Champions Online: The No-NDA Merged Edition

[Modern Angel]

Well the question is whether the torrent is even going to help since we still have to do SOME patching and we can't get past half a percent

[Montague]

You guys are so impatient.

HEY BUDDY WE'VE PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THIS GAME oh wait...

[taolurker]

Well, at least this time the patcher did something different.

First, this time it did not actually go blank on it's own, it gave a message at the bottom Server Not Responding, and STILL didn't show a Cancel button, only the Patch button. So when I attempted to click "Patch" to see if it started again from where it left off, I assumed maybe it would continue.

Nope.. Instead it totally crashed.

This is what it showed as an error reporting screen:



Now that's a quality error reporter.


Then after this I promptly nuked the patcher from Task Manager (again) and attempted to open the patcher over.

This time the whole patcher came up like a website that's down:




In better news the torrent is now near 15%.

[Lantyssa]

Based on the screenshots and videos I've seen today and comments from people in this thread with similar taste in game visuals to mine, I think I'll pass on even bothering to try the preview clusterfuck open beta.  The game visuals just look awful.  Even if the game play turned out to be fun, that horrible cel shading just looks so distracting I wouldn't be able to enjoy the game.

I forgot to mention something in my spiel that you reminded me of.  Very often when you see screenshots of a game you'll hear "you need to see it in action".  This was true of WoW and a few others that I can recall.

In Champions, the screenshots are actually better than seeing it in motion.  It's... bizarre.

[fuser]

Ok, so I installed the newer build from the filefront link ( ChampionsOnline_FPOB_v9.20090815.6.exe ) without uninstalling the previous version.

Very quickly it shot up to ~40% with ~5mb of data downloaded.



Currently at 53.9% patched with 8261KB downloaded 

[Threash]

Ok, so I installed the newer build from the filefront link ( ChampionsOnline_FPOB_v9.20090815.6.exe ) without uninstalling the previous version.

Very quickly it shot up to ~40% with ~5mb of data downloaded.



Currently at 53.9% patched with 8261KB downloaded  

Can you post the link for that?  Well, i found it but it says file is unavailable.

[Numtini]

Impressions of a disgruntled tester.  This guy is obviously biased against the game, so keep that in mind.

I don't think he's biased. Having been in beta, that review seems very fair. Possibly even charitable.

Please to take note of his griping about the beta. I didn't play constantly, but I'm pretty sure it's only been up one or two full weekends. The one I played on was the full weekend two weeks ago and the servers went down regularly. The rest of the closed beta afaik were one evening a week deals.

[HaemishM]

The closed beta was idiotic. Until about a month or two ago, they only ran 2 sessions a week - Wed. night and Fri. night for about 4-5 hours. Friday night's session was longer. Then they shifted it to 12-hour sessions on the same days. That was it. Suddenly, open beta and release are announced and they still didn't bring the servers up to 24/7. You don't run the final stages of beta like that. You are in essence asking your players to work for you and you don't get to see how your servers will truly perform in a live environment. I think that was part of the reason I couldn't get through the game - the play times were just so limited that the lackluster interest I had in the game didn't compel me to accommodate their restrictive testing schedule.

[fuser]

Ok, just about done with this garbage. Latest issue is "Champions Online.exe" leaking RAM like a sieve during patching ~3-5MB every 60seconds stuck at 53.9% patched.

[Signe]

Suddenly it's flying.  I've gone from 19% to 56% in about three minutes.

[koro]

I'll say this for the big update today: now that anti-aliasing actually works properly, the cel shading looks a lot less horrible on the eyes.

[Ozzu]

Suddenly it's flying.  I've gone from 19% to 56% in about three minutes.

Same, but then it stalled out. I relaunched the patcher, and now it's back to 0% with 8 mb downloaded. Ugh.

[Threash]

Suddenly it's flying.  I've gone from 19% to 56% in about three minutes.

Same, but then it stalled out. I relaunched the patcher, and now it's back to 0% with 8 mb downloaded. Ugh.

