Busy, But Not Too Busy To Be Bitchy About Games

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 92 Comments

So as I’m sure everyone noticed (or failed to, if you haven’t seen anything in your RSS reader) I’ve been neglecting this blog. This is 100% due to my day job going into overdrive; we have a pretty major milestone coming up (and in fact I’ll be giving AGDC a miss, though I’ll be cadging beers in the evening; if you have beers to cadge, hit me up!) and it has been keeping me focused.

However I did pick up Champions last week. I like superhero games – I played City of Heroes since it launched, and still do, on and off – even though I’m not really a comic book guy. Plus, I have a sort of history with Paragon (CoH’s current developer) and Cryptic before that, given that I worked at their publisher, worked for years with one of their lead writers/designers, and once had Jack Emmert lecture me at Gen Con about my Latin pronunciation while wearing a silver lamé cape.

So, I really wanted to like Champions. I even had a hero all ready to go.

The Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il. He specializes in dark, fell sorcery. And robots!

Unfortunately, there was a few things to harsh my buzz.

First, apparently the entire game was nerfed on launch day. It wasn’t technically a nerf unless you pre-ordered. I did pre-order, but apparently not soon enough to play during the pre-order, so I didn’t play in the blissful 3 days of pre-nerf nirvana. However there was, as you might expect, a bit of a community explosion over changing the balance of the entire game overnight. Or, to quote a community person who was the first to announce the news:

Good news! Defensive passives are getting a decrease in their effectiveness very soon. That’s all the detail I have for now.

This is quite possibly the most awesome post from a community person ever. “Guys! Guys! You’re going to be weaker and take more damage soon! Isn’t that great? Talk to you later!”

But, really, that didn’t bother me either, because I didn’t play during the pre-order phase, and the board explosions didn’t bother me because, well, I didn’t read the boards.

What did bother me was the character skill system. And my reaction to it I actually find kind of interesting. Normally I’m pretty hardcore about character builds. I like analyzing things to death – it’s why I constantly reroll new characters. Well, that and I get bored.

With Champions, I felt as though I wasn’t qualified to do that. It was too complex and opaque to me, despite most things having liberal tooltip explanations and the developers helpfully supplying a “danger room” where you can test new skill purchases for free. Thanks to the ridiculously expensive respec costs, I felt as though every decision I made about my character was final. And I resented it. Perhaps I was spoiled from WoW, where a talent respec cost maybe a day’s worth of daily quests. I didn’t feel like I really knew what I was doing – which for a game like this, with a rich skill system like this is normal. Yet I felt like not knowing what I was doing was critical. I made characters which rapidly were unplayable. Kim, for existence. Turns out mixing robots and sorcery doesn’t work well. Guess he’s shelved. As was my fire blaster. As was my dual blades guy. I would plow through the tutorial, whose corny jokes and earnest Golden-Age-of-Comics demeanor wore more and more on me with each repetition, get to the first real zone, and fall flat on my face if I pulled more than one enemy. Clearly, this was not City of Heroes, where you plow through dozens of henchmen while laughing loudly. The game was letting me fail.

This is a necessary evil of a rich, classless skill system – the game has to let you fail. And it irritated me. Probably because of the punitive respec costs. I’m thinking that a cheap and available respec is a necessity for a game like this. Sure, you can fail, but the cost should be going to an instructor and saying “I’m sowwy” while pawing the dirt with your shoes, not shelving your character as Failure #12 after going through yet another session of Captain Stupendous intoning that you have to deactivate ALL the consoles!

The lack of content at release bugs me as well – it means that every character goes through the same content every time without fail – but realistically, that always gets fixed if the game gets successful. Content is easy. An interesting, yet essentially forgiving skills-based system? Not that easy. And Champions is almost there.

But not yet. And that frustration, at least for me, is a learning experience.

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Doug

dear leader looks a lot like half the cast of The Sopranos.
Zuzax

It appears that Champions is answering the “did we really need another superhero MMO?” question with a tentative “no.”
http://opensourcedesigner.org DrewC

Easily available respec is mandatory. The only conceivable argument against it is “we want people to roll alts.” People will roll alts anyway, and every time you force someone to roll an alt you create a point where that person might stop playing instead of creating an alt. That’s a pretty dangerous choice to create.
Gx1080

Well, given “The great round of fail of 2008″ (and early 2009, but it doesn’t sound as cool), I’m not surprised that games like Champions Online and Aion are floating in cash.

I knew that theres was a reason why people did so many characters in their reviews, and also I was RIGHT:

http://brokentoys.org/2009/03/19/cryptic-marcom-malreported-verify-ungood-rectify-candygive/#comment-23404

The Champions Online forums are fun (if you like drama) and they earned another mention in here.

