champions

I mentioned yesterday that there was a new Ask Cryptic column where they started the process of fixing the mess caused by the Vibora Bay announcement. Well today Cryptic release a new State of the Game from Chronomancer as well as small news post from Rekhan with a bullet points summary of the coming expansion and two screen shots.

Here’s the highlights from the SotG message.

Kitchen Sink Patch

Roper starts off with a mea culpa regarding the all of the problems cause by the Kitchen Sink patch. Basically Cryptic admits to not having done sufficient testing, and has attempted to correct this by increasing the size of their QA team and instituting better internal controls to keep changes from STO and other projects from providing nasty surprises.

Communication Improvements

He also expands on what they stated in the previous day’s Ask Cryptic about how they’re intending to improve communication:

• bi-weekly columns for Ask Cryptic and State of the Game
• GM blog for a community channel to the support staff
• monthly chat via IRC with the devs
• an “all-company supergroup” to provide a more visible company presence in the game and additional PvP events
• website overhaul and additional web content: monthly fiction releases, screenshots, fan art, wallpaper, and developer special features (intended to provide the dev’s point of view on the game)

There is a lot of good stuff here. Most of this is specific enough that the community will be able to easily grade Cryptic’s follow through in the coming months, and I can guarantee that there are some heavy forum users keeping a keen eye on how well Cryptic does fulfilling these promises.

Vibora Bay Revelation Expansion

They’ve changed the name of the upcoming expansion from Vibora Bay to Revelation, supposedly this reflects the change from working name to release name. There’s a short mention of a new arch-villain Therakiel (half-angel/demon) who is the focus of the expansion. Then Chronomancer gets into the part most of the Champions player community was waiting for: the expansion will be free. There’s not much additional details beyond general promises of new powers, new play areas, etc. He repeated that the content is designed for the 37-40 range with a new level 40 repeatable lair. Roper was also very careful to emphasize that the change from paid to free doesn’t reflect the quality or size of the expansion in anyway, and closes out the post by promising additional details “very soon.”

Rekhan’s News

Most of the information here is a summary of what Bill already posted in the SotG message, with one new and important detail. Champions Online – Revelation will be released in mid-March of 2010.

Forum Followup

There’s a Chronomancer followup post in the SotG forum thread where he addresses a couple of additional player concerns.

First, they are looking at some technical issues to tie the PTS and Live server accounts together to provide testers with in-game rewards for helping out.

Second, he provides a clarification of his mention about the quality level of the expansion having nothing to do with the pricing change:

What I am saying is that we didn’t consider the expansion to be sub-par and so we’re just giving it to you, or that in some way you’re getting less than we always intended because we’re not charging for it. I am ecstatic that we can provide this level of content to you for the low, low price of nothing! We’re having an internal play test right now and it’s been great to see people that haven’t been through the zone before be blown away at how it looks and plays.

Third, Roper tries to address the whole “STO stole our developers” idea that a lot of players have used as a reason why the game are languished the last few months in regards to patches and communication, saying they’ve been focused solely on the upcoming Revelation expansion and not losing resources to STO.

For me, the best part is the last sentence of his post:

We don’t expect one post to fix everything, but it’s our first step of many in the right direction!

I’m happy to see that they’ve reconsidered the idea of a paid expansion six months after launch, and I like what they’re promising regarding increased communication with the community from all levels of the Cryptic Champions team. Two days of announcements are a good start, but they are only a start.

So like I said yesterday, now we just need to see if  the Cryptic Champions team can deliver on their promises.

There was a new Ask Cryptic yesterday. I couldn’t find a link, but I think this is the first one since before the game launched. Cryptic picked seven questions out of a 32 page, 320 post forum thread, and while that seems like a very small percentage I do think they picked all of the questions that the general community was most interested in finding out answers to.

Because of the recent uproar regarding the last State of the Game message, a lot of the questions were regarding future plans for the game both in terms of design and communication:

Jackalope: …you can expect to see new adventures every other month (roughly). The content will be far more story based and focused on the background of the game.

