If you're sick of games with terribly boring combat systems like Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online, and you're looking for a game with a very Action Oriented Combat system, then give Champions Online a try.
I have a gunslinger character and she just mows sh&t down with her guns. Two pistols, shotguns, rifles, MISSILE LAUNCHER, grenades.... this character just kills things like crazy. Its really fun to play.
The game's graphics are extremely unique and very attractive.
Its a fun game.
What does it need? More content. But what content it has is really fun.
If you want an Action game... give it a shot, its only 29 dollars to own it.
I think a lot of people have either forgotten or never heard about the really serious and infamous billing fiasco with Hellgate: London, when they started up the monthly subscription system.
About how Bill Roper and his Co. had absolutely NO morale nor any Ethic values when it came to their customers when people saw their whole bank accounts emptied by this horrible error in their billing system! How these affected poor souls had to through hell (how ironic sadly) to get their money back! Some of them gotten into such trouble by it, that they weren't able to pay their bills for that month!
Customer support didn't want to hear about it. Posts of this issue on their forums were instantly deleted and their accounts perma banned! That's right! Their bank accounts emptied and then also not being able to login into the game afterwards, because you tried to bring this issue up in a desperate attempt to get your money back!
People couldn't remove their creditcard info. So they had to go through their Creditcard Company. Have their cards blocked and had to go through great lenghts to get all the transactions rolled back to recoup their money!!
This guy is dangerous and that's why I am still baffled up till this day why in earth Cryptic hired this con artist??! After what he pulled off with his Flagship Studios.
CO was off to a good start before this fat douchebag was brought on board. The Alpha version looked promising then it all went down hill. You can thank him for this rip off business model and the lack of content in the game. Expect the same of STO.
Still, its close to launch so perhaps in a year if the game is still round i'll try another trial.
Lol, I'm not ragging on you man but CO has launched already back in September. Although I do admit that right now it feels like beta. My personal joke on this is that, in game development, there's Closed Beta, then Open Beta and finally Paid Beta. CO feels like Paid Beta sometimes.
Ya, when I wrote that I started in on a rant about how wrong it is that the products launch so messed up that they've got to be around for a year or so before they become what they should have been at launch and how the industry uses its customer base. But then I erased it cause the subject has been beaten to death.
One thing though that isn't the necessarily the dev/pub's fault though and that is lack of community. I'll admit in CO it feels like its the dev's fault for the design of the game, but realistically even the best made game has no community at launch.
Roper is like the tip of the iceberg of WoW-cloning. He practically invented the old boring scheme of quests/intances/gearwhoring, he invented "go kill 10 rats'', Hellgate was a game exclusively about farming and grinding stupid quests to get more gear and to get dings.
A fucking shame. Every game he touches will turn into a wow clone.
I hope after this last failure of a clone they understand that (i hope they're reading this)
MMO'S ARE DOOMED TO FAIL IF THEY VAGUELY FEEL LIKE WOW.
Wow, now does anyone have anything nice to say about CO?
So far I haven't found anyone who has.
I love it, in-game the people playing it are generally having fun and staying positive.
Yes, I love it, I think it brings a new level of action to the MMO genre.
Lol, i've never seen in-game players who criticize the game. If one is against the game he will not be in-game. Your argument fails like WoW with spandex. In-game players are fricking fanboys who refuse reality, especially if they already paid for the game.
I am one of the few who happen to criticize games even inside game-chat. And they say i troll. And obviously i am reverse-trolled by 20 persons simultaneously.
For the rest it's same old story... combat changes slightly, but quests remain the same. Im glad to hear that people are finally realizing how stupid is a game that tells you what to do and where to go, objectives, places, actions, class, gear you can have, everything. I'm glad that people are more and more eager to invent their own activities, without pre-fabricated objectives.
Lol, i've never seen in-game players who criticize the game. If one is against the game he will not be in-game. Your argument fails like WoW with spandex. In-game players are fricking fanboys who refuse reality, especially if they already paid for the game. I am one of the few who happen to criticize games even inside game-chat. And they say i troll. And obviously i am reverse-trolled by 20 persons simultaneously.
SANDBOX, people.
You used the word "never", and then provided a counterexample to your own statement. What analogy would you use to describe the level of fail for your argument? WoW in spandex? Stillborn fetus? Whether or not someone enjoys a game is their opinion, and cannot be construed as "refusing reality."
Running the beta only twice per week all the way up until OB was a stupid mistake for them to bounce back now and say they didn't get enough data. We asked they open up the servers more days a week, they said no, we told them there were some balance issues with powers and small content gaps, and we told them to push back release a month, but instead they went ahead. The game is fun, for approximately 2 weeks, and then you've pretty much seen just about all there is. 2 meager content updates (if even that) in 3 months? Just not enough to keep most players occupied.
Then again, if you can rehash the same ol' characters in CoH I'm sure there are some that won't mind reserving themselves to some monotony just for the sake of it in CO.