Well, and there’s the failure to learn lessons from other games(Put a respec, for god’s sake), but thats common in this industry.
TPRJones

I don’t care what your game is like, in the early game respec’ing should be free or close to it. Save the punitive costs until mid- to high-level ranges, where a character has survived long enough to be feasible.

That’s just basic, no one should be failing that design test.
Freakazoid

I blame tiers. Of course, I was in the beta early enough to marvel at the joys of having orbital cannon during the tutorial. I also enjoyed leveling up without a trainer, grabbing new powers during the tutorial (especially a travel power), having robots that were crazy offensive dumbfire pets… I could go on.

They literally had one guy balancing all the powers in the last few months of testing. I think his name was Balseraph. His views on game balance were… well, let’s just say that early in the beta, he had no idea other MMOs were using dodge as a means of negating damage. I don’t know if he’s just that new at video games or if he’s got some mental disability.
Dags

I enjoy reading this blog- for the thrills of the composition alone- as well as finding a true like mind (which worries me, but that’s another story): However, this time I’m not sure I’m going to wholly agree; on the other hand, I can’t fully disagree either, not just yet. I too found my early dual-blades character feeling gimped and lost, but then, with a few (quick) levels later and a re-slot of some easily available stat-builders, she went from barely able to shave her legs to auto-ginzu babe, slashing her one-framework build through mobs of mobs a few levels above her; and this post the pre-launch nerf also (I too came in late). Only once did I back out (retcon) a skill, that being her acrobatic travel in favor of flying (for thy aggro many when only merely jumping over them- one of the games few true *fails* that needs a *fix*). Overall, I am enjoying the game more than I did WoW or LoTRO or EVE at the same point- which happily surprised me. And the game’s character creation ability is outstanding. That being said- you speak truth in terms of the epiphany curve; it’s somewhat mystically steep although I’m getting insight into it as time goes on. I also agree the opening “tutorial” needs a button for any second or later character. Twice through it is probably what drove Dr. Destroyer to level the joint in the first place.
JuJutsu

Wearing a silver lamé cape screws up your pronunciation of Latin? Interesting.
Slyfeind

Yeah, this has been kind of a weird launch. They did some things that make the game fun, which is why I’m still playing it, but then there’s mistakes that people learned ten years ago that they seem to want to retread. For some weird reason. Design Choice A makes a game fail. Design Choice B makes a game succeed. But…let’s try Choice A one more time, just in case it works out for us! Um…what?
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

A funny thing I’m noticing about a lot of the angst on the Champions Online boards is that it’s born from a certain desire to be spoon-fed. World of Warcraft raised most of these players, and failure really isn’t an option in World of Warcraft. The players don’t need to take responsibility for how they build their characters – they expect all their characters to work the way they intended them to work without bothering to do any experimentation to find out how to make them work right.

That’s really a shame. A gamer should relish a game that actually asks them to play it – where success or failure is based on their abilities as a gamer, which should improve in time and practice. Instead, these poor fools had been conditioned to believe that grinding is all that’s really needed. They’ve been neutered of their responsibility as players, and it seems they genuinely prefer it that way.
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

That said, the retcon system does need some further balancing. You can afford to retcon back a few levels, but any more than that is indeed a “restart from start” scenario.

Part of the trouble is that the balance seems to be set in such a way that you pay for your retcon twice. The price increases because the further back you recon the more the individual step costs, and the price increases because you have to pay for all previous steps. The developers need to figure out that what they’ve accidentally set up is an exponential cost mode.

You can use the current retcon system to your advantage, bu it doesn’t beget a lack of experience. You actually have to take things very carefully, understand that there’s a certain need for offense and defense in any character, and avoid taking too many attacks because they’re generally red herrings because your first few attacks will get you through the game. How you retcon is usually over the past level if, after giving the power a test run in the power house, you still decided to take it because after getting into the field you decided it’s really not going to suit your tastes.

It is good, at least, that characters created over the 3-day head start period are going to be given a free complete retcon. Eventually.
Peter S.

I, too, kind of agree, but would offer my own experiences. I was in for the head-start days, and did get to run around a little bit with one of the broken defense powers (Regen, specifically, and I mean come on, CoH once had a standing policy of nerfing Regen in each and every patch, so I saw this coming).

First, I came in having played Hero system and with an eye toward really dissecting the available power choices. To me, the system wasn’t too opaque, but it was a lot to keep track of all at once (Powers, Traits, Perks, etc.) plus it was very difficult to accurately guess what worked well and what didn’t. While most powers show decent detailed info, quite a few apply effects that aren’t explained, which sometimes masks power data completely.

