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Funcom: female dps bug being worked on
Nadia
Member UncommonPosts: 11,798
but its going to take a few weeks
www.massively.com/2008/07/01/female-avatar-dps-bug-will-take-weeks-to-correct/
"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."
Comments
This is going to be locked. Why? Who knows why I posted copy from the board here and it was locked with no explaination as to why. Anyway. I hope that get it sorted out along with all the other stuff that needs addressed and fixed in game. The game will be a success if Funcom would just get their act together and realize it is a game and was meant to be fun. Right now it is to frastrating and aggravating. Good luck Funcom, you're going to need it.
Funcom post that theyre aware of the issue, and are working to resolve it. Yet you bash them anyway? No surprise there, they cant win can they.
Knights who say Ni website!
I bashed them. Where do I bash them. Please point it out?
Any company that releases a game that bug ridden deserves to be bashed. Something like what they did would be unexcusable on a console game, but because they can patch fixes in on PC games we allow them to get away with that garbage. I hope AoC fails so it can serve as a message to future game developers that the player base is unwilling to pay to beta test.
This major bug seems to offer a sad look inside the development process at Funcom.
According to reports, this bug was heavily noted to the developers at least two months before launch (which would be very soon after the female avatars were finally added to closed beta).
The nature of this bug makes you realize that either Funcom failed at many different levels by allowing the animation timing problems to enter the game completely unnoticed, or they knew this bug was going to be in the game at launch, because it was the result of a deliberate "cutting of corners" in order to ensure they met their launch date.
It's almost impossible to believe that they didn't understand the need to normalize animation run times for all the female combat move animations. Depending on whether or not they have been working on the issue behind the scenes since launch, the total time to fix the issue could be as little as a month, or as long as three or four months. They obviously were not willing to delay the game to fix it and were willing to subject a large portion of the player base to a severely unfair disadvantage in game play and rate of reward for hours played.
That, to me, is completely unacceptable.
That female avatars came so late in the development process is just another solid example of the fact that launch was rushed. How a company that is in the books for the worst MMORPG launch ever with Anarchy Online (also the prime example of the permanently crippling fiscal effects of a premature launch on a potentially great game), could have gone on to repeat such a similar mistake is beyond me.
There is a lot to like about this game. If they had taken the time to not launch it "until it was ready", it's place as an MMORPG mega hit would have all but been assured.
This is one reason so many people get angry. We are sick of seeing these companies repeat the same mistakes over and over again, even when the cost/benefit analysis of a premature launch has been proven to be clearly against launching before the game is truly ready.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
It was locked because goldyknight was making those stupid comments then I called him a retard. I got a warning, but I didn't think it was wrong that I called him a retard. He was really an amazing piece of work.
"Well woman can't swing a sword faster then a man its proven science. There upper area gets in the way of a swing and therefore throws off there balance in a speed sense."
"HAHAHA they did intend it, but you think they are going to say we made it that way and lose all the female gamers because of this. No they are going to give you a politically correct answer. sorry that you want to believe otherwise. Science strikes again!!"
I called him out for those 2 stupid idiotic comments. Yet, I was the one that got warned, funny how that works.
lol so we bash all MMO games ever released i guess, as all all of them are bug ridden.
Add to that most PC games as well.
Add to that a few console games as well.
Peoples like you should play board games to be honest, where there are no bugs.
lol so we bash all MMO games ever released i guess, as all all of them are bug ridden.
Add to that most PC games as well.
Add to that a few console games as well.
Peoples like you should play board games to be honest, where there are no bugs.
Apart from what he said about hoping they fail , what was said that was incorrect or out of line? What he said is 100% true to todays market
You base a lot of your argument of things that you dont know, you dont have all the facts.
I am not saying that you are wrong, but there must some sort of reason, apart from trying to rip off the general public that companies have to resort to this.
The people in these companies are not idoits, as you point out the cost/benefit is against this behavoiur and still it happens, why? I dont know, but i am sure that becasue it affects most games companies it must a valid reason that is some what unavoidable.
The off shot of it is that we, the buying public suffer for a few months whislt the game is patched up.
I prefer that than not having a game at all.
Although I've never played AoC, I'm confused as to why the dev's didn't use the same algorithm for females as they did males. Are they saying women would carry a smaller weapon but hit quicker so even though the dps is the same, damage per hit is less? So they use a different algorithm to calculate it?
Could someone explain?
Thanks.
lol so we bash all MMO games ever released i guess, as all all of them are bug ridden.
Add to that most PC games as well.
Add to that a few console games as well.
Peoples like you should play board games to be honest, where there are no bugs.
Apart from what he said about hoping they fail , what was said that was incorrect or out of line? What he said is 100% true to todays market
He is 100% correct in an ideal world, but naive and has no understanding of the PC products.
Less so of MMOs. First off to comparing them to consloe games.
Maybe we should let all pc products that are patched to fail?
Starting with Windows XP? if the your answer is yes, then we may as well throw our PCs away, since no operating system we wont be able to use them!
Get your abacus out and play with that!
AoC's melee dmg is all based on collision. They messed up when females animation took longer to finish than male ones. That's it. They have to redo all the female animations. That's the kind of insight the dev teams have if they somehow overlook this one. Their QA team also fail, I would have them fired right away if I was in charge over there.
It may well have something to do with the animation, in AoC all attacks are AOE attacks, not like the normal auto attack in other games.
Women in AoC have smaller bodies and maybe a less of a reach than male, if you keep the animation at the same speed as the males it may end up doing less damage.
I am just guessing though, but i am sure AoC used Auto Attack this would not be an issue.
Well my friend, little do you know it, the joke is on you lol.
Because you wasted your money, and you come here to waste your time flaming the game with little to no effect.