I want to hear more about the RMT, on top of box and subscription cost, I mean other than the industry standard name change, server change one time fees stuff. Introducing endless microtransactions on top of a full subscription fee isn't right. Is that what they're doing? That's what an above post indicated, but I don't know.
I want to hear more about the RMT, on top of box and subscription cost, I mean other than the industry standard name change, server change one time fees stuff. Introducing endless microtransactions on top of a full subscription fee isn't right. Is that what they're doing? That's what an above post indicated, but I don't know.
yeah, thats what they're doing, but its okay because you don't have to buy the extra costumes, items, and so on. right?
To summarize: Costume packs (some of which can be unlocked in game), action figures, more char slots, name changes, retcons/respecs. Really nothing to get upset about.
ChampionFan: “To summarize: Costume packs (some of which can be unlocked in game), action figures, more char slots, name changes, retcons/respecs. Really nothing to get upset about.”
Unbelievable how every game has fanboys who serve as apologists for anything and everything.
/facepalm.
Pro business tip. Price your product according to industry standards or customers will know they’re getting ripped off and will go elsewhere.
If you have a product that people don’t know well, a product with a tiny following compared to the competition, don’t charge MORE for what people are suspicious is LESS than what they can find elsewhere.
If CO charges a box fee, AND a full subscription fee, then people are going to treat it like the plague and avoid it if the game also involves microtransactions for retcons/respecs and character slots, which are NOT industry standard for games currently using box and full subscription fees.
Industry standard? It looks like you are uninformed: vanity pets in WoW costs $10/each, whereas in CO they cost $1. Retcons in CO, which allow you to change all your skills, which in this classless game is tantamount to changing your entire class/race, cost $12.50, compare that to the costs and limitations of the corresponding service in WoW. Costume packs are similarly priced to what NCsoft charges in CoX.
Pro forum tip: get informed before speaking.
Why don't you actually look at what they sell on the Cryptic store, and try to argue to me that any of it is over priced compared to industry standards. Then I will show you some outdated pay2play game, from Sony, Blizzard, or NCsoft, that charges more for an equal or worse version of the same service.
Oh, I should clarify that retcons can be earned in game by reaching lvl cap, can be purchased at any time using in game currency, and have been given away to all players at least 3 times since launch, coinciding with major patches. Similarly, 5 costume slots can be unlocked for each character in the game, the C store is for those who want more than 5 costumes.
I agree with anyone who decries such things being availible only for MT in a p2p game: that would be unacceptable. Fortunately, in game respecs are very reasonable: even after hundreds of hours put into the game and over a dozen character, I have never purchased a respec from the C store, and I am not the type who prefers to grind then to pay, I am a working adult and would pay in a heartbeat instead of a 5 hour grind, but CO does not present the choice that way.
Still, its close to launch so perhaps in a year if the game is still round i'll try another trial.
Lol, I'm not ragging on you man but CO has launched already back in September. Although I do admit that right now it feels like beta. My personal joke on this is that, in game development, there's Closed Beta, then Open Beta and finally Paid Beta. CO feels like Paid Beta sometimes.
Ya, when I wrote that I started in on a rant about how wrong it is that the products launch so messed up that they've got to be around for a year or so before they become what they should have been at launch and how the industry uses its customer base. But then I erased it cause the subject has been beaten to death.
One thing though that isn't the necessarily the dev/pub's fault though and that is lack of community. I'll admit in CO it feels like its the dev's fault for the design of the game, but realistically even the best made game has no community at launch.
Agree with you completely that the trend these days seem to be Paid Beta, where the focus of the developers is simply to meet the budget deadline and not actually to put a worthwhile mmo out there.
Yup, there isn't much community but I think a few days ago, the devs removed the barriers for chat so you can basically chat across all the instances now. So for the time being at least people are now talking to each other.
And to respond to a previous poster on the powers issue. There is a problem with the powers although I don't think it's really the fault of the devs. The problem seems to rest more in the fact that the system CO has implemented is a classless system, meaning that people are free to mix and match. If you apply that to standard class systems, you can easily see what the problem is, e.g. imagine a mage with wizard nukes, warrior tanking abilities, healer spells and rogue dps, and you will see that an imbalance will occur. Frankly, I don't have a clue how CO is going to fix this without coming across as a nut case wildly swinging the nerf bat.
Champions Online has had a series of just absolutely horrible leadership decisions. I don't know if Roper is at fault or not, but:
(1) Only 2 days a week (and for only a few hours each day) closed beta testing.
(2) No stress testing at all during beta. The only thing they did was put some daemons/scripts on. LOL. I remember in the beta forums telling people that the scripts were pointless and having Cryptic fans defend them and saying it was all the stress testing they needed. But guess what happened when open beta started? Yep, it couldn't handle it. And guess what happened with release? Yep. LOLZ
(3) Lifetime subscription offer where they retroactively changed their webpage in an attempt to mislead people. Then their PR rep publicly posted on their forums, "Look, the offer says it is limited by supply and you can see this on our web page." It was only when people pointed to Google caches that they had to fess up.
