The complaints stem from an issue based in the MMO'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 Funcom agree with you; this is an unacceptable bug,'" said Age of Conan designer Svein Erik Jenset on the game's official forums. "We never intended for any character to be stronger/weaker than another based on its gender."

Jenset went on to explain that the imbalance boils down to the difference in character attack animation 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 the length of an animation 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 800 to 1000 animations...this naturally takes a lot more time."

A fix could take as much as three to four weeks to enact on live Age of Conan servers, owing to the animation work in addition to follow-up tweaking and balancing.

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

An Xbox 360 edition of Age of Conan is currently in the works, though no release date has yet been specified by the developer.