My main went the dark sorcery route too, with the Shadow Form offensive passive, and did start to struggle in the teens. The Regen alt I then rolled, a crit build taking the full suite of pistol-based powers, did much, much better (partly due to being unkillable pre-patch). But, I’ve since gone back to the dark sorcery character and bought the perk that gives a knockdown to his AoE cone along with the life-drain power, and suddenly that extra bit of mitigation has him working very, very well again.

I’ve also swapped Regen for Lightning Reflexes post-patch on pistol-dude (found out Regen relies on a stat, and one I wasn’t gonna raise). The defensive powers do still grant a noticable difference while feeling a bit more in-line with each other, but at the same time there are more “Oh, come ON!!!” moments.

Thing is, I was actually very underwhelmed with the game at first. The thing that made it fun was only using my XBox 360 controller and setting up the controls somewhat close to a Youtube video about making it control like an FPS. If it wasn’t for the fun control schema, I’d have skipped actually buying the game. In that respect, I otherwise can’t help but agree with Zuzax.
Ardanna

…a certain desire to be spoon fed, like WoW? Really? That’s the argument? We’re not taking responsibility as gamers?

Please. You SHOULD be spoon fed at the low levels, that’s the time to learn the game – or wait, is this supposed to be hard core for the elite few?

I didn’t think so. I am tired of the WoW is so easy – you walk into ToC /dance and epics fall from the sky – argument for explaining why it’s the players fault for not getting an unnecessarily complex/punitive gaming system the moment they log in.

I played Champions during the early beta and throughout. I gave my feedback, and then I stopped play the beta and clearly didn’t buy it.

I didn’t feel like a hero – that’s where it failed in my mind. In CoH/V I felt like a hero (or villain), even a fledgling one at the beginning. In Champions I felt isolated (tiny zones with many instances in some cases), and very weak. Part of it is personal preference (or not) for the Art style – I felt pasted onto a backdrop and not particularly epic. But a big part was the powers… that’s where the biggest failure is.

They don’t feel impressive to me… and yes the speccing or how to in the open ended system is just too open ended and you can destroy your character completely by taking “the wrong” choices.

As an example – in late beta I took “gadgeteering” or whatever it was called. You start with two powers… I couldn’t use my second one until level 6 because I didn’t have energy. So the first four levels were me using my “power up” pew pew power… that was painful. I thought – oh this is clearly a balance issue – nope – notice on the boards was that this was intended – you may not be able to use certain powers when you get them (or for a while) and you will have to build your energy. Whoops!

They have a LONG way to go – honestly I think they made some critical mistakes.
Tremayne

The costs for “retconning” (read: respeccing) went WAY up just before live – from ‘probably too cheap’ to ‘I’m gonna need Barack Obama’s stimulus package to finance a full respec at level 40′. I don’t like respecs to be too cheap – if they aren’t limited then every bugger under the sun goes with the overpowered fotm build and then hops to the next one without so much as a shrug. On the other hand, when people reach level cap with about 30 [gold piece equivalents] and a full respec would cost about 1000, that’s just crazy.
The live day patch reduced the effectiveness of the defence passives, which probably needed doing – some people with stacked defences were unkillable in the PVP arenas. The nerf probably would have encouraged players to be more diverse in their builds, because it made defence passives like regeneration less of a ‘gimme’ but…
… the same patch fixed some bugs which had been making the mobs underperform. All of a sudden a lot more damage was coming the players’ way and you now NEED a boosted defence, a self heal ability or an ungodly amount of luck given how thick on the ground mob spawns are in CO.
The forums for the game are a whinefest of epic proportions, which isn’t really fair to what is a fun game. I’m still happily taking on supervillains with my characters, but I can see why others have problems. CO is best played as more of an action game than other MMOs – for best effect you need to be staying on the move in combat, shifting out of the AoE of the big attacks and grabbing the heals and power ups that drop like candy. If you think in terms of standing there and pressing buttons in your “skill rotation” a la WoW or CoH you will get your head handed to you by supervillains or decent sized pulls with villains in them.
Slyfeind

Challenge as a gamer is definitely desirable, almost necessary for a game’s success. However, this challenge should not come so early, so abruptly and without warning, and with such stringent punishments for failure.
taodon

And you know, I choose not to play Champions Online because it had no resemblance to the incredibly detailed character creation system of the PnP game off which it is based. The Champions RPG is merciless for character creation, but allows for so much more flexibility.

I agree with the spoon-fed-ness of the WoW crowd though. Unfortunately, that’s one of the few reasons it is so successful.
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

The interesting thing about the WoW influence being behind a lot of the complaints about Champions Online is that it transcends merely having a more difficult learning curve. We’ve actually quite a number of people complaining that the game plays differently, at all.

