Champions Online: The No-NDA Merged Edition

[Malakili]

I have to imagine they actually WANT full retcons to be extremely rare, because this change to the value of items isn't going to make them more affordable.  Maybe a couple more steps back, but a full retcon is still going to be way outside the realm of possibilty, especially for high level players.

I'm actually fine with that, but I wish they would just admit they want them to be rare instead of trying to please people.  The only currency that "matters" right now is Nemesis tokens and UNity badges, or whatever they are called, but they only matter if you are level 40 and actually care about gear progression.  Frankly, I don't care about gear at all on any of my characters.  Sure, if I find upgrades I'll be happy to equip them, but I'm not going to go out of my way looking when I can already do everything in the game I want to with no problem at all. 

Of course, to me, this game is all about making/playing characters, not about loot whoring, and I'm happy I don't have to stress over optimal loot in order to play.

They've gone out of their way for the last few months about trying to prove they have a cool ways to show off how leet you are in game (action figures, costume unlocks, etc), because I guess they want to attract that group fo MMO players, but frankly, I just don't think that is the audience they are really going to have for anything other than the short term anyway.  There are already posts on the forums COMPLAINING that their characters are too cool to begin with and they would feel better if they had to earn being cool.

[UnSub]

Dudes. If you want to change availability of retcons, lower the price, you dumb monkeys. Raise it later if there are too many retcons.

Yeah, because players would react well to a fluctuating retcon price. 

I'm fine with a slower determination process of how retcons should be priced and part of Cryptic is remembering back to CoH/V where there was nothing to spend inf on so players literally had millions sitting on their character. Yes, it needs to be less expensive, but by how much? OTOH, I do think that the vast majority of titles should stop throwing around the word 'economy' when it is, at best, a sideline to their game. EVE can talk about it because they treat it as srs bsns. SL can talk about it because real money is involved. Pretty much every other MMO ends up with something so superficial as to really not worry about it (and should just sell their in-game currency directly for RL money to get rid of gold farming, but that's another issue).

Also, this post-launch pricing issue is almost directly caused by the limited testing times Cryptic had and the ease of retconning (which was: type /retcon) in beta. Limited time means players don't have time to just earn currency.

[tkinnun0]

Not going to play an MMO where I can gimp myself effectively forever or until the devs give a free respec because they nerfed the good powers I could've gotten.

[Malakili]

Not going to play an MMO where I can gimp myself effectively forever or until the devs give a free respec because they nerfed the good powers I could've gotten.

This is way overblown though.  The nerfs they have done have not been so bad that you can "gimp" yourself based on their nerfs.  You CAN gimp yourself  by picking a lot of support powers and stuff that is bad for soloing, but I don't really think anything they have nerfed so far has gimped anyone beyond recognition.  Sure, there are people complaining about it on the official forums because they can no longer solo 20 guys at once with mini mines, or something, but its far from gimp.

[UnSub]

Not going to play an MMO where I can gimp myself effectively forever or until the devs give a free respec because they nerfed the good powers I could've gotten.

Cryptic have given out one free respec and have indicated that affordability of the current system is going to be improved. Right now, it isn't like they are holding back on respecs, nor did they on their previous title with new content.

If you don't want to play ChampO because you find it a crappy game or not worth your time, that's fine, but not playing ChampO due to a retcon issue is making up a problem.

[Typhon]

They are adding bots to the power house that fight back, ideally giving you a better idea of how powers pan out prior to getting locked in.

[Khaldun]

Dudes. If you want to change availability of retcons, lower the price, you dumb monkeys. Raise it later if there are too many retcons.

Yeah, because players would react well to a fluctuating retcon price. 

I'm fine with a slower determination process of how retcons should be priced and part of Cryptic is remembering back to CoH/V where there was nothing to spend inf on so players literally had millions sitting on their character. Yes, it needs to be less expensive, but by how much? OTOH, I do think that the vast majority of titles should stop throwing around the word 'economy' when it is, at best, a sideline to their game. EVE can talk about it because they treat it as srs bsns. SL can talk about it because real money is involved. Pretty much every other MMO ends up with something so superficial as to really not worry about it (and should just sell their in-game currency directly for RL money to get rid of gold farming, but that's another issue).

Also, this post-launch pricing issue is almost directly caused by the limited testing times Cryptic had and the ease of retconning (which was: type /retcon) in beta. Limited time means players don't have time to just earn currency.

I don't really give a shit how players react to fluctating sink prices, because every MMO economy that's functioned even modestly well has had fluctuating sink prices. Skillful devs have ways to hide that fluctuation or divert attention from it, but it still happens. Players will complain about anything.

Precisely BECAUSE the economy in Champions is so utterly primitive and negligible, the idea that they're putting more value in the economy in order to indirectly manipulate the pricing of retcons is FUCKING CLOWNSHOES. Seriously. The moment the devs said, "Oh, see, we were gathering data on the economy and we wanted to accurately gauge the flow of value and we were doing graphs and shit so that we could figure out whether to lower the price of retcons", every single player should have just laughed and laughed and laughed. It doesn't require any kind of remotely serious response or debate. Dumping currency value into a primitive three-sink economy where itemization is worth dick and shit in terms of necessity to game play is like collecting phlogiston in a jar on a summer night in order to run your automobile, it literally makes no sense.

All of this is about avoiding saying, "Well, see, we don't want retcons to happen often (ever) because our retention model is that you'll only keep playing if you level up alts. So we don't want you to use a single toon as an all-in-one alt. What's that? We could retain with a lot of content? Fuck that, it's expense. We could retain with good social tools? Also expensive and we don't know how to do that."