(4) Absurd holiday event with hour lockouts on zones even though you needed over a dozen of them, leading to camping issues obviously not appropriate for a casual game.
(5) Balance patches upon release and xp changes that made it so they didn't have enough content to let people level.
Really, the list goes on and on. The upper management for CO has been just beyond pathetic.
He also felt the game launched well from a technological point of view..... There were not many, in a broader sense, reports of crashes and other major problems people have come to associate with MMO launches.
.....
While Champions Online didn't shatter sales numbers, Roper believes it has done more than enough to have a very solid future.
Almost certainly related. The major cause of launch crashes/problems is having more players than anticipated. Clearly CO didn't have to worry about that.
And still no indication on what those sales numbers were...
With Jack Emmert's pre-launch statement that he'd be skipping the light fantastic if they netted 100k subscribers and CoH's long history of just over 100k subscribers, I'm guessing it's lower than that, otherwise they'd be crowing about their success.
Pro business tip. Price your product according to industry standards or customers will know they’re getting ripped off and will go elsewhere. If you have a product that people don’t know well, a product with a tiny following compared to the competition, don’t charge MORE for what people are suspicious is LESS than what they can find elsewhere. If CO charges a box fee, AND a full subscription fee, then people are going to treat it like the plague and avoid it if the game also involves microtransactions for retcons/respecs and character slots, which are NOT industry standard for games currently using box and full subscription fees.
This concept seems to be beyond Roper.
Hellgate London did the same. Its online component fell so far short of what other MMOs offered and the $10 a month subscription they wanted to charge was outrageous for what they offered in return.
I put that aside as an obvious rip-off.
And now he's at it again, but this time he has a real (if flawed) MMO and is hitting players up for a subscription + microtransactions.
championFan, “Pro forum tip: get informed before speaking”
Industry standards, and getting what you pay for…
Nothing means anything when taken out of context.
Yes, two, and only two, so far, WoW pets cost 10 dollars. It’s disturbing and lame and worrisome that Blizzard went this direction, everybody knows it. Yes, Blizz is making a shameless money grab allowing and charging for race and faction change and all that,
BUT… you take it out of context.
Blizzard waited 5 years, 5, FIVE YEARS, amassing a huge following, while giving people lots of free pets and holiday extras, and a mountain of content. Some people don’t like the game and don’t like Blizzard, but you can’t deny that a lot of people have fun playing , and Blizzard delivered all of that before the RMT pets you mentioned ever appeared.
What Blizzard provided for the money compared to Cryptic and CO are incomparable.
Bill should make a great game that everyone loves and talks about and brings to their friends, BEFORE he and his buddies decide to get into microtransactions.
Blizzard has endless resources Bill didn’t and doesn’t? Smaller developers should have our sympathy and our dollars to support them? I would sympathize except for the horrible experience with Hellgate: London.
If you want to be an automobile manufacturer, that’s great, but you better have the resources to do it. Don’t make a two wheeled piece of garbage in your garage, then call it an SUV and charge me 40,000 dollars for it, trying to convince me to support ‘the little guy’ independent car maker. If your lack of resources lands you with an end product no better than a pile of poo, don’t polish it and lie to my face and call it gold, just don’t. Bill did, with Hellgate: London anyway.
Blizzard can afford to provide more with their large player base you say, whereas poor lil ol’ Bill can’t?
To point out the obvious, WoW started out small. There weren’t that many servers in the first 12 hours of day one, and it wasn’t remotely as evolved as it is today. That huge player base and all that money went to Blizzard because people enjoyed playing it. You might not like that game or the company, you might think WoW players are crazy, but that’s how it worked, it started small.
If you want to look at smaller models, Guild Wars has a much smaller player base and they make a game which lots of people like without charging a subscription.
Lotro has a much smaller player base, but they make a decent game for lower than usual box prices, and it’s easy to get a 10 dollar/month sub rather than 15 for that game.
I don’t care if you like those games or not, they demonstrate you can run an mmorpg frugally without looking to bleed extra dollars out of players here and there with a full court press of let’s say box AND sub AND microtransactions AND in-game advertising for instance. (I assume there’s no in- game advertising in CO like there was in HGL.)
ChampionFan, what matters is that you’re having fun. If you and others are having fun in the game, then that’s great. Gaming costs for you are so small that a little more or less probably doesn’t make much difference. I get that. I wish you and other CO fans all the luck in the world.
Maybe CO is a fun game, who knows, maybe it isn't. People criticize it in this thread, but I don’t know first hand. What I do know is that CO would have done better bringing more people in if they did not begin with all those microtransactions at the very start, and of course, if they didn’t have Bill Roper’s name stamped on it.