For example, the other day I read a fellow saying he had “lost faith in” the developers because they decided to have an aggro system that didn’t simply involve the mobs jumping on the first person to attack them. The way Champions Online is doing it isn’t inherently wrong, just different, but he was used to that from World of Warcraft.

There was one thread that was complemented by a forum admin for being a bit more coherent of a complaint than most. The basis of the complaints outlined were that roots didn’t break when the monsters were attacked – making crowd control too powerful, that area of effect seemed too powerful, and that passive defenses were too powerful. The reason for all three complaints? Because that’s not how World of Warcraft was balanced.

I’m not saying Champions Online is perfect. I agree that the retcon prices are set a bit unforgivably high for newbies, and the freedom to pick powers is somewhat problematic given that most people won’t understand what taking those powers really means until a few dozen hours into the game. However, the vast majority of the complaints you hear on the board can be easily attributed to a bunch of self-indulgent WoW players refusing to broaden their horizons.
MTpromises

I rember reading, before WoW launched, the City of Heroes forums and how they scrapped their very open character and skill creation system because players were gimping themselves. The anti-bois are worse then the fan-bois.

The fact is with an “open system” and unlimited skill resests it’s only a matter of time before almost all players convert their skills to whatever works out to be the most sucessful mixes… which will in-turn be just the same as having official ‘classes’.

Ofcourse their will be a couple of unique snowflakes who run their gimp specs and love their characters… but won’t play them since they are gimp and instead spread negativity across the forums arguing why their gimps skills should be bolstered. Or worse, they’ll just unsubscribe.
Luk

As a long time COH player I have been watching Champions very closely from closed beta up to now and while it seems that CO has to offer much more than COH, it has some things that really put me off, enough to never even consider to subscribe.

To mention a few, ugly graphics choices (fixable with turning some options), drunk and unresponsive keyboard controls (it was designed for Xbox controller), no way to fix gimp choices like picking melee power builder power in the beginning and then having you butt kicked by everyone with ranged powers, the bait and switch with lifetime sub option, the list can go on and on.

All those issue can be fixed and probably will be, but I am not going be playing a game that intentionally trying to test those design/marketing grounds and expect me to pay for that with my time and money.
Arkazon

“All those issue can be fixed and probably will be, but I am not going be playing a game that intentionally trying to test those design/marketing grounds and expect me to pay for that with my time and money.”

I think this perspective, just by itself, is a damaging one to take. For all their problems, I DO want game companies to test new design/marketing grounds and expect me to pay for it, because innovation is what leads to the few gems in a sea of obscurity. The alternative is to use “the usual template” and just tweak the minor things.
Slyfeind

“The fact is with an “open system” and unlimited skill resests it’s only a matter of time before almost all players convert their skills to whatever works out to be the most sucessful mixes… which will in-turn be just the same as having official ‘classes’.”

This has so far proven not entirely true, as evidenced by the cooks and tailors in UO, all the way to the frost mages raiding in WoW. A LOT of players will copy optimum builds, but I don’t think it’s so many as to say “almost all.”
tmp

“This is a necessary evil of a rich, classless skill system – the game has to let you fail.”

Not sure if i agree with this concept — there is no reason for a game to have “fail” state for the custom-built character, short of it being a result of having some skills which fail to provide enough utility compared to what the game expects any and every character to have. But that’d seem more like failure to properly design the pieces, than a necessity…
Peter S.

@Slyfeind, true, but one problem that I actually raised on the CO boards is one encountered in the original Asheron’s Call: you don’t want some fraction of your selectable powers to in fact be very cleverly disguised “Make My Character Suck” buttons. (Assess Creature, anyone?)

AC had/has de-facto classes within a relatively short amount of time, and new players were given no hint as to how strict their build would need to be in order to be effective by even mid-game.

It’s funny, in a way, that the CO game is running into the same problems between concept-builders and powergamers that the HERO System rules are pretty notorious for. If I decide to build a classically-styled mage in CO, I’ll perhaps take the Eldrich Blast, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, and one of the summoning spells. This character will pale in comparison to someone who stuck to a single powerset (Fire or Lightning only rather than mix-and-match, for example), preferably one known to be powerful, and makes the additional choices that are known to increase the potency of the build settled on. This is (highly) similar to a concept character in the pencil-and-paper version who dilutes his or her character points over multiple powers versus the one who just maxes out a V.P.P. of RKA- *ahem* stuffs them all into one deadly blast of doom (or god forbid just maxes Strength).

Now, that characters will have varying effectiveness isn’t automatically bad, if it’s even bad at all. But the size of the gap needs to be kept relatively small, so that non-ideal builds are still effective enough to be fun and worthwhile. Doubly so in a game whose main selling point is being able to envision and create *YOUR* hero, without these sorts of pitfalls. THAT’s what a lot of the whining on the boards is ultimately about.
Iconic

I haven’t played Champions, but I disagree in principle. If you can freely change your character, then choices are meaningless. You might as well just create character classes that are all the same and be done with it.

