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Shapermc
Hot Sake!
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
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 Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 12:50 pm Post subject: Sexism in games Redux (Age of Conan, not Lost in Blue) |
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While I'm pretty sure this is a quiet story in the gaming press, it's something that's struck me as totally bizarre. In Age of Conan female characters attack approximately 33% slower than their male counterparts for most classes. This is something that made it through at least 18 months of beta testing, and something that was done intentionally at one point or another. Since this is all hidden behind a log-in password that you need to have a copy of the game to access I'm going to copy/paste the developer comments here:
| Svein Erik "Sharum" Jenset: BCC Design wrote: | My fellow Hyborian Adventurers ...
Last week I promised that I would do my best to have a more detailed update on the issue about Male vs. Female attack speed/damage ready by today. It’s quite possible that not everyone will be thrilled by what this update contains but you as a community deserve to know both what’s causing it, why it’s taking us this long to fix it, and how we plan on fixing it.
Let me begin with saying “yes, we here at Funcom agree with you; this is an unacceptable bug”. We never intended for any character to be stronger/weaker than another based on its gender, and we have been working on making the necessary adjustments to correct this issue for quite some time already.
Now, in our game, we have two primary sources of damage; ‘normal’ damage, commonly referred to as “white damage”, and ‘combo’ damage. Making the white damage equal for both Male and Female characters is, in this context, a fairly simple task and something we’ve already done and which should already have been patched out to Live.
For future reference, when I say that it was a fairly simple task to fix it, we’re still talking about modifying, either through actually having an animator work on the animation resource itself or by having a BCC designer adjust the speed-scaling of said animation resource, of more than 150 unique animations. In addition, these animations are fairly “simple”; by which I mean that they are your ordinary attacks and don’t contain any flourishes, sequential blows or other “complicated” stuff.
However, if we move onto ‘combo’ damage, which is what is causing the notable part of this issue, there are suddenly several factors that come into play when determining the final damage. I won’t be wasting too much time in this update to go into detail about every factor, but to quickly list a few they would be stat/modifier/multiplier (which in turn depends on class, level and weapon equipped), length of animation and, although irrelevant to this exact issue any longer, amount of steps in a combo sequence.
The main reason for the discrepancy in damage output that you’re seeing is that the length of an animation isn’t equal for both Male and Female characters in many cases. This is what we’re currently fixing, but there’s roughly 800 to 1000 animations in total that are involved here, and that they are significantly more “complex” than the ‘white damage’ animations mentioned above this naturally takes a lot more time.
Of course, once the length of the animations have been fully corrected/tweaked either by an animator or BCC designer then every rank (of every combo for every class) has to be re-balanced by the System Designers because, as I mentioned above, one of the factors that come into play when determining the combo damage is animation length.
I guess I should begin wrapping this up by now. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give you an exact date for when this issue will be fixed, but we’re working internally towards a goal of having everything finished during the next two to three work-weeks, depending on how much we need to re-adjust after the initial tweaking. This is including the majority of QA testing, which can be performed during the process as we’re working on a class-by-class basis. That being said, and even with on-going testing during this process, everything still needs to be verified by QA once more after we merge our changes into the system data to ensure that we’re not breaking anything else.
We will however not be patching this out to Live on a class-by-class basis, but rather in one big “collective” fix to all classes. I will make another promise right here and now though; I’ll be investigating whether or not we can introduce these changes to the public Test server (which Famine has promised everyone a bigger update on soon) at the earliest possible convenience.
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 rather than rush out a “quick fix” that might not work as well
And finally, 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. There’s a lot of stuff that, while totally unrelated, might cause a certain patch to be delayed or even pushed out without containing this data. What I can promise though is to return with another update about a more specific patch date as soon as possible.
I hope that this information is what many of you have been asking for, and that I’ve been able to present you with answers to many of the questions you’ve had about this issue. On behalf of myself, everyone else directly involved on fixing this issue and Funcom as a company; thank you for reading! |
Bold added for emphasis by myself.
I think it's interesting that this is being handled as a "bug". It is clear that at one point or another someone made the conscious decision to do this. Whether it was just carelessness by the animation department, or if it was intentional from a higher up level, I don't know. But clearly if 800 - 1000 animations are "effected by this bug" it's hardly a minor oversight.
Honestly, I'm not really sure what conclusion to draw from this. It's obviously an oversight that the developers didn't care about. Now I can understand how this wasn't picked up in Beta testing or anything for a while (I wasn't playing two characters of different sex of the same class, I can understand why many people wouldn't), but I don't understand how it made it past the developers in the first place.
What are your thoughts on this?
EDIT: Two more things have come to light about this issue.
1st: The devs were told about this bug in beta testing. Around mid-March the first reports of noticing this were released by beta testers. This means that the game could have still shipped w/o the "bug"
2nd: The devs are saying that this "bug" is due to the speed of the Motion Capture for the animation for the classes. This opens up a whole new bag of worms.