I will give kudos to Bill Roper for admitting finally the mistakes they made during beta, or at least the major one, not getting enough info from the testers; i.e.; not listening. The real question now is, since he has admitted fault what are they going to do to correct it? Are they going to actually improve the game or is it really just a diversion tactic still for STO?
I agree with this. A lot. Yet another small loss of credibility for the site, hope the "exclusive" screenshots for ST:O or whatever you got for this will be worth it. Klingon>English dictionaries hopefully? Add this slop to the pile of how, "ungrateful and whiny gamers are" articles you push out.
Also: "...all of these updates were added to the game for free, not exclusively to the Champions Store as some have feared may be the case with all such items."
How much do you think people bitching about the store actually changed this? I know MMORPG.com does nothing but spin spin spin the "new business models" for all of the games featured here but at least pay some lip service to the fact it was as bit more than paranoid rantings for players to think Roper and Co. were out to gouge. They charge for freaking respecs. Stop tripping all over yourself to thank Roper for providing all the free stuff. You want to speculate on something, speculate on the store and how it's not going anything like they planned it too?
Roper, I can not say enough bad things about him.
P.S. I wish this article was brought to us by Dragon Age.
Blizzard waited 5 years, 5, FIVE YEARS, amassing a huge following, while giving people lots of free pets and holiday extras, and a mountain of content. Some people don’t like the game and don’t like Blizzard, but you can’t deny that a lot of people have fun playing , and Blizzard delivered all of that before the RMT pets you mentioned ever appeared.
What Blizzard provided for the money compared to Cryptic and CO are incomparable.
I see your point, and it is a good one. The thing to understand is that CO is very much a spiritual successor to City of Heroes: Cryptic was forced to sell the CoH IP to NCsoft after the Marvel Online deal soured. The engine used in CO is a refined version of the CoH engine. Therefore in a sense Cryptic has already earned their 5 years of good reputation without microtransactions with CoH.
Sure, it's not the same as a sequel, but it is also not the same as coming out of nowhere (or from a failure like Hellgate) and expecting people to pay premium + MT. Similarly, when Blizzard releases its future MMO based on a new IP, they too can spend some reputation points to charge more money, even though that IP will not be 5 years old.
Bill should make a great game that everyone loves and talks about and brings to their friends, BEFORE he and his buddies decide to get into microtransactions.
Yeah, Bill failed to do that personally but the Cryptic team succeded with CoH, and the majority of that team (besides a few who moved to NCsoftto support CoH) is who has brought us CO.
What I do know is that CO would have done better bringing more people in if they did not begin with all those microtransactions at the very start, and of course, if they didn’t have Bill Roper’s name stamped on it.
It does appear that they have lost control of their public relations, I agree, and that is hurting the game a lot in terms of subscription counts.
How much do you think people bitching about the store actually changed this?
I you look at dev statements before launch, not at all: they have always maintained that it would be this way, despite all the slippery slope accusations that have not materialized. Really the slippery slopers should be acknowledging that they were wrong in teir paranoia, not patting themselves on the back thinking that their bitching changed anything.
They charge for freaking respecs.
They offer respecs for sale, but at least 3 free respecs have been given, and in game currency can be used to do partial or full respecs at anytime. Also, keep in mind that a respec allows you to change everything about a character besides their name and sex, so it is tantamount to race/class changes in other games, the difference is that in CO you can buy this with in game currency, and in WoW you must pay with real cash.
Blizzard waited 5 years, 5, FIVE YEARS, amassing a huge following, while giving people lots of free pets and holiday extras, and a mountain of content. Some people don’t like the game and don’t like Blizzard, but you can’t deny that a lot of people have fun playing , and Blizzard delivered all of that before the RMT pets you mentioned ever appeared. What Blizzard provided for the money compared to Cryptic and CO are incomparable. I see your point, and it is a good one. The thing to understand is that CO is very much a spiritual successor to City of Heroes: Cryptic was forced to sell the CoH IP to NCsoft after the Marvel Online deal soured. The engine used in CO is a refined version of the CoH engine. Therefore in a sense Cryptic has already earned their 5 years of good reputation without microtransactions with CoH. Sure, it's not the same as a sequel, but it is also not the same as coming out of nowhere (or from a failure like Hellgate) and expecting people to pay premium + MT. Similarly, when Blizzard releases its future MMO based on a new IP, they too can spend some reputation points to charge more money, even though that IP will not be 5 years old. Bill should make a great game that everyone loves and talks about and brings to their friends, BEFORE he and his buddies decide to get into microtransactions. Yeah, Bill failed to do that personally but the Cryptic team succeded with CoH, and the majority of that team (besides a few who moved to NCsoftto support CoH) is who has brought us CO. What I do know is that CO would have done better bringing more people in if they did not begin with all those microtransactions at the very start, and of course, if they didn’t have Bill Roper’s name stamped on it. It does appear that they have lost control of their public relations, I agree, and that is hurting the game a lot in terms of subscription counts. How much do you think people bitching about the store actually changed this? I you look at dev statements before launch, not at all: they have always maintained that it would be this way, despite all the slippery slope accusations that have not materialized. Really the slippery slopers should be acknowledging that they were wrong in teir paranoia, not patting themselves on the back thinking that their bitching changed anything. They charge for freaking respecs. They offer respecs for sale, but at least 3 free respecs have been given, and in game currency can be used to do partial or full respecs at anytime. Also, keep in mind that a respec allows you to change everything about a character besides their name and sex, so it is tantamount to race/class changes in other games, the difference is that in CO you can buy this with in game currency, and in WoW you must pay with real cash.