I don’t mean that you should never be able to change your mind, but it should really require more effort than doing an hour’s worth of brain dead daily quests.
Luk

@Arkazon “I think this perspective, just by itself, is a damaging one to take”

Like many other COH players I really wanted CO to succeed as the next main superhero MMO, but I also did not appreciate being conned and treated as if I do not understand what Cryptic was doing with CO and why it is the way it is.

Breaking new grounds is fine, but doing it in a subvertive manner, hiding the game’s arcade roots under NDA blanket almost until 2 weeks before its release, selling open beta keys through fileplanet and pre-order only, trying to sell the game lifetime subscritions before anyone had any chance to play it, changing game mechanics on the day of the release after selling those lifetime subs, promising the means to respec the character and then pricing the respec too high in order to hide the lack of content. I am not even going to dwell into dubious issue of MT paired with monthy sub model (maybe because of Xbox live?).

I would even bet that the entire Xbox control schema is only there because of the code salvaged from the Marvel Universe Online that Microsoft pull the plug on and not because they really wanted to develop an MMO for console users. Like i said, breaking new grounds is fine, doing it the way they did, is not.
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

Looks like the free reset is coming in tonight, and apparently it’s extended to all players – 3-day or otherwise – so if you were concerned about how badly your character was built, you’ll have a chance to rebuild it wiser for your mistakes.

It’s generally a good line of reasoning that templating is inevitable in an open-ended system – you don’t avoid a class-based system by having no classes, so much as you invite players discover how many viable classes there are in your game (usually far less of them than a class-based system) or be a gimped lesser.

Champions Online does have a fairly unusual balance in that there’s technically several “classes” in the various templates that, after leveling for awhile, everybody can borrow from the other classes what they want. It lends to a balance where you can be an incredibly powerful generalist — and probably should be, if you expect to be able to solo.

So, in this, I would say that instead of having the players gravitate to a few basic templates of effectiveness, we may actually see the opposite: over-generalization. If nothing else, it does make it much harder for the nerfhammer to slaughter you by killing the more overpowered power you may be leaning overheavily upon.
Gx1080

Once again, the difficulty of a skill system its that you need to stop people to: a)Become gimped and b)Become god of the tank-mages. I think that Lum said it once, cant remember where.

A its easy: A respec can be more exponentially expensive, but it must be tied to the number of uses or to the character level, not to the level of the skills. Punishing people for being new to your game it’s, well, stupid.

And yes, it needs a check for avoiding everyone to swap to the flavor of the month. As long as you got a cap for skills, you need let people reset said skills.

B it’s more difficult, but it comes with being in a MMO. Players will always find the loophole that allows them to be overpowered, the designers will nerf it, and players will whine about it. It’s unavoidable.
UnSub

@Luk: Sorry, but I have to comment on your perceptions:

“Breaking new grounds is fine, but doing it in a subvertive manner, hiding the game’s arcade roots under NDA blanket almost until 2 weeks before its release, selling open beta keys through fileplanet and pre-order only, trying to sell the game lifetime subscritions before anyone had any chance to play it, changing game mechanics on the day of the release after selling those lifetime subs, promising the means to respec the character and then pricing the respec too high in order to hide the lack of content.”

1) ChampO has been called an ‘action MMORPG’ for a long time with several devs commenting on it being more like MUA than a typical MMO. This wasn’t hidden at all.

2) There were a number of paths into open beta. Fileplanet and pre-order weren’t the only way.

3) The end of the lifetime sub coincided with launch. So those people who played it in alpha / closed beta / open beta / pre-start had the opportunity to play and decide if they wanted a lifetime sub. Cryptic could have possibly offered it in a better (or at least different) way, but it’s an over-generalisation to say that people didn’t have a chance to play and decide first.

4) The launch day patch was a stupid move. It should have been made back in closed beta, but not all the systems were implemented until late in closed beta – that issue is certainly Cryptic’s fault.

Those people who felt aggrieved enough with the changes were offered refunds on those lifetime / 6 months subs.

5) A full respec went out for free in a recent patch. Respec prices are being looked at and it has been recognised that they are too high.