Interesting.
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ryan
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Joined: 20 Feb 2005
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| Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 3:17 pm Post subject: |
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Considering just how much wasn't finished for release, I wouldn't be surprised if this got past them. Remember tavern brawls? I've read of a several issues brought to Funcom during the beta that weren't addressed. I think they hit a stage of N years late and X over budget and decided to finish whatever they could, however they could and just ship the fucker.
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Swimmy
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Joined: 16 Sep 2005
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Location: Fairfax, VA
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| Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 3:55 pm Post subject: |
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If it's not a bug, shame, but I'm willing to believe that it is. I just don't have enough info about what goes on in animating a 3D object to know.
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Shapermc
Hot Sake!
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
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| Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 4:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Swimmy wrote: | | If it's not a bug, shame, but I'm willing to believe that it is. I just don't have enough info about what goes on in animating a 3D object to know. |
It sounds like an oversight more than a bug.
| Shapermc wrote: | | 2nd: The devs are saying that this "bug" is due to the speed of the Motion Capture for the animation for the classes. This opens up a whole new bag of worms. |
This means that actual people who dressed up in the mocap suits are the "cause" of this issue bug. Hence, it's not a bug.
This also means that when someone was programming the damage into the animations that they overlooked this issue.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932
"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!" |
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sediment
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Joined: 15 Aug 2007
Posts: 428
Location: SUPERPOWER GEORGIALAND
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| Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 4:37 pm Post subject: |
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weird fact: female damage numbers are slightly higher to compensate for their reduced attack speed. it's like somebody knew about it and tried to throw girls a bone, but in the end the reduced ability to hitch off your combos really makes it a "wtfux" problem.
upside: i prefer casters.
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Shapermc
Hot Sake!
Joined: 14 Oct 2004
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| Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 6:08 pm Post subject: |
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| sediment wrote: | | weird fact: female damage numbers are slightly higher to compensate for their reduced attack speed. it's like somebody knew about it and tried to throw girls a bone, but in the end the reduced ability to hitch off your combos really makes it a "wtfux" problem. |
Actually, this only came about in the most recent patch, and it's only for non-combo damage. Basically, they're still doing less damage, and on top of that it takes them longer to do their strongest attack so there's a bigger gap between when they start and stop doing damage. If this was just a speed thing it wouldn't be an in game issue if the damage balanced out, but it only does outside of the end of combos which isn't where the largest percent of damage is done.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932
"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!" |
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sediment
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Joined: 15 Aug 2007
Posts: 428
Location: SUPERPOWER GEORGIALAND
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| Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 11:32 pm Post subject: |
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that's odd, i thought i noticed it being the case shortly after launch.
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Cycle
Mac daddy
Joined: 08 Sep 2006
Posts: 2767
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 6:27 am Post subject: |
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it think it evens out by the fact that female characters have the advantage of distracting male enemies by getting their tits out.
how do the breasts work, anyway? in the game, i mean. can you define the size and shape when creating a character? can i make a real woman?
i guess that wouldn't fit in with the conan universe though, huh
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sediment
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Joined: 15 Aug 2007
Posts: 428
Location: SUPERPOWER GEORGIALAND
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 8:48 am Post subject: |
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You just define bigness. With men the only real sexual-promiscuity-size-slider you get in Conan is bum perkiness, so naturally my male character had a really tight and cute little butt.
But he didn't wear a thong like the girls, he wore some hempen diaper. Funcom's other MMO, Anarchy Online, put everyone in sci-fi bodysuits as their "underwear" and men could wear the same sleaze clothes as women, so I was kind of really a lot disappointed by their handling the genders here.
Um, I guess I'll try and expand the discussion... lol Itagaki?
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daphaknee
just enemies now
Joined: 26 Jul 2007
Posts: 892
Location: YAY AREA
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 8:20 pm Post subject: |
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| leisure suit larry does it right |
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Cycle
Mac daddy
Joined: 08 Sep 2006
Posts: 2767
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 8:21 pm Post subject: |
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i thought you never played leisure suit larry? did you finally play one? about time!
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The Great Unwashed
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Joined: 27 May 2006
Posts: 359
Location: Perth, Western Australia
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| Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 8:53 pm Post subject: |
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I don't know if it's intentional - or unintentional sexism, but it sure as hell is absolutely sloppy design. Attack faster if you're a male! Tie damage to to animations which could very well lag depending on network and server conditions! Woooo I can't see anything wrong with this plan
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daphaknee
just enemies now
Joined: 26 Jul 2007
Posts: 892
Location: YAY AREA
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| Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 9:43 pm Post subject: |
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| Cycle wrote: | | i thought you never played leisure suit larry? did you finally play one? about time! |
cycle i couldnt help myself after everything you said! |
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Cycle
Mac daddy
Joined: 08 Sep 2006
Posts: 2767
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| Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 9:57 pm Post subject: |
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which one did you play? the original is the best despite a few silly puzzles.
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