You claim the store didn't change at all, it's nice to see such devotion in a corporate entity. It never materialized because they realized how stupid it was and they could not in fact fleece the majority of players, just the devoted ones. I remember a few interviews with your hero (Roper) where they eluded to adding items that actually effected game play. You can dismiss it if you wish but it directly impacted the game's population in the end.
The whole MT thing was a farce they opened a thread on their own forum asking for input and then quietly archived it after it was over five thousand posts with not a single response. Respecs, for sale, period. Regardless if the system is linked to your "class" and your fixation with WoW, the point is they had that in place prior to patching some serious rifts in content and addressing issues that caused players to leave.
Comments
I think Champions Online is a fantastic game.
If you're sick of games with terribly boring combat systems like Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online, and you're looking for a game with a very Action Oriented Combat system, then give Champions Online a try.
I have a gunslinger character and she just mows sh&t down with her guns. Two pistols, shotguns, rifles, MISSILE LAUNCHER, grenades.... this character just kills things like crazy. Its really fun to play.
The game's graphics are extremely unique and very attractive.
Its a fun game.
What does it need? More content. But what content it has is really fun.
If you want an Action game... give it a shot, its only 29 dollars to own it.
I think a lot of people have either forgotten or never heard about the really serious and infamous billing fiasco with Hellgate: London, when they started up the monthly subscription system.
About how Bill Roper and his Co. had absolutely NO morale nor any Ethic values when it came to their customers when people saw their whole bank accounts emptied by this horrible error in their billing system! How these affected poor souls had to through hell (how ironic sadly) to get their money back! Some of them gotten into such trouble by it, that they weren't able to pay their bills for that month!
Customer support didn't want to hear about it. Posts of this issue on their forums were instantly deleted and their accounts perma banned! That's right! Their bank accounts emptied and then also not being able to login into the game afterwards, because you tried to bring this issue up in a desperate attempt to get your money back!
People couldn't remove their creditcard info. So they had to go through their Creditcard Company. Have their cards blocked and had to go through great lenghts to get all the transactions rolled back to recoup their money!!
This guy is dangerous and that's why I am still baffled up till this day why in earth Cryptic hired this con artist??! After what he pulled off with his Flagship Studios.
Cheers
CO was off to a good start before this fat douchebag was brought on board. The Alpha version looked promising then it all went down hill. You can thank him for this rip off business model and the lack of content in the game. Expect the same of STO.
Overhype & Offer Lifetime & Abandon & Move on to next project.
REALITY CHECK
Lol, I'm not ragging on you man but CO has launched already back in September. Although I do admit that right now it feels like beta. My personal joke on this is that, in game development, there's Closed Beta, then Open Beta and finally Paid Beta. CO feels like Paid Beta sometimes.
Ya, when I wrote that I started in on a rant about how wrong it is that the products launch so messed up that they've got to be around for a year or so before they become what they should have been at launch and how the industry uses its customer base. But then I erased it cause the subject has been beaten to death.
One thing though that isn't the necessarily the dev/pub's fault though and that is lack of community. I'll admit in CO it feels like its the dev's fault for the design of the game, but realistically even the best made game has no community at launch.
So far I haven't found anyone who has.
I love it, in-game the people playing it are generally having fun and staying positive.
So far I haven't found anyone who has.
I love it, in-game the people playing it are generally having fun and staying positive.
Yes, I love it, I think it brings a new level of action to the MMO genre.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
Roper is like the tip of the iceberg of WoW-cloning. He practically invented the old boring scheme of quests/intances/gearwhoring, he invented "go kill 10 rats'', Hellgate was a game exclusively about farming and grinding stupid quests to get more gear and to get dings.
A fucking shame. Every game he touches will turn into a wow clone.
I hope after this last failure of a clone they understand that (i hope they're reading this)
MMO'S ARE DOOMED TO FAIL IF THEY VAGUELY FEEL LIKE WOW.
the best blog of the net
So far I haven't found anyone who has.
I love it, in-game the people playing it are generally having fun and staying positive.
Yes, I love it, I think it brings a new level of action to the MMO genre.