But the total needed to download is lower.  At least mine went down from 3. some gigs to 2.8 when i relaunched.

[taolurker]

Suddenly it's flying.  I've gone from 19% to 56% in about three minutes.

Same, but then it stalled out. I relaunched the patcher, and now it's back to 0% with 8 mb downloaded. Ugh.

Hahaha mine did the same exact thing.. was up near 55% but didn't look like it was moving. Sure enough 2 minutes later Connection to Server lost again, no way to cancel or restart it, so I also am back to 0%.

This is the worst patcher I think I have experienced in 10 years of MMOs.

[Kageh]

Impressions of a disgruntled tester.  This guy is obviously biased against the game, so keep that in mind.

I think most of what he says is spot on. I've been in the closed beta for a few months myself and that sums it up pretty good.

Some other random points that I would add are:

The whole power concept is made obsolete by the fact that you usually need only 3 attacks and 1 defense to make it through the whole game: Endurance builder, single target big attack and AOE attack. If you're lucky, you might even end up with your biggest AOE attack being sufficient for single target killing as well and thus play with 2 buttons from 1 to 40. The game includes lots of attacks for each power set (framework), but since it mostly boils down to finding the best damage/endurance ratio and spam it incessantly, there's no need for diversity. Unless you're roleplaying.

Flight type travel powers are vastly superior to non-flight type travel powers and up to the end of the beta Cryptic found no way of making non-flight travel useful or even remotely comparable to flight. The reason for that is that getting aggroed by a random mob, even one 20 levels  below you, puts you in a state of "travel suppression" that either greatly reduces your travel speed or completely turns it off. If you get it turned off, you might even kill yourself, as often reported by lots of masochistic superjump users that managed to crash to death all over Canada.

Block is overpowered and trivializes most of the PVE content. Unless you're getting alpha striked, the "twitch" nature of combat is reduced to "watch for the exclamation mark over the mob head and press block". Even though the game requires you to actively block to get the benefits of it, some block powers are way better than others because they have a "lingering" type of effect, allowing you to spam your block key for a brief moment, get a few seconds of increased block resistance - +250% to all resistances - and start spamming attacks while still counting as blocking. This'll probably get nerfed soon though.

The grouping mechanics are broken to the point of being totally cumbersome. Since there is no class concept, a group is basically a band of soloers teaming up to rip through stuff faster. Everyone is self-sufficient and a CoX scrapper with defensive powers and heals there, so lumping 6 of them together leads to everyone zipping around somewhere around the map and killing stuff, with little to no coordination and communication. Mind you, this all with closed beta testers which are otherwise a lot more helpful and communicative than the average retail player ;) And don't even get me started on the fun of grouping with flyers as a non-flyer "Hey guys, mind waiting 5 minutes for me while I run around every tree in my way while you are already killing stuff at the other end of the zone?".

Instaces are often of the size of about one room or 2-3 rooms connected through a tunnel, making you feel quite awkward. It often takes longer to zone in and out than it takes to complete a misison in an instance. Most "signature" or "special supervillains" that you meet up to 30 reside in some sort of closet that you enter through zoning and their missions take about 1-5 minutes to complete.

On the note of Marvel recycling: Grond/Desert is so Hulk. Imagine a whole secret military desert base built around the concept of containing a huge, powerful, mutated, super strong but dumb giant. Incidentally, the giant was the result of radiation experiments gone wrong. He also happens to be too strong to keep imprisoned and is found running and superjumping around the desert terrorizing low level players (in a manner very reminescent of the old Sand Giants/Oasis of Ro days of Norrath past) shouting "Grond smash!" or somesuch. Oh, yes, he has four arms. And looks very different from that OTHER green, super strong, mutated, dumb giant.

The client performance was horrible. Early beta experiences were so-so, but the final  closed beta weeks turned it into unplayable for me, and that on a computer that was vastly superior to the recommended specs (i7 with a GTX280). Since the game used to run acceptable before that, I still have hope it was just some debug stuff that can be gotten rid of easy enough.

