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Champions Online

Retconning - Denied

Champions Online naturally includes a system to respec your character. Respec is called "retcon", in true comic book style. During beta it was effectively free and it was easy to toss out unimpressive or bugged powers and keep on playing. On the launch day of the official head start, retcon was broken - probably more or less on purpose. What used to be free or almost free suddenly had a price tag that had nothing to do with the reality. After tutorial, my cost to retcon a single power was 311 resources while I earned 347 during the tutorial - less than third of the total cost of full retcon (around 1100 resources).

If you plan on just saving up more, there is a problem - as you level up, the goalposts keep moving. As you save resources and inevitably gain levels while doing so, costs to retcon your powers keep going up faster than you can earn resources and less realistic it will be to fully retcon your character if you are unhappy with your early power picks. While it is possible to wind back a couple of choices by blowing every bit of resources you have gathered up to that point, real retconning to fix early mistakes is effectively impossible.

Champions Online happily combines this system with the "official launch day patch" that completely messed up combat balance by nerfing defensive powers to the ground, nerfing many offensive powers in various ways while increasing henchmen damage considerably at the same time. Suddenly many perfectly valid builds were utterly unplayable, constantly dying to the new and improved henchmen. Cryptic has promised a full free respec for characters created before the rebalancing patch but it is apparently something they never considered having to offer - so it is delayed indefinitely until it can be implemented.

Indirectly, this ensures that the whole economy is completely borked - we have tons of people who are selling everything and anything they can get their hands on, just to scourge resources for retconning mistakes and hardly anyone is buying anything. Related to this, the crafting system included rewards you with far more skill points when you dismantle excess loot drops than if actually building something. This leaves everyone with their inventory full of worthless components that nobody has much use for. Overall, crafting feels unfinished and thrown together at the last minute, lacking polish and balancing.

PvP = LOL

Those seeking for interesting PvP action can forget it - Champions Online contains only arena PvP, "Hero Games". True, it is possible to play these to advance your character and gain "endgame" equipment but PvP is horribadly broken due to power balance being completely out of whack. There are already silly ubercombos running around that are almost impossible to kill (they'll just Tunnel or Teleport away) while retaining ridiculous damage output. Everyone has also found the block key so the only reliable way to kill someone is to burst him with multiple people. If Cryptic didn't have time to balance the powers properly even for PvE, this isn't exactly unexpected. Only griefers who enjoy dominating with overpowered builds need to apply.

There are also reports that the level 40 PvP rewards are currently broken and have worse bonuses than common mission drops available even before level 40. Guess nobody got around to testing and balancing that stuff either.

Microtransactions?

Champions Online is a traditional subscription-based MMO - about $15 / 13 EUR / 9 UKP a month. Yet it also contains a microtransaction store. This created a predictable storm - it appeared that Cryptic was trying to double dip by charging subscription fee while also stacking the game with optional (yet usually anything but optional) microtransaction items as is the common style with Asian MMOs. Cryptic has defended their move by promising that the microtransaction store will include only cosmetic items - emblems, costume pieces, pets or things usually offered for a separate service fee, character renames or extra character slots. Supposedly, "any micro-transaction that has a game effect can also be earned in the game through play".

At this point, it is hard to say how things will work - so far the C-points store appears to include only purely cosmetic "action figures" that work just like non-combat pets do in WoW. In other words, pure fluff. Microtransaction store is also one of those things that did't quite get finished for launch - while it is possible to buy items with C-points that were included with some pre-order deals, it is currently still impossible to buy more C-points with real money.

It is very likely that the store will get more things to buy but the details are kept under wraps until you can actually buy C-points. I will withhold my final word on this subject until Cryptic finally shows where they are going with this - so far there is nothing that effectively forces you to start spending on C-points, but it is a delicate subject. Western gamers commonly hate being nickel-and-dimed to death or seeing their achievements in game overshadowed by those who buy their way to victory with real money.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Character CreationPage 3: Leveling, Powerhouse, UIPage 4: Combat, Nemesis SystemPage 5: The Fail Sector: Unfinished, UnpolishedPage 6: Fail, Part 2: Respec Problems and MorePage 7: Visuals, PerformancePage 8: Summary, Scoring

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