Funcom has sold more than 500,000 copies of their new massive multiplayer online role-playing game, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures and has been getting generally positive reviews from fans. One thing they're not happy about, though - Funcom just shrank their characters' boobage.
After a recent patch, some players noticed that female characters had a smaller chest than normal. Complaints began to pour in and Funcom responded with one of the most surreal announcements ever: "Funcom can confirm that some of the female models in the game have had the size of their breasts changed. This is due to an unintended change in data that was introduced in an earlier patch, data which controls the so-called morph values associated with character models and the size of their respective body parts. We are working on a fix for this and your breasts should be back to normal soon. The plastic surgeons of Hyboria apologize for the inconvenience."
Why did players make a fuss over this? The easy answer is that MMO players are predominantly strange, male, and undersexed. There's more to it, though. In World of Warcraft, there was a similar incident where male orc characters' shoulders became inexplicably smaller after a patch. No one's attracted to orc shoulders (I assume) but there was still a lot of outrage.
So what gives? I think both of these incidents underscore the importance many MMO players place on the physical appearance of their characters. These games involve spending hours upon hours farming mobs or learning raid bosses just to get a slightly shinier piece of gear for their avatar. If you put all that effort into making your character look cool (so you can trot around the town square with your virtual head held high), it'd probably piss you off when your character unexpectedly gets mosquito boobs or small, wimpy shoulders. It's weird, I know, but I'm sure if you played an MMO 20+ hours a week like some gamers do, it'd make sense.
