Conan's female avatar DPS bug will take weeks to correct
by Michael Zenke 
Jul 1st 2008 at 8:30AM
Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Bugs, Patches
A few weeks back our own Adrian Bott took a close look at a very ... unique ... bug in Age of Conan. It seems that differing animation cycles in the game have resulted in an unforseen side effect: female avatars do less damage then male ones. At the time, the Funcom developers said they'd let us know as soon as they could about a fix. Today they let us know, but the news is mixed. The good news is that 'straight damage' (what they call white damage) has been fixed. Simple autoattack routines use few animations and they've all been fixed and pushed to the live servers.The problem comes in with the much-vaunted realtime combat system, which requires heavy use of combos and unique animations. There are almost a thousand of those animations, and every single one will apparently have to be tweaked by animators and then retuned by a designer. "I know that many of you will probably be disappointed to hear that it might take us as much as another three to four weeks to solve this issue, for which I can only apologize, but we want to make sure that we devote the amount of time that an issue of this magnitude and importance deserves ... I have to stress that even with our internal goal set and everything currently proceeding on schedule I cannot currently promise that this will be patched to Live at the projected date."
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
pufonthis said on 9:22AM 7-01-2008
I call bull***t. You're telling me they didn't know about this before the game went live? This product just keeps getting better and better. This level of unprofessionalism is now legendary amongst MMOs.
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Chas said on 2:11PM 7-01-2008
IIRC, the female models were added very late in beta. The models (or the models' animations) were kicked back when they didn't meet internal quality standards, so Beta testers had less time with them... and to be honest, were probably more focused on the issues that got the females kicked back (animation & art) and... umm... their "Unique attributes." It's one of those things where you don't expect a difference... so you don't look for one.
Jaladan said on 10:20AM 7-01-2008
Tweak all the animations rather than set a damage multiplier in whichever file references each animation? Admittedly it might cause some balance issues if one class, or body type, had slower higher damage attacks, but the main issue could be solved today rather than next month.
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fenoe said on 11:04AM 7-01-2008
ok..whats the difference in dps?
like 1? i dont care if males do 1 more dps than me.
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George said on 11:25AM 7-01-2008
These people have absolutely no idea what they are doing. None, zero, zip, nada, nanimo nai! AOC was such an Epic Fail. I tried it, a total waste of $50. I'll never play AOC again. In 6 months or less, their retention rate will fall thought the floor. The fact that the speed of animations really does affect DPS is sad in every way possible, and what is sadder is the fact that is took a very tenacious player to examine the game himself to determine this. You'd think after 1,000 different animations some one, SOMEONE at Funcom would have realized that slower animations = lower DPS. This is the kind of fundamental amateur hour antics that will cost funcom its existence.
There is no defense for this kind of incompetence, especially after running AO for these 7 years. It's not like that have not done an mmo before.
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ghiest said on 11:47AM 7-01-2008
How about 200 dps difference at lvl 80 (which is around 25-30% difference) than the male characters?
Yes there is a dps meter, yes there is a place you can upload logs to see who does what in a 'raid'. We did measure it and it's particularly depressing as a female dps class that's for sure.
Along with a few other major bugs in the end game, really this is what forced me to quit, I'm not going to roll another class or gender and level to 80 just because funcom are stupid to know this would make a difference. Hell this was reported back in BETA about 2 months before release and still wasn't looked at.
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Brian! said on 11:46AM 7-01-2008
Wait, statistically, are most female avatars played by male players? And are the majority of the players still the younger crowd?
So, maybe they don't mind if their character does less damage, just as long as they stay unusually scantily clad.
If Conan wanted to be very realistic, they would adjust armor values based on the coverage. How female heavy armor with no lower body torso coverage is supposed to be truly protective is beyond me. I would like to see more games treat female warrior avatars with respect and clad them properly.
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Michael Zenke said on 12:00PM 7-01-2008
Brian,
I totally agree. Really nice comment. My biggest annoyance is that a lot of times 'fleshing up' the female avatars detracts from the enjoyment of the gear itself.
Here these companies spend time and effort making art for their loot, and then chop it up so they can show off digital thighs/waists/boobs.
Waste of time.
Cray said on 7:16PM 7-01-2008
You know I would love to see a MMO that has a DPS modifier in character's height and weight as opposed to just the gender, race, class, and profession. Bigger characters should invariably be slower than smaller characters, but they should also be stronger.
The possibility of having a big strong female who happens to be a Mage should be possible, but it should be rare. So the height/weight should come at a cost or a random modifier that would effect the gender, race, class, and profession.
In real life you don't get to choose your genetic make-up, but you do have the ability to alter it within limits.
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