Chronomancer: …we’re going to be focusing more on creating content to provide multiple paths of advancement within Champions Online. The plan is to create more of what you want in smaller bites so we can do them on shorter timelines.

Arkayne: …We’re stepping up the communication. We’re going to do more Ask Cryptics, more Dev Chats, we’re going to be in-game, playing with you more, Our GMs are going to start letting you know the status on the current bugs, and the entire development team is going to start being more active on the forums.

As someone who enjoys theme based characters, I was especially happy to see this:

IchbinVol: Will there be any reason to have a theme based character in the future? Perhaps a synergy bonus for having a certain set of skills?

BigOtter: That’s actually one of the goals of our Tier 4 powers being introduced in our upcoming expansion – to provide high-end thematic meta-powers for each of the power groups.

Cryptic does seem to be making a start on their forum promises from last week about more and better communication. They also seem to have a proper sense of urgency:

Arkayne: …Oh, and that “soon” we’re talking about up there, that’s not a “soon(tm)” that’s a soon, as in as soon as humanly possible soon.

I do want to say, that I’m still enjoying the game. I’ve not yet reached the level cap and I’ve been leveling slowly enough that all of the content holes in the late game seem to be getting filled before I get there. My main hero, Silver Hunter, is level 35 and still has a full mission log. I’d not really been concerned about direction and communication issues, except peripherally, until the SotG announcement of Vibora Bay. While it is too soon to say for sure, it does seem that Cryptic is now genuinely aware of their PR issues and is starting to address them.

So now we just need to see if  Cryptic’s Champions team can follow through.

I took the day off from work yesterday because it was my birthday and played video games all day. With a wife, a 16 month old son, a job, a home, and two dogs, this was a big deal to get a whole day (guilt free) and was very very fun. It isn’t often that you can give yourself time, but that’s what it feels like I did yesterday. I played a about 2 hours of of LotRO and and hour of EVE, but most of my time (nearly 7 hours) was in Champions Online. There also happened to be a big patch yesterday in Champions and it caused some issues.

Lag? Lag. Lag!

I started in Monster Island and was having a lot of problems with rubber banding, freezes, and stutters. I found Millennium City to be a lot smoother (which is counter to some peoples experiences based on the forums). I also did a little crafting and didn’t have any of the item loss some people were complaining about. I don’t remember the client patching anything, but the lag issues did seem to be mostly solved by yesterday evening. I’m planning to pop in tonight and see if Monster Island is still having issues.

As a side note, even in the middle of the day on a week day there were plenty of players on the server. I was able to group up several times for missions within minutes of asking in zone chat.

Paid Expansion Already?

Besides the patch and lag issues, there was also a State of the Game released two days ago. Most of it was interesting to me but not exciting until I got to the part about a new zone, Vibora Bay. I’m not at the cap yet, my main is at level 34, and I’m still doing Monster Island content. I haven’t done the crisis mission for Lemuria yet. Still, new content is always a good thing. The expansion wording that Roper used didn’t even click for me until I was reading through the forum follow-ups and say this one from Daeke. Paid expansion before the game has been out a full year?

Of course the nerd rage on the forums has gone super nova.

My initial reaction was disappointment. When I read the SoG message I assumed that this was a free update. I think partly because Champions now occupies the same position in my mind that City of Heroes used to and CoH always had a lot of free content updates. After some thought though, I’ve gone from disappointment to wait and see. First, I realized that I just paid $20 for a mini-expansion from Turbine. Second, I had skimmed Daeke’s post the first time and missed  a very important not that he used. This expansion is not going to be full box price. Third, there are way too many details still missing to have any kind of valid opinion. All we know right now is Vibora Bay has content for levels 37-40 and that it will cost some amount of money.

So, I’m just going to wait and see. The only thing I’ve really decided in the last few days is I need to not read forums for MMO’s, with the exception of the Dev Tracker, in order to preserver my sanity and positive outlook on life.