And you have to play what ever you were playing before AoC
I must have overlooked the earlier locked post
thought this was new information - o well
EQ2 fan sites
From what I've managed to gather:
They use motion-captured animations, and in those animations the female characters were slower/faster than the male - and if you use the animation for timing, that's a problem.
According to someone that claimed to be in closed beta, the idea/workaround was to make the female models hit faster for less damage - balancing out in the long run...
However, that's not balanced either (status attacks would be more powerful for female characters, male characters would be better for PvP, stamina drain would be broken [or "more broken"]).
And so they shipped the game with the original problem... to funcom's credit they haven't claimed it's a bug, and they haven't claimed that they didn't know about this.
I have to say that I thought the attack speed bug for females was a joke, another reason for people to bash the game, but I guess the joke is on me.
As a female 75 barbarian reaver spec, finding this out when i have to grind 20 million exp for the next 5 levels (roughly) at 3-4k exp a mob, i have to say I'm a little upset. I was overlooking a lot of flaws because I like the combat, gore, and more mature theme, but this kinda just....sucks....
One of the worst parts is my account renewed 2 days ago, I would have waited to renew it If i had known this. Don't get me wrong, I still find the game quite entertaining, I've just reached my patience limit with what I'm willing to put up with when I'm paying for a service, whatever it may be.
They did motion capture for all their character animations. They did separate motion capture of male and female animations. Sharum also implied that the "skeletons" the male and female avatars are rigged for animation on are too different to allow sharing of male and female animations.
The problem in game is that the female combat animations are longer than the male versions. The game waits for the animation to finish before being able to go on to the next attack. The attacks do the same damage for men and women, but with the female animations taking longer to complete, their damage output is lower than that for the males.
What the developer left out in his official response was that the females have more problems than just longer animations. The flow from the end of one animation to the beginning of the next for the females is not as smooth as for the males. In fact, fairly frequently you could experience a one or two second delay between some attack combinations, on top of the actual animations being slower.
They designed their animation system and they obviously must have know the that the animation speeds for females would have to be normalized to the male counterparts. The addition pauses could be an unanticipated bug, but the impact of unadjusted animation speeds had to have been obvious from the start.
I would have expected two elements from the development process for the female avatars that seems to be missing. Why would be speculation. First, the female motion capture artist should have been performing her moves with real time display of the male counterparts, to ensure the moves were not only similar, but also to try to get the timing of the moves as close as possible. Second, either the game should have had the ability to dynamically scale animation times to a set value (be speeding them up or slowing them down), or the development tools should have included such a utility.
Once again, they had to have known right from the start that one way or the other, the animations would have to match time wise.
So, did they just really, really screw up? Or, did they see that the time required to sync the males and females would make it impossible to fit them in with out delaying the launch of the game?
People need to realize that for some reason, with years of development time for the game, the female avatars were one of the last major elements to be added to the game. They weren't even seen in closed beta until I believe two months or so before launch!
Bugs and delays are going to pop up, that's a given. However, why would they put off work on an entire gender until extremely late in the development process, knowing that time is needed to get the avatars working and polished?
A lot had to go wrong at Funcom for a problem this big to be in the game at launch.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
I doubt it is as bad as you make out, to the extenet that you would not have renewed if you had known. Especially since you enjoy the game anyways.
At the most you maybe talking about an extra swing to kill a mob. And normally you use a combo as the last attack with more damage than is required to kill said mob, in these cases there is no consequence for being female.
This is a great question. During beta female avatars were not even there until close to the end. Then when they were added there was a huge issue. For all classes that can dual wield, female characters could only do so with 2 daggers. Equip a sword/dagger, sword/blunt, blunt/dagger, 2 swords, or 2 blunts and combat completely and totally broke down. No combos were working. It took them a number of weeks before they got that ironed out and by then beta was close to over. Ample testing was never done but it was noticed at the end of beta and has been noticed and proven many times since launch. Why it is going to take another 3 to 4 weeks to get this issue ironed out is beyond me. Something like this should have well been taken care of long before launch.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
I doubt it is as bad as you make out, to the extenet that you would not have renewed if you had known. Especially since you enjoy the game anyways.
At the most you maybe talking about an extra swing to kill a mob. And normally you use a combo as the last attack with more damage than is required to kill said mob, in these cases there is no consequence for being female.
pvp? and it's also not just an extra swing. Our combos literally takes longer to pull off because our swings are slower, and there's messed up animations.
oops, yeah at pvp it would quite a disadvantage
He was talking of experience gained, and hence i didn't eventheink about pvp.
I doubt it is as bad as you make out, to the extenet that you would not have renewed if you had known. Especially since you enjoy the game anyways.
At the most you maybe talking about an extra swing to kill a mob. And normally you use a combo as the last attack with more damage than is required to kill said mob, in these cases there is no consequence for being female.
The largest impact reported in controlled tests, I believe for a HoX, but I'm not positive, showed that it took about 50% longer, chaining the same combos, for the female to do the same total damage as the male counterpart.
That's a huge impact on kill speed and survivability (in the race to kill before being killed). For Soldiers, it also has a direct impact on the ability to hold aggro. Female Dark Templars really get screwed, because a lot of their survivability is tied into Life Tap.
In the early levels, questing is a huge portion of XP. Even if the female takes 50% longer to kill, maybe 50% or more of play time is spent out of combat. Later on, when grinding becomes a much larger factor in progress, the reduction in DPS and survivability becomes a serious impediment to the progress rate for female avatars affected by the bug.
Sort of a weird mirror of the real life situation of many women getting paid less for the same work as a male counterpart! For the same hours of combat, the woman would only earn about 2/3 the XP and cash vs. a male version of the same character!
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
Rofl at least it's life like then!
the sad part is this was a known issue the last 6 months of beta and its just now being addressed.