It’s not a flawless launch and ChampO has a ton of issues about it – agree with Lum’s concerns about the opaqueness of the systems, which comes from them coming together as a package only about 2 weeks prior to the end of closed beta – but it certainly doesn’t need misinformation piled on top of it.
Belsameth

I’m actually enjoying it loads. Bought a lifetime sub during open beta and haven’t regretted it a second. I do agree that mostly the stats work weird tho and I think that most of the confusion arives from that. They’re working very different from the usual MMO’s. However, there’s a bunch of very good guides about them on the forums.
Paks

The free respec they’re giving now will help some but still won’t change other major issues with the game that were introduced or highlighted with the 9/1 patch. And Roper’s statement about the ship rudder needing to be turned full to the left when making changes in MMOs (not the exact words) is damn sure coming back to haunt him… daily.

CO is another MMO I’ve found to be very disappointing. I really liked the game in beta and into headstart (except for the XP fiasco in OB), but for some reasons devs have developed this habit (Mythic and FC did the same thing as well) of making sweeping game impacting changes real close to release or at release, that just aren’t proving to be healthy for the MMOs success.

I really believe Gamers solidify their interest or non-interest in an MMO in a short span following release. Major game changing patches at release really put a lot of players off. It gives the impression that your beta was a waste and you really don’t know what you’re doing. Do your major changes well into beta where they can be tested and given proper attention without turning your paying customers off, then do your minor (MINOR!) tweaks near the end.
Tremayne

I also think Cryptic have confused a lot of players by making all of the stats useful. MMO players are used to characters having about 20 different characteristics, only 3 of which are of any benefit to their class. This allows them to stack their chosen stats to high heaven and indulge in ritual whining about idiotic devs putting “useless” stats on an item “clearly intended for class X”.
In CO you pretty much get good use out of every stat (maybe you can get away with ignoring Presence if you don’t heal and never group and so don’t care about raising/lowering threat). If you stack one or two stats exclusively you’ll gimp yourself.
Brask Mumei

I don’t see what is so horrible about people recreating classes inside a open skill world. Ideally the developer will then take the popular “classes” and fold them into the intro as ready-set skill sets.

Cheap respec and open systems basically crowd-source your balancing. If the warlock “class” is crap, you just will end up with no one playing it, rather than 1/8th of your player base permanently gimped because they thought it sounded cool on character creation. You also have no need love all “classes” equally, like you do in a class based system. I think a lot of mileage could be achieved by being more explicit about not loving all skills equally in a skill based system. Have skills auto-rated by players use, and visible to players, so they can tell which skills are gimped.

Players switching to the build-of-the-day is a good thing. It keeps them active in optimizing and looking for the new build-of-the-day, or understanding why the new spec is better. It also seems odd that anyone should support the opposite position, that players should be forced to play bad configurations in the hopes that the devs will some day come down and make all configurations equal.

Free respec can also help *prevent* players from flocking to the same build. You will be much more willing to experiment on unusual configurations when you know you can safely respect back to the herd, but if this character is locked forever, I’m going to follow the board’s recommendation blindly.
EpicSquirt

So there is the danger room where you can try out stuff before you spec into it, there are character planners and there is the web where you can gather some info on what is a viable spec and then there is this blog entry.

I am confused .

Transparency sucks as do class based systems, give it a break please. I am sure there is some good way to play the non-cookie-cutter-specs for hardcore pleasures, even if it decreases the character’s overall effectiviness.
Luk

@UnSub
You are right those were my perceptions only, I am not close to Cryptic and have no insider information about why they did what they did, but everything I stated did happen and this is what it looked like to me.
1. NDA did not drop until Aug 17 so nobody was talking about it until then, so expecting people to buy lifetime sub to cat in the bag was what it looked like.

2. The closed beta was not available to everyone.

3. The lifetime sub offer was pulled off the table several days before launch initially, reinstated afterwards until Sept 1 since it generated a huge uproar in the community, it did look like bait and switch to me.

4. Saying that launch day patch was stupid doesnt justify why it was done and the reasons behind it.

5. They will continue fixing things and eventually find some kind of balance within the game, but that is what beta was for.

CO is not a bad game and it will get better with time, but the simple fact is that it is a console to PC port of an action game and not an MMO at all.
Gx1080

@EpicSquirt

You need to take in account that people NEW to the game don’t know about character planners and/or web sites.

Besides, the pressure of having your options permanent really kills the fun of a game.

@Luk

You know, people could always just connect an Xbox 360 controller or whatever hardware they want to their PCs. They can be connected to an USB port, if the game allows it just configure your buttons. I don’t know if CO allows that.
Freakazoid

So there is the danger room where you can try out stuff before you spec into it

The power house does not live up to its purpose. The test dummies are only good for putting out numbers as they relate to the dummy. They don’t fight back and they don’t move or use powers like mobs do, nor do their defenses match that of the average mob. Not even the dummy running track is any better. The travel power training room is redundant as you’ll get a good idea of which travel powers are better just by running around inside the rest of the room as that’s far more accurate as to the kind of obstacles you’ll run into in the real game. The only decent part of the center is the laser room, and even then the lasers don’t put you into combat which messes up the results of some defensive power testing.