Lol, i've never seen in-game players who criticize the game. If one is against the game he will not be in-game. Your argument fails like WoW with spandex. In-game players are fricking fanboys who refuse reality, especially if they already paid for the game.
I am one of the few who happen to criticize games even inside game-chat. And they say i troll. And obviously i am reverse-trolled by 20 persons simultaneously.
For the rest it's same old story... combat changes slightly, but quests remain the same. Im glad to hear that people are finally realizing how stupid is a game that tells you what to do and where to go, objectives, places, actions, class, gear you can have, everything. I'm glad that people are more and more eager to invent their own activities, without pre-fabricated objectives.
SANDBOX, people.
the best blog of the net
You used the word "never", and then provided a counterexample to your own statement. What analogy would you use to describe the level of fail for your argument? WoW in spandex? Stillborn fetus? Whether or not someone enjoys a game is their opinion, and cannot be construed as "refusing reality."
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
Running the beta only twice per week all the way up until OB was a stupid mistake for them to bounce back now and say they didn't get enough data. We asked they open up the servers more days a week, they said no, we told them there were some balance issues with powers and small content gaps, and we told them to push back release a month, but instead they went ahead. The game is fun, for approximately 2 weeks, and then you've pretty much seen just about all there is. 2 meager content updates (if even that) in 3 months? Just not enough to keep most players occupied.
Then again, if you can rehash the same ol' characters in CoH I'm sure there are some that won't mind reserving themselves to some monotony just for the sake of it in CO.
I want to hear more about the RMT, on top of box and subscription cost, I mean other than the industry standard name change, server change one time fees stuff. Introducing endless microtransactions on top of a full subscription fee isn't right. Is that what they're doing? That's what an above post indicated, but I don't know.
yeah, thats what they're doing, but its okay because you don't have to buy the extra costumes, items, and so on. right?
Anyone can look at all the microtransactions that are availible in Champions by going to this link:
http://champions-online.com/store
To summarize: Costume packs (some of which can be unlocked in game), action figures, more char slots, name changes, retcons/respecs. Really nothing to get upset about.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
ChampionFan: “To summarize: Costume packs (some of which can be unlocked in game), action figures, more char slots, name changes, retcons/respecs. Really nothing to get upset about.”
Unbelievable how every game has fanboys who serve as apologists for anything and everything.
/facepalm.
Pro business tip. Price your product according to industry standards or customers will know they’re getting ripped off and will go elsewhere.
If you have a product that people don’t know well, a product with a tiny following compared to the competition, don’t charge MORE for what people are suspicious is LESS than what they can find elsewhere.
If CO charges a box fee, AND a full subscription fee, then people are going to treat it like the plague and avoid it if the game also involves microtransactions for retcons/respecs and character slots, which are NOT industry standard for games currently using box and full subscription fees.
Industry standard? It looks like you are uninformed: vanity pets in WoW costs $10/each, whereas in CO they cost $1. Retcons in CO, which allow you to change all your skills, which in this classless game is tantamount to changing your entire class/race, cost $12.50, compare that to the costs and limitations of the corresponding service in WoW. Costume packs are similarly priced to what NCsoft charges in CoX.
Pro forum tip: get informed before speaking.
Why don't you actually look at what they sell on the Cryptic store, and try to argue to me that any of it is over priced compared to industry standards. Then I will show you some outdated pay2play game, from Sony, Blizzard, or NCsoft, that charges more for an equal or worse version of the same service.
Oh, I should clarify that retcons can be earned in game by reaching lvl cap, can be purchased at any time using in game currency, and have been given away to all players at least 3 times since launch, coinciding with major patches. Similarly, 5 costume slots can be unlocked for each character in the game, the C store is for those who want more than 5 costumes.
I agree with anyone who decries such things being availible only for MT in a p2p game: that would be unacceptable. Fortunately, in game respecs are very reasonable: even after hundreds of hours put into the game and over a dozen character, I have never purchased a respec from the C store, and I am not the type who prefers to grind then to pay, I am a working adult and would pay in a heartbeat instead of a 5 hour grind, but CO does not present the choice that way.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
Lol, I'm not ragging on you man but CO has launched already back in September. Although I do admit that right now it feels like beta. My personal joke on this is that, in game development, there's Closed Beta, then Open Beta and finally Paid Beta. CO feels like Paid Beta sometimes.
Ya, when I wrote that I started in on a rant about how wrong it is that the products launch so messed up that they've got to be around for a year or so before they become what they should have been at launch and how the industry uses its customer base. But then I erased it cause the subject has been beaten to death.
One thing though that isn't the necessarily the dev/pub's fault though and that is lack of community. I'll admit in CO it feels like its the dev's fault for the design of the game, but realistically even the best made game has no community at launch.
Agree with you completely that the trend these days seem to be Paid Beta, where the focus of the developers is simply to meet the budget deadline and not actually to put a worthwhile mmo out there.