In spite of all the flaws noted in the review - which I agree with - and my gripes, I found the game to be fun at times, especially in little doses. It reminds me a lot of the  simple and primitve 2d brawlers of my childhood (Double Dragon and all that) where you were just running from A to B and ripping through stuff on the way. In a nostalgic fit, I can run around smashing things, never in danger of dying, zipping through a game that at times plays like a harmless version of <insert generic 3d brawler  name here>. The combat system seems to actually allow for some strategic variety and interesting PVP, and maybe they'll be able to squeeze something interesting out of it. Too bad nearly 1 year of beta obviously wasn't enough for that.

The character creator is still the biggest reason to get into this. And the first few levels of smashing fun and playing dress-up doll for boys. Too bad male imagination statistically only comes up with about 50% mecha, 40% demons and 5% utter crap, but that is another story (there are lots of furries actually too, now that I think about it).

Compared to a single-player invest, this can still be a lot of fun for my €35,-. I'll pick it up and see  what it looks like at the end of the free days.

[tmp]

But the total needed to download is lower.  At least mine went down from 3. some gigs to 2.8 when i relaunched.

It sounds similar to what LotRO uses for their patcher. If it's (re)started the progress is always reported starting from 0 no matter how many files are there actually left to patch, or were patched already. Which is pretty confusing unless one pays close attention.

[Ghambit]

You guys are so impatient.

HEY BUDDY WE'VE PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THIS GAME oh wait...

"you're playing it for free!  it's a beta!" durr durr durr  
Irrelevant, and a waste of forum space.  This thing releases in 2 weeks, they've gotten masses of money off of pre-orders and lifetime subs, and it's been in "beta" for a damned long time.  There's no excuse for this type of failure at this stage.  And regardless, the fact that "it's a beta" does not give MMO devs carte blanche to be total asshats.  Quite the contrary imo.  If you've got a (open) beta running, it behooves you to implement it properly or suffer the marketing consequences, let alone the design consequences.  And you've got to be quite the imbecile to think the front office (and their investors) at Cryptic is saying "oh well, it's a beta... it's free...  so we can suck all we want."  So, just as a warning to the impending posts in this thread stating the obvious fact it's a beta - dont.

fin

[UnSub]

I haven't played since the last patch, but I'm always worried when a company increases mob difficulty while nerfing defensive powers at the same time. One or the other, but not both at the same time please.

[Kageru]

Champions Online: How to create a mediocre MMO.

tl;dr. The game is competent but mediocre, I pity those who bought a lifetime sub.

1. Have a weak, derivative or inappropriate foundation for the game.

In the case of champions online the original design seemed to be most strongly
formed by the console environment and existing material (Marvel ultimate alliance).
These are fine as considerations or influences but the design process also has
to address what the game will be adding that is new or has interesting gameplay
possibilities. Like any large production getting this answer clearly defined in
the early stages will save a lot of cost compared to trying to retro-fit a solution
later.

The main gameplay influence was on a more action oriented environment, no doubt
encouraged by the console gameplay. Goals included no downtime, high character
mobility and more engaging combat in highly varied environments. In practice though
some of these things are very hard to do in an MMO environment. And some of them
have immediate costs. For example with no downtime how do you encourage a player
to manage energy rather than just constantly use their biggest attack? How do you
have engaging combat in an environment that has to deal with lag and the resulting
uncertainty in character positions. Meanwhile having mobile characters immediately
limits how interesting power animations can be. Solving these problems in an
interesting way would provide a firm foundation for a game. Or you could...

2. Build the world first, worry about fun later.

It was fairly clear that they focused first on getting the engine and world working.
When beta started the game world was in a reasonably advanced stage but the mechanics
were still quite basic. It felt like they'd been farmed out to different staff members
which really limited the cohesiveness of how the powers interacted to form good
gameplay. In addition I can assume each developer had a fair amount of grunt work
such as fleshing out powers or designing itemization. Faults in the game world, such
as the chronically bad UI or massively undocumented powers are more obviously broken,
and attract more fault reports, than global things like design weaknesses. This tends
to distract developer attention without a core designer tying it all together.

