Age of Conan Dev Addresses Gender Equality, Females to Be as Powerful as Males in 3-4 Weeks

Wait, why couldn't they make females weaker in some areas, and stronger in others? And the same for males? Make the females more agile, faster, and the guys slower, but stronger?
Making them equal after so long sounds like a cop out to their original design philosophy.

So after 4 weeks of people complaining about it they finally say they will fix it in.... 3-4 weeks.

I don't want to rock any worlds but (and this will come as a great shock I'm sure) men *are*, far and away, much stronger than women (with very rare exception).

Now, what this has to do with frames of animation, etc., I don't know, but let's not get all worked up and hyperventilate over how the guys (oh, sorry--and gals!) at Funcom are a bunch of closet sexists because there's an obvious bug that needs squashing.

Note: I dont even play the game but I can just see this degenerating--rapidly--into some people twisting themselves into pretzels trying to raionalize how women are just as strong as men but gender "constructs" erected by "society" keep women from benching 'x' percentage of their bodyweight.

Okay, I'm not a developer but why would you tie damage to character animation? No wonder the render engine is a bloated POS. How many other pointless calculations are going on behind the curtains. Sounds like a smoke screen because Funcom got busted by the gender police. :-p

As long as the female Tailoring and Cooking animations are sped up to compensate, I'm OK with that. Also, their "Hide shoes" checkbox should be permanently checked while in kitchen instances.

Do black characters run faster too?

Just for the sake of stating what ive seen. Im still quite the noob to the game but the reasoning actually makes some sense. Mens animation in the game simply moves faster which = more swings per minute = more dps. When you use a melee ability in the game you do a sequence of button presses to trigger a "combo". The mens animations simply go off faster allowing more dps, due to more rapid swings.

A guildie showed me a parse of his male and female barbarian(1 level difference) going through Sanctum, an instance dungeon in AoC.

The damage dealt by the female model was more than 8,000 less than the male. It's a very noticeable problem.

Pfff, hilarious.

make men physically stronger and make chicks better at trade skills or something.

I'm surprised with 800 to 1000 animation cycles, there are no instances where the female variant is faster/better.

Of course, this means someone is drawing the sex card instead of consistently analyzing every factor and circumstance within the game, but that wouldn't be a surprise, and where's the fun in that.

Why can't they just speed up the animations

Damage is based on the frames of animation of the characters? That seems just retarted.

Apologies: this is the first thing that immediately came to mind when reading this.

(HEAVEN) World Developer God has issued a response to complaints arising out of the RealLife (all major platforms) community over attack speed discrepancies between male and female characters.

The complaints stem from an issue based in the simulation's basic combat system, in which female player characters dealt less damage than their male counterparts when engaged in combination attacks.

"Let me begin with saying 'yes, we here at HeavenCo Games agree with you; this is an unacceptable bug,'" said RealLife designer Saint Peter on the game's official forums. "We never intended for any character to be stronger/weaker than another based on its gender."

Peter went on to explain that the imbalance boils down to the difference in one chromosome between male and female characters, which is one of several factors that determines damage output.

"The main reason for the discrepancy in damage output that you're seeing is that one chromosome isn't equal for both Male and Female characters in many cases," Jenset noted. "This is what we're currently fixing, but there's roughly 100 to 1000 genes...this naturally takes a lot more time."

A fix could take as much as three to four weeks to enact on live RealLife servers, owing to the gene sequencing work in addition to follow-up tweaking and balancing.

The damage discrepancy isn't the only gender-related scandal to hit RealLife since it launched on game systems last month. Players complained when the breast sizes of their female characters were altered following a silicone update.

An Mars edition of RealLife is currently in the works, though no release date has yet been specified by the developer.

HA! But they call it. What a poor cover up.

In before shit hits the fan.