.

Hey now

[Renderer of Evil]

Some people pay good money to see bugs penalize female characters.

Other gender bonuses to offset?

[bornyesterday]

Has anyone checked to see if there is a gender bonus for female characters who have tailoring or cooking professions?

Re:Other gender bonuses to offset?

[berashith]

only while they are not wearing shoes

DPS

[spyrochaete]

I play the game and have heard the rumours but have not tested. However, damage is calculated as DPS (damage per second) in this game, so wouldn't a slow-swinging she-hulk simply do more damage with each swing?

It's true though - the game is rather unfinished. I'm going to unsubscribe when my 30 free days are up and perhaps I'll come back in 6 months. It just doesn't pay to get in on the ground floor with an MMO.

P.s., female characters wear only a g-string under their armour. :) Topless Playboy bunny hops abound. It truly is a fantasy wonderland.

Re:DPS

[merreborn]

It just doesn't pay to get in on the ground floor with an MMO.

There's also a disadvantage to getting in too late, though. 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.

Similarly, there's no value in low-level trade goods, like there once was. Back around launch, you could make serious bank sewing low level packs to other players, etc. These days, it's next to impossible to find buyers for anything you craft until you get up to higher levels.

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.

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.

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.

Actually, it's made up elsewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

The women do a tremendous amount of psychological damage over time.

Another game another bug

[sparhawktn]

You know games have bugs, a lot of them, and people aways act surprised every time comes to light. Why is it then that people always buy something the day it his the selves then complain when it is broken, I know it shouldn't be broken, but more times that not there is an issue that needs to be addressed when you first load up the game and have to download a huge patch just to start playing the game.

Age of...?

[oahazmatt]

AoC Bug Penalizes Female Characters? That's a rather amusing headline if you read AoC as Age of Consent.

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

[bugnuts]

It's also a well-established fact that you DIE when a barbarian sneaks up on you, stuns and knocks you down, then lops your head from your shoulders.

Stupid hollywood... if not for them, we'd all pay $15/mo to stay dead. How dare they make a game where they're not simulating reality?

Re:Female characters should be weaker

[zippthorne]

Every guy you meet produces and uses his own steroids. Women, not so much. I suppose you could say it's cultural...

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 attack speed and mount movement speed

[Eowaennor]

Those issues were already fixed on Monday...

unsheath your weapon to fix your mount speed trick

[gblackwo]

Everyone knows you run faster with a knife.

The Full Scoop

[Scorpinox]

I've been following this bug since it was first made apparent by some female assassins. At first we thought it was limited to the assassin class, but they were just the first to notice it, it turns out ALL classes who dual weild weapons are affected by the gender bug.

Here is a youtube video which clearly showcases the difference:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=k-C4z-pTrII&feature=related

Players who were in the beta of the game say (while breaking their NDA sadly) that this bug was in the beta for months, but was never addressed.

Funcom's response as of over a week ago was along the lines of "We'll look into it, they should be the same speed". There has been no communication on the bug since then.

I think it's great that this bug is getting mainstream attention now, it's a very serious imbalance that Funcom needs to take responsibility of.

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:unsheath your weapon to fix your mount speed tr

[electricbern]

No. You run faster with scissors.

Objoke

[Dogtanian]

From what I've seen, that is for very large values of "normal" Large breasts *are* normal on the average Slashdotter. Unfortunately, the average Slashdotter is also male.

Re:topless bunny hoppers

[evilkasper]

Never read any of the Conan books, or comics have you? Naked flesh is a central theme in the heavy metal fantasy style of the game.

Grow up

[Rui del-Negro]

How is showing a perfectly normal part of the human body "resorting to the gutter"?

It never ceases to amaze me how some people (or some societies) look at a movie or game where dozens of people get shot or hacked into pieces, and are offended by... a nipple.

But only if it's a female nipple; male nipples are fine (although those have no purpose other than sexual arousal). Probably because men won't take shit about not being allowed to go shirtless when they want to.

Personally I think any game where characters have undetachable underwear is simple pandering to pseudo-moralistic puritan pricks.

Re:topless bunny hoppers

[sesshomaru]

Yes, it goes all the way back to his Weird Tales debut in the 1930's with covers by Margaret Brundige:

Wikipedia: Margaret Brundage

I mean, there's a reason why H. P. Lovecraft (notorious prude) would tear the covers off the magazine where many of his best stories appeared, to quote Wikipedia:

Brundage's art frequently featured damsels in distress in various states of full or partial nudity; her whipping scenes were especially noteworthy and controversial. Her sensual images usually illustrated scenes from the pieces chosen by editor Farnsworth Wright as cover stories; her work was so popular among readers that some WT writers, like Seabury Quinn, cannily included scenes in their stories that would make good Brundage covers.

So.. there you have it... you'd think people would've been able to tell this from the Conan movies, though. Or maybe... those are also too old fashioned now. I feel old.

Re:unsheath your weapon to fix your mount speed tr

[svnt]

"unsheath your weapon to fix your mount speed"

That's what she said.

What is best in AoC?

[residieu]

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the female characters.