However the two lead designers for this project were noticeable only by their absence.
Major game mechanics remained unexplained and unclear even very late in the beta process.
Information on design was more likely to come from Bill Roper doing publicity seeking
interviews than any sort of interactions with the beta community. The "State of the
game" posts which were probably meant to fill this function were often missing, outdated
or more like annotated change notes than anything which would offer insight. It may
have been that there was deep design work going on but the feeling was very much of
a rudderless ship left to drift.

As an example the beta community was fairly unified (barring the inevitable fangirls
trying to become the developers best friends) in strongly disliking the limit of having
less than 7 powers hot keys. The precise number varied a little as some of the 7 slots were
at times used for passives or required utilities but the end result was a very small number
of powers. This led to heavily repetitive combat and the bizarre situation where you'd
get powers due to levelling but be unable to actually gain anything from them due to not
having any slots to put them in. This was almost certainly a result of the games console
goals despite some impressive smoke-screening from the developers where they suggested
it was due to university studies on the limits of memory. The valid argument that the
study related to memorizing abstract information (phone numbers I believe) and that more
importantly their customers are used to having larger numbers of active hot keys were
ignored for months. Some people were even banned for being too agressive in demanding
an answer. Eventually the developers promised to explain why a small number of hot keys
made for better gaming. This never occurred and shortly before release they doubled the
number of hotkeys in addition to moving some powers into passive slots. However all the
powers were designed on the basis of having a very small number of active powers so this
last minute change also had negative gameplay interactions.

There were quite a lot of bizarre gameplay decisions that really gave the feeling they
were making it up as they went. For example in order to meet their "no downtime" goal
they introduced an endurance pool that started largely empty and was filled by using
a trivial damage attack (different by power set) to fill it before you could use your
larger attacks. This added nothing to gameplay because you had no tactical options, if
you had power you would never use your power building attack since it was very weak. If
you did not have power you could do nothing but use the power building attack. The end
result is it did not add any tactical depth because there was no choice and it removed
the ability to do things like alpha strikes or resource management and destroyed the
flow of combat. This system was modified in the last weeks of beta so that the power
bar started full (enabling alpha strikes) but would empty faster.

The powers themselves were another issue. Because of the small number of hot keys each
power set (eg. fire, single blade) had to cover all the basics but gained little from
duplication. Thus each power set would have an end builder, a ranged single target
attack, an AoE and then maybe some minor variations such as a charge up single
target attack or a cone AoE. Almost all of the powers were about doing damage probably
to support the "action-RPG" design goal. The end result however is that a lot of the
power sets felt very similar in play. Zapping things with lightning, fire, force, bullets
and such was ultimately all about a difference in special effects and minor game mechanics.
And given their goal of total customisation people were free to cherry pick the best powers
for each need reducing gameplay variety even more. The first problem was never fixed, the
power list is actually far more limited than the number of powers might lead you to believe.
The second was solved by making powers interact such that you were heavily encouraged to
focus on one power set. For example a gun use power that made all gun use powers half energy
cost but all other powers double cost.

The small number of active powers, similarity in the powers (and strongly DPS focused), holds
and heals being nerfed for PvP balance and mob hitpoints being steadily boosted to slow
progression and increase challenge led to some very repetitive combat. You'll spend a lot
of time alternating between end builder and either AoE or single target damage to grind
the opponent down. Mob AI and powers are likewise fairly basic. The much vaunted "run & gun"
is largely useless because ducking out of sight simply stops your power regeneration due
to the need to have constant line of sight for the attack. Strangely using cover worked
better in City of Heroes where you could make the tactical decision to gain some endurance
and let powers refresh by running and hiding.

3. Consider the beta a promotional tool

The Champions online beta was frequently labelled as a product "preview" and this felt
about right. Despite the importance of balance in making the game enjoyable the beta
was run in a very casual fashion. The game was up for very limited periods of time, even
in the last weeks of beta only running for 2 sessions a week. Testing was rarely focused
to any useful extent. Testing tools like being able to re-pick powers or level up in order
to test power builds were absent for the majority of beta and then quickly removed or
weakened when introduced. Things like introducing end-game content and then doing a
character wipe 2 weeks later ensured that testing was much less useful than it could have
been.