Yup, there isn't much community but I think a few days ago, the devs removed the barriers for chat so you can basically chat across all the instances now. So for the time being at least people are now talking to each other.
And to respond to a previous poster on the powers issue. There is a problem with the powers although I don't think it's really the fault of the devs. The problem seems to rest more in the fact that the system CO has implemented is a classless system, meaning that people are free to mix and match. If you apply that to standard class systems, you can easily see what the problem is, e.g. imagine a mage with wizard nukes, warrior tanking abilities, healer spells and rogue dps, and you will see that an imbalance will occur. Frankly, I don't have a clue how CO is going to fix this without coming across as a nut case wildly swinging the nerf bat.
Champions Online has had a series of just absolutely horrible leadership decisions. I don't know if Roper is at fault or not, but:
(1) Only 2 days a week (and for only a few hours each day) closed beta testing.
(2) No stress testing at all during beta. The only thing they did was put some daemons/scripts on. LOL. I remember in the beta forums telling people that the scripts were pointless and having Cryptic fans defend them and saying it was all the stress testing they needed. But guess what happened when open beta started? Yep, it couldn't handle it. And guess what happened with release? Yep. LOLZ
(3) Lifetime subscription offer where they retroactively changed their webpage in an attempt to mislead people. Then their PR rep publicly posted on their forums, "Look, the offer says it is limited by supply and you can see this on our web page." It was only when people pointed to Google caches that they had to fess up.
(4) Absurd holiday event with hour lockouts on zones even though you needed over a dozen of them, leading to camping issues obviously not appropriate for a casual game.
(5) Balance patches upon release and xp changes that made it so they didn't have enough content to let people level.
Really, the list goes on and on. The upper management for CO has been just beyond pathetic.
He also felt the game launched well from a technological point of view..... There were not many, in a broader sense, reports of crashes and other major problems people have come to associate with MMO launches.
.....
While Champions Online didn't shatter sales numbers, Roper believes it has done more than enough to have a very solid future.
Almost certainly related. The major cause of launch crashes/problems is having more players than anticipated. Clearly CO didn't have to worry about that.
And still no indication on what those sales numbers were...
With Jack Emmert's pre-launch statement that he'd be skipping the light fantastic if they netted 100k subscribers and CoH's long history of just over 100k subscribers, I'm guessing it's lower than that, otherwise they'd be crowing about their success.
This concept seems to be beyond Roper.
Hellgate London did the same. Its online component fell so far short of what other MMOs offered and the $10 a month subscription they wanted to charge was outrageous for what they offered in return.
I put that aside as an obvious rip-off.
And now he's at it again, but this time he has a real (if flawed) MMO and is hitting players up for a subscription + microtransactions.
championFan, “Pro forum tip: get informed before speaking”
Industry standards, and getting what you pay for…
Nothing means anything when taken out of context.
Yes, two, and only two, so far, WoW pets cost 10 dollars. It’s disturbing and lame and worrisome that Blizzard went this direction, everybody knows it. Yes, Blizz is making a shameless money grab allowing and charging for race and faction change and all that,
BUT… you take it out of context.
Blizzard waited 5 years, 5, FIVE YEARS, amassing a huge following, while giving people lots of free pets and holiday extras, and a mountain of content. Some people don’t like the game and don’t like Blizzard, but you can’t deny that a lot of people have fun playing , and Blizzard delivered all of that before the RMT pets you mentioned ever appeared.
What Blizzard provided for the money compared to Cryptic and CO are incomparable.
Bill should make a great game that everyone loves and talks about and brings to their friends, BEFORE he and his buddies decide to get into microtransactions.
Blizzard has endless resources Bill didn’t and doesn’t? Smaller developers should have our sympathy and our dollars to support them? I would sympathize except for the horrible experience with Hellgate: London.
If you want to be an automobile manufacturer, that’s great, but you better have the resources to do it. Don’t make a two wheeled piece of garbage in your garage, then call it an SUV and charge me 40,000 dollars for it, trying to convince me to support ‘the little guy’ independent car maker. If your lack of resources lands you with an end product no better than a pile of poo, don’t polish it and lie to my face and call it gold, just don’t. Bill did, with Hellgate: London anyway.
Blizzard can afford to provide more with their large player base you say, whereas poor lil ol’ Bill can’t?
To point out the obvious, WoW started out small. There weren’t that many servers in the first 12 hours of day one, and it wasn’t remotely as evolved as it is today. That huge player base and all that money went to Blizzard because people enjoyed playing it. You might not like that game or the company, you might think WoW players are crazy, but that’s how it worked, it started small.
If you want to look at smaller models, Guild Wars has a much smaller player base and they make a game which lots of people like without charging a subscription.
Lotro has a much smaller player base, but they make a decent game for lower than usual box prices, and it’s easy to get a 10 dollar/month sub rather than 15 for that game.