The whole power house idea was a total misfire based on terrible feedback interpretations. Whoever was in charge of community feedback severely screwed up the message we were saying in beta, which was we didn’t like using UNTIL databases because grabing powers as we leveled were far more convenient. They took it to mean that UNTIL wasn’t offering anything different than what we had before and the cost to our playing time to constantly go back to it was unjustified. Their answer? A fucking fitness club. One that doesn’t reflect actual playing conditions and time completely wasted that they could have spent making the end-game actually matter or perhaps had more than one guy balancing powers.

NDA did not drop until Aug 17 so nobody was talking about it until then, so expecting people to buy lifetime sub to cat in the bag was what it looked like.

I hate to break your NDA virginity, but various gaming sites have NDA breakers all the time. Hell, I broke the NDA on the initial lead-up to the june release on corpnews. I still openly broke it afterwards, too. There were several sites that were mentioned in the closed beta forums where internet gumshoes tied closed beta participants to these forums, yet cryptic didn’t do anything most of the time (nobody ever caught me though, because no one reads corpnews anymore). Youtube had plenty of in-game clips from various NDA breakers, yet cryptic could not be bothered to have them taken down.
Luk

@Freakazoid
There is nothing new about gaming sites breaking NDA, however, the sources that I and most gamers actually monitor and trust with valid opinions about games usually do not break any NDA and for good reasons.
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

An interesting collections of half-truths, this.

1. NDA did not drop until Aug 17 so nobody was talking about it until then, so expecting people to buy lifetime sub to cat in the bag was what it looked like.

The lifetime subscriptions weren’t even available until later in August, open beta had been going on for quite some time, so you definately would have had an opportunity to get a good general idea how the game played by then.

2. The closed beta was not available to everyone.

By the open beta, that had been going on well from about mid-August was.

3. The lifetime sub offer was pulled off the table several days before launch initially, reinstated afterwards until Sept 1 since it generated a huge uproar in the community, it did look like bait and switch to me.

This was primarly due to them circulating emails saying it was “limited time” offer when it was supposed to be a “limited number” offer in their mind. Seeing how the offer was re-opened, it’s not bait and switch. Bait and switch means you put a different offer on the table instead.

4. Saying that launch day patch was stupid doesnt justify why it was done and the reasons behind it.

The developers actually outlined their reasons when the patch went through:
“The changes were PVE driven, there were issues with Passive Defenses being massively overpowered in PVE from where we wanted them to be. Basically folks were aoe farming mass piles of critters with no danger of ever dying, basically people were able to handle more than 2x the intended sized encounters, which obviously breaks the game because instead of things being challenging and fun fights people could just plow through everything without having to look at their life, consider tactics, escape from time to time, etc.”

So the reasons were explained, but the Champions Online complainer in general either did not understand these reasons or simply decided to reject them.

5. They will continue fixing things and eventually find some kind of balance within the game, but that is what beta was for.

There’s always a bit of ambiguity here with an MMORPG, you know?

CO is not a bad game and it will get better with time, but the simple fact is that it is a console to PC port of an action game and not an MMO at all.

Champions Online was always developed concurrently to be an XBox360 and PC Game. It’s not a port job because port jobs are where something is developed exclusively for the console before being moved to the PC.
Drakks

I’ve enjoyed Champions so far, honestly.

I didn’t find the skill system intimidating, and really my random choices have worked out just fine. The quests are standard leveling faire, they found a way to incorporate crafting and loot better than CoH did, and I think visually the game is pretty stunning (admitedly I’m on a high end system running @2560@1900). Also the inclusion of low level pvp was a good call, and even if it’s just team-deathmatch at the moment.. it’s pretty fun teleporting around and pewpewing people.

I’m so bored with WoW, it’s a nice paced change that I hope they can do something with. Time will tell I spose.
Peter S.

Worth repeating, since it was mentioned: the game CAN be played with a 360 controller plugged into your PC, and played quite well. (In fact, that really is THE reason the game feels fun and different to me.) There are a couple of quirks, where you’ll still be reaching for the mouse fairly often (for menus, inventory, etc.), but the running around beating up bad guys works great.

I liken it to playing FFXI: if you’ve never tried playing it with a controller, you’ve never had the full pleasure of the game.
Tremayne

@Luk
I’m a bit confused by your statement that Champions Online is “not an MMO at all”. CO has an open, persistent world, full chat options, a guild system… what is it exactly that you think is missing that would be needed to qualify as an MMO?