In addition the game mechanics were so clearly in flux, and developer communication so
poor, that it was very hard to have a baseline to give bugs against. For example the
might powerset was felt to be very weak, the passive defences too strong and a huge
variety of other obvious imbalances. But without some idea of what the balance goal
is meaningful feedback is impossible. It was further discouraged by the developers
putting "powers are imbalanced" as a known issue that was in place up throughout beta.
In many cases the beta testers could barely determine what the power was supposed to
do since the only documentation was algorithmically generated from the power mechanics
and generally incomprehensible. Heavy balance changes were put in at the last moment
with no opportunity to get feedback or iterate on it. This process of power balancing
will almost certainly continue into live.

4. Launch content light and expect to generate it live

This is probably the biggest problem with the game. The game has effectively 5 zones
consisting of one city zone and four outdoor areas (desert, snow, forest, underwater).
Levelling is done in a wowlike fashion with each zone having a sprinking of points of
interest which often badly conflict with one another. Having an alien invasion, snow
demons, a canadian uprising and an air disaster all within a kilometer of one another
makes the environments feel more like a theme park than real places. Each location will
have a number of quests of the traditional kill this, collect those and escort him type.
These quests are the only meaningful way to progress as mob XP is very low. There are
Warhammer style open quests but these are often imbalanced and the reward for doing them
poor which combined with the bad grouping mechanics and shard design (no servers, multiple
instances of the zone with quite low populations) means they're frequently laying idle.

In general to get to the level cap you will need to do pretty much all the quests in
all the zones. There is some switching between zones, for example the city fills a
small segment of levelling between upper and lower desert quests, but you are going to
be spending a lot of time in these areas. Any characters after the first can expect to
follow pretty much exactly the same path with minimal variation. Nor are the quests
interesting enough that they avoid blurring into each other and people just batch
processing them.

More seriously the game is missing 20% of the content it was meant to launch with. In
theory the max level is actually 50 but the game will launch with the level cap at 40
and release new content soon after release. However this line was used before the
development process was extended by 3-4 months which should have been enough time for
it to be included. It is more reasonable to assume this content is only in its very
early stages and not close to being release ready.

The end-game (well, not really since it's level 40 content) which might bridge this gap
and stop bored people cancelling is at a primitive state. It was only introduced in the
last weeks of beta and consists of 5 daily solo instances. These instances are featureless
maps with a sprinkling of mobs which have clearly been rushed out. Doing 5 of these gives
you one additional mission. The rewards from these missions can be used to buy access to
one of two group instances or gear / costume rewards. It's almost completely untested and
the solo instances are dull, involve a lot of travelling and have minimal challenge.

In addition there's no real reason to bother. In general you'll have all your core powers
long before you reach maximum level. These powers can be enhanced with upto 5 points you
also get from levelling. So your character is already complete. The end game content offers
you gear which due to poor itemisation and stat mechanics is of minimal interest, especially
since gear from questing is sufficient. You can also buy new weapon models and vanity cloaks
which many players will have very limited interest in (how many cloaks do you need? most people
will only want a single weapon model that fits their character image).

Itemisation is weak for a couple of reasons. One of them is the use of algorithmically
generated names for both crafted and found drops. A piece of eye-wear (by icon, gear
slots are actually generic) called "Energized Torpedoes" does not make you care much
about the item. Most items will have a 1-3 stats on them but the influence of stats on
the game are so indirect and obscure (and in some cases known to be minimal) its quite
hard to care. This pretty much destroys crafting as well other than the ability to make
bags.

In short people will game the quest system for rapid progression. They can't slow it down
much because there's no content to support a longer levelling curve. This will quickly
lead them into an end-game which has little interest, challenge or reward.