I don’t care if you like those games or not, they demonstrate you can run an mmorpg frugally without looking to bleed extra dollars out of players here and there with a full court press of let’s say box AND sub AND microtransactions AND in-game advertising for instance. (I assume there’s no in- game advertising in CO like there was in HGL.)
ChampionFan, what matters is that you’re having fun. If you and others are having fun in the game, then that’s great. Gaming costs for you are so small that a little more or less probably doesn’t make much difference. I get that. I wish you and other CO fans all the luck in the world.
Maybe CO is a fun game, who knows, maybe it isn't. People criticize it in this thread, but I don’t know first hand. What I do know is that CO would have done better bringing more people in if they did not begin with all those microtransactions at the very start, and of course, if they didn’t have Bill Roper’s name stamped on it.
I will give kudos to Bill Roper for admitting finally the mistakes they made during beta, or at least the major one, not getting enough info from the testers; i.e.; not listening. The real question now is, since he has admitted fault what are they going to do to correct it? Are they going to actually improve the game or is it really just a diversion tactic still for STO?
I agree with this. A lot. Yet another small loss of credibility for the site, hope the "exclusive" screenshots for ST:O or whatever you got for this will be worth it. Klingon>English dictionaries hopefully? Add this slop to the pile of how, "ungrateful and whiny gamers are" articles you push out.
Also: "...all of these updates were added to the game for free, not exclusively to the Champions Store as some have feared may be the case with all such items."
How much do you think people bitching about the store actually changed this? I know MMORPG.com does nothing but spin spin spin the "new business models" for all of the games featured here but at least pay some lip service to the fact it was as bit more than paranoid rantings for players to think Roper and Co. were out to gouge. They charge for freaking respecs. Stop tripping all over yourself to thank Roper for providing all the free stuff. You want to speculate on something, speculate on the store and how it's not going anything like they planned it too?
Roper, I can not say enough bad things about him.
P.S. I wish this article was brought to us by Dragon Age.
Blizzard waited 5 years, 5, FIVE YEARS, amassing a huge following, while giving people lots of free pets and holiday extras, and a mountain of content. Some people don’t like the game and don’t like Blizzard, but you can’t deny that a lot of people have fun playing , and Blizzard delivered all of that before the RMT pets you mentioned ever appeared.
What Blizzard provided for the money compared to Cryptic and CO are incomparable.
I see your point, and it is a good one. The thing to understand is that CO is very much a spiritual successor to City of Heroes: Cryptic was forced to sell the CoH IP to NCsoft after the Marvel Online deal soured. The engine used in CO is a refined version of the CoH engine. Therefore in a sense Cryptic has already earned their 5 years of good reputation without microtransactions with CoH.
Sure, it's not the same as a sequel, but it is also not the same as coming out of nowhere (or from a failure like Hellgate) and expecting people to pay premium + MT. Similarly, when Blizzard releases its future MMO based on a new IP, they too can spend some reputation points to charge more money, even though that IP will not be 5 years old.
Bill should make a great game that everyone loves and talks about and brings to their friends, BEFORE he and his buddies decide to get into microtransactions.
Yeah, Bill failed to do that personally but the Cryptic team succeded with CoH, and the majority of that team (besides a few who moved to NCsoftto support CoH) is who has brought us CO.
What I do know is that CO would have done better bringing more people in if they did not begin with all those microtransactions at the very start, and of course, if they didn’t have Bill Roper’s name stamped on it.
It does appear that they have lost control of their public relations, I agree, and that is hurting the game a lot in terms of subscription counts.
How much do you think people bitching about the store actually changed this?
I you look at dev statements before launch, not at all: they have always maintained that it would be this way, despite all the slippery slope accusations that have not materialized. Really the slippery slopers should be acknowledging that they were wrong in teir paranoia, not patting themselves on the back thinking that their bitching changed anything.
They charge for freaking respecs.
They offer respecs for sale, but at least 3 free respecs have been given, and in game currency can be used to do partial or full respecs at anytime. Also, keep in mind that a respec allows you to change everything about a character besides their name and sex, so it is tantamount to race/class changes in other games, the difference is that in CO you can buy this with in game currency, and in WoW you must pay with real cash.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.
You claim the store didn't change at all, it's nice to see such devotion in a corporate entity. It never materialized because they realized how stupid it was and they could not in fact fleece the majority of players, just the devoted ones. I remember a few interviews with your hero (Roper) where they eluded to adding items that actually effected game play. You can dismiss it if you wish but it directly impacted the game's population in the end.
The whole MT thing was a farce they opened a thread on their own forum asking for input and then quietly archived it after it was over five thousand posts with not a single response. Respecs, for sale, period. Regardless if the system is linked to your "class" and your fixation with WoW, the point is they had that in place prior to patching some serious rifts in content and addressing issues that caused players to leave.