Also, as Geldonyetich has already pointed out, please stop referring to the lifetime subscription offer as a “bait and switch”, or at least go and find out what the phrase actually means instead of parroting some troll post you read on the forums. If they’d taken your money and given you lifetime access to Evony instead… THAT would be a bait and switch!
Joho

Having played a few weeks, I feel like they don’t give me nearly enough information to make good choices about powers, then punish me for misunderstanding their descriptions. Many powers scale in ways that aren’t obvious, or have synergies that only appear when certain advantages are taken. Rather than let people respec freely in the Powerhouse, they should simply put it on a time limit. Let players try a new power for an hour, then lock it in.

I also can’t believe how generic the setting is. I know that Marvel pulled out, but they created something much better in City of Heroes. A witch called “Witchcraft”?
Luk

@Tremayne
according wiki:
“A massively multiplayer online game (also called MMOG or simply MMO) is a video game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously.” CO can only support up to 100-125 of players per instance, that is not massive, it is a MOG: Multiplayer Online Game. I realized that the moment when I was trying to team up with a friend and we could not find each other even in the same instance just because we were in a different part of our levelling arcs in different instance within an instance with only around 90 players around us.

Also you are correct that I should not use “bait and switch” to describe what happenned to lifetime subs, because it was just a “bait”, since they pulled it off the table and then reinstated again so that everyone who thought they missed out grabbed as soon as they could.

Everything that i posted here is my personal opinion and I am not “parroting” anyone else’s ideas. I just feel very strongly about a game that i had huge hopes for and was in the end disappointed. I expected COH2 and what we got was Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 only without “Marvel” in it.
Luk

@geldonyetich
Half-truth, huh?
I have an email sent to a friend dated on Tuesday, August 04 with info about $200 lifetime offer, so do not tell me that it was available much later than that.
Peter S.

@Joho,

Please understand that some of that generic-ness comes from the Champions setting from LONG before the computer game. Most all of the official characters are in some sense or another gleefully made knockoffs or send-ups of the “real” comic hero characters, and even then we’re often talking the heros of a good two decades ago or so. Witchcraft (since you mentioned her) has been around, as a Champions-setting character, for a long time. And yes, her evil sister is named “Sinisister”. Comic book characters were often that corny back then.
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

Half-truth, huh?
I have an email sent to a friend dated on Tuesday, August 04 with info about $200 lifetime offer, so do not tell me that it was available much later than that.

I’m not sure which of those half-truths you’re objecting to, but if it’s in regards to when the open beta took place, a simple net search reveals a link (which I can’t post here lest it be auto-moderated) showing the open beta began on August 17th, and the game as released September 1st. So they had a good two weeks to try before they buy.

Even then, nowhere is it said that a Lifetime Subscription offer has to be a good game. People are free to jump in and waste their money on something they don’t enjoy all the time.

It’s to Cryptic’s credit that even knowing this and having their Terms of Service agreement clearly state that there will be no refunds for canceled subscriptions, they have apparently been giving refunds to unsatisfied lifetime subscription customers.

So, what are you complaining about there, again?

Another thing I didn’t mention earlier was that I was in closed beta about 3 months before the game’s release. It was pretty feature complete at that point, and they said they were going to release the game at that point.

They didn’t – they pushed it back 3 months and took this time out stitching up a bunch of bugs, balancing the powers, and adding a few unnecessary extra features (such as the power house). So your “they will continue fixing things and eventually find some kind of balance within the game, but that is what beta was for” complaint is a half-truth, too.

It’s also pretty damn pretty to say that re-opening a special discounted offer, because people asked for it, is a bait tactic. If they had decided not to, they would have made even more money, as it costs about 20% more for the non-discounted prices. (At least for the 6-mo offer – the lifetime offers were not available, but it was mentioned they would be made available later some time after release.)
The Alien

I thought Witchcraft’s sister was Talisman and the mission to save Witchcraft from her was called Sinisister.
fatbutt

Luk, by those standards I’m kind of at a loss as to what would actually qualify as an MMO. Are you saying that games need hundreds of people per instance/zone to count as massively multiplayer?
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

I half-agree with the instancing argument against MMOs, but I’d say there’s a certain level in which you’ve got enough players. Are you really going to meaningfully interact with 100 players, right now?

Another interesting tangent to consider it with is that there’s no multiple shards in Champions Online. All players of Champions Online can play with any other player, without having to hop servers. So, along these lines, it’s actually more MMO than a classical MMO.
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

It’s interesting to think about, really. Champions Online, despite being heavily instanced, pretty much replicates the behavior of a non-instanced MMORPG perfectly. You can and will run across other players by chance — usually killing the snagging your quest goal out from under you. If being inconvenienced by other players you bump into isn’t the essence of true massively multiplayer online gameplay, what is?

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