5. Launch with bad design decisions because you were rushed.

This is sort of the catch-all section. But it also reflects that beta feedback is pretty
useless if the developers barely have time to glue the bits together and make the game
minimally saleable. There has to be time for the "is this fun?" test before you release it
and it seems a lot of games companies just don't feel they have the time for that. Anyway,
some smaller results of that.

a. Trying to balance PvP and PvE with the same ruleset. That just doesn't work. Blizzard
are still failing for this reason and most companies can't afford to waste that much energy.
For that matter don't expect PvP to make up for having no end game content unless your game
does something really special in the PvP context.

b. Remove release content to stock an in-game store when your game is already content-lite.
Buying the box should be the price payed for the content developed at that point.

c. Make a character creator which uses 3D objects extensively but has very poor texture usage.
So the furries and robot fetishists like it (especially since everything can be made shiny) but
trying to make a traditional super hero is very limited. And the 3D models are pretty crude.

d. Low detail models. Many of the objects in this game are really basic. For example the jet
used for transport or ships in the harbor are just simple geometric shapes. The wolves in
alaska are almost painfully bad with their fur chipped out of fresh plastic. This combines
with generally bad animation (watching an NPC talk looks like someone in the throes of a facial
spasm).

e. Highly derivative environment. From monster island being directly ripped off from the island
of Dr. Moreau, underwater environment from various atlantis stories and city gangs ripped off
from clockwork orange. It just feels really lazy and excessive. The champions lore clearly only
gave them a bunch of uninteresting heroes to use as quest hubs... though foxbat comes close to
having an actual presence, even if it is hugely geeky and comic-relief.

f. An entirely underwater zone. It always sounds like a good idea, it inevitably isn't.

g. The much vaunted nemesis system is extremely basic. Design the appearance of the boss, a
text and power set and then have random ambushes by his minions and a couple of missions with
that design applied to the mission boss. End result is not much different from running normal
missions.

[Trippy]

You have some dups in there.

[Kageru]

Yeah, I noticed that just took me a second to fix.

Shorter version is the game is competent but mediocre, I pity those who bought a lifetime sub.

[NiX]

tl;dr, throw that short version at the top of your post, not after.

Worth bothering wasting 3 gigs of bandwidth?

[Malakili]

tl;dr, throw that short version at the top of your post, not after.

Worth bothering wasting 3 gigs of bandwidth?

Given the problems people have been having downloading today, if it is at all, it isn't today.

I'm having a lot of fun playing this game, by the way, but not many people seem to agree with me here it seems :(

[Modern Angel]

Downloaded the new FP version and it zips along until ARBITRARY POINT ON THE PROGRESS LINE and craps out. Fucking *unreal*. I'm bored. I want to give you money. Even if I only play for the first month I want to give you money. Why do you not want it?

[Nonentity]

Found this on the forums, I went from a 3.2 gig download to a 900 meg download.

1)Install the client.
2)Run the patcher once.
3)Navigate to Program Files/Cryptic Studios/Live/Prepatch/piggs and delete all *.hoggs files you find there.
4)Navigate to Program Files/Cryptic Studios/Live
5)Cut and paste all 2.02 GB of *.hogg files from Program Files/Cryptic Studios/Live to Program Files/Cryptic Studios/Champions Online/Live/Piggs, overwriting the files therein.
6)Restart the patcher.
7)If patch stalls during download, give it a chance to resume. If it does seem stuck, press the X button on the patcher and restart it.

[Kageru]

It's always interesting poking around a new MMO if you have the bandwidth, time and a user code. It's also a good way to protect yourself from the temptation of buying the actual game.

Read the Memetic Hazard link and agree with pretty much all of it.

[Margalis]

I'm sure whoever decided to name the files "hoggs" and "piggs" feels very clever.

I don't get the console-centric aspect of this game at all. So it was demoed with a 360 controller and was supposed to be designed around a console but isn't actually releasing for a console? What? Making a console-centric game fundamentally alters the design, why in the world would you do that then only release a PC version?

[Kageru]

I believe the history is that this was originally in collaboration with microsoft and marvel thus the Xbox360 focus. However as soon as they (wisely) fled the building and the developers realized they'd be lucky to release anything the console support fell by the wayside.

[Lantyssa]

Worth bothering wasting 3 gigs of bandwidth?

Unless you were really, really, really looking forward to this game... no.

[UnSub]

I'm having a lot of fun playing this game, by the way, but not many people seem to agree with me here it seems :(

It was the same during alpha / beta. Ultimately the players who played CoH/V and wanted CoH v2.0 are going to be the most disappointed with ChampO because it isn't CoH v2.0.

My only major counter to Kageru's comments is that I found dev communication in ChampO's alpha / beta to be the best I'd seen in any closed alpha / beta I'd been in. Lots of different devs from different areas posted regularly, the State of the Game wasn't nearly as outdated as suggested (if Roper made an outdated reference, I found it to be the exception, not the rule). Players were banned for being aggressive twats, not for daring to question the great vision of Cryptic. The whole '7 powers' thing is proof that the devs did listen - it got changed. Lots of things were changed due to player feedback. Early zones were completely redone. The powers system went through a few iterations. That not every player request was acted on isn't surprising. Broadly it was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation - if the devs don't change a system, they aren't listening, but if they do change it they are breaking their promises.

Now, I do recognise that dev interaction dropped off after 10k players joined the beta. Perhaps I was in early enough to see the best of it which therefore colours my view.

I agree with Kageru's points that a lot of things seem a bit thrown together and lacked the appropriate time to bed down and polish up. Although some of the ideas are great - the Super Stats system is pretty elegant imo - they aren't always well slotted with other systems - melee powers get a bonus from Strength, which was implemented by stealth, as were revisions to the stat system.

(Personal bugbear: ChampO having customisable stats at all. The focus should have been on getting powers plus items right, not trying to balance powers plus stats plus superstats plus items especially when a change to one system impacted on all others.)

[fuser]

No doubt they're going to put out a press release or newsletter about TOTALLY UNEXPECTED OVERWHELMING RESPONSE TO THE OPEN BETA where the patch server just couldn't keep up with demand! But they'll get that fixed, just you wait! So that when the game releases, they'll have enough bandwidth for 10x what they need.

The biggest issue we’ve had today is that getting into the Champions Online open beta was more popular than even we hoped for. While I know this doesn’t make the people who have been going through the challenges of getting online today any happier, it has been a great test for us in terms of diagnosing and working to fix problems on numerous fronts. In short, here’s what happened:
...

[UnSub]

I believe the history is that this was originally in collaboration with microsoft and marvel thus the Xbox360 focus. However as soon as they (wisely) fled the building and the developers realized they'd be lucky to release anything the console support fell by the wayside.

The Xbox 360 version is still planned. AFAIK the major roadblock is getting MS to sign off on a streamlined QA system that would let Cryptic patch Xbox 360 versions quickly.

The Xbox 360 controller is functional (it was supported during the alpha, wasn't supported during parts of beta and was re-supported recently) and I've seen a lot of good feedback about playing with it.

EDIT: Just thought I should clarify terms: 'support' means 'you can play with it and it works', not 'CS will answer your questions about how to change things'. I don't know if the controller is officially supported.

[Ghambit]

patcher update:
seems to be fixed...  I uninstalled my original FP client, reinstalled, and then just ran the patcher (didnt move any files or some such hoo ha).  Took it a while, but it updated itself and recognized the files properly this time, starting the download at about 50%.  Problem now is, it's too slow and will most likely time out.  

[Modern Angel]

 

Of note, they didn't even have the courtesy to link directly to the updated FP file. Is it the second one? A third? It's the same version number as the second one.

[kildorn]

adding:

 -project FightclubClient -server 208.95.184.132 -port 7255 -name FC.9.20090815.7

to the command line also causes it to not do single threaded downloading, which has turned it from 1%/30 minutes, to 13% in the past two.

Yeah, cryptic, you may not want to download ONE FILE AT A GODDAMNED TIME off what amounts to a torrent client as shitty as Blizzard's initial one.