The game is at its core good fun, good combat engine, great character customization. Like CoH.  But even less than CoH do they have even the faintest clue how to keep people around for more than a few months. So they're flailing around hoping to not have to say the obvious, and resorting to utter mumbo-jumbo statements about the economy and spreadsheets and data and fucking shit. Which should really not fool anybody who knows anything about MMOs for a second. I'd rather they just go totally silent and let people stew about stuff than lay out this kind of doofus stuff. They want retcons unaffordable? Goal accomplished at present pricing. Slightly less affordable? Pull the price down a teeny bit. Affordable on demand? Line up the pricing with tailoring, which you could pretty much do repeatedly for hours and never see it eat into your questing funds. That's the only questions that matter, and the only action that's relevant to the question is adjust the price.

[Kageru]

Also, this post-launch pricing issue is almost directly caused by the limited testing times Cryptic had and the ease of retconning (which was: type /retcon) in beta. Limited time means players don't have time to just earn currency.

Pretty much. Though they did introduce various costs on retcon's during beta, many of which were stupidly high and the subject of many facepalm's from the beta community. What they didn't do is actually try balancing it. They simply waved it away with "nothing is final yet" and that persisted into launch. Powers were pretty much in the same boat.

To me it points to a very weak or absent lead designer. Someone who should have been tying the systems together and actually observing the in-game results. Instead you had a lot of designer / content developers assigned to a part of the game and told to get the puppy ship-ready so they could move the focus onto STO.

[Slyfeind]

Putting money into Champions seems very much like putting money into Asheron's Call 2. It's just sort of the way these things are done, and virtual economy is...well, you know, MMO! With virtual economy! That's what you do, right?

What do you spend resources on in CoX? I still need to play that.

[Trippy]

What do you spend resources on in CoX? I still need to play that.

CoX has a real economy now, sadly. Basically after nerfing the hell out of everybody they created an invention system that lets you get back the what was nerfed (plus a lot more) in exchange for having to grind and grind and grind and grind and grind for "money" (there are various forms of "currency" in the game, too many actually) and drops.

In CoX each power has 1 or more "slots" to which you can add "enchancements" (you add slots to powers as you level up). These enhancements boost various aspects of each power like giving the power more damage or a better chance to hit. These were in the game from launch. The invention enhancements work the same way except that they are grouped into "sets" and if you have more than one enhancement in that set in the power you get a various bonuses (the enhancements in the set in that power have to be different ones to get the bonus). It's these bonuses that can signficantly boost the power of your character if you are willing to grind for the money and/or drops needed to buy/create these invention enhancements.

Thanks to the invention system CoX is flooded with Influence seller spam now, which I suppose is an indication there's a functioning economy, where before there was virtually none as once you got to max level there wasn't anything to use your money on other than buying/altering costumes.

[UnSub]

What do you spend resources on in CoX? I still need to play that.

As Trippy said, enhancements mostly. Particularly rare / particular enhancements that grant desired bonuses.

Unless you farm 24/7, you probably can't earn enough to buy the best / most desired ones. Or perhaps you get a lucky drop that sees you rolling in currency for a bit.

It is completely true that you don't need these particular enhancements to have a good character, but as a MMO player there is a certain major appeal to having them.

The auction consignment house sees certain recipes / enhancements going for hundreds of millions of inf. They are pretty much the only thing worth saving for, especially since (again, to repeat Trippy's comments) there are several different specialised currency types and little overlap between them.

[Slyfeind]

That actually sounds like a fun system, if it didn't seem like a huge afterthought!

[Khaldun]

Also, this post-launch pricing issue is almost directly caused by the limited testing times Cryptic had and the ease of retconning (which was: type /retcon) in beta. Limited time means players don't have time to just earn currency.

Pretty much. Though they did introduce various costs on retcon's during beta, many of which were stupidly high and the subject of many facepalm's from the beta community. What they didn't do is actually try balancing it. They simply waved it away with "nothing is final yet" and that persisted into launch. Powers were pretty much in the same boat.

To me it points to a very weak or absent lead designer. Someone who should have been tying the systems together and actually observing the in-game results. Instead you had a lot of designer / content developers assigned to a part of the game and told to get the puppy ship-ready so they could move the focus onto STO.

This is the vibe I'm getting. There's a bunch of people who are cutting their teeth on this thing. It's like when ambulance chaser law firms send newly minted law school grads into court to argue their first "omfg I have whiplash" case. They know it's not really what the skilled people will be doing most of their career, but it's kind of a test case about who can cope. The problem is that for Cryptic, the "cope" test can only be applied to Star Trek Online, which seems an utter and total burn-and-die dog at launch. If they were smart as a dev group, they'd put resources into keeping Champions afloat before stripping it to bare bones in order to deliver STO.

[Malakili]

[If they were smart as a dev group, they'd put resources into keeping Champions afloat before stripping it to bare bones in order to deliver STO.

I don't get the impression they've stripped it to a bare bones.  They are pumping out patches pretty often.  They certainly did move some people over to STO that caused them to have to scale back on release content.  However, the game mechanics are pretty solid and the launch was pretty stable.  They've had I think, 3 unexpected server outages in the first three weeks, which isn't too bad. 

My only real concern is, like i've said, the content.  This first "content" patch they are talking about next month I think is actually just a trumped up halloween event, and I don't know if that content is here to stay, or if it will just be there for a couple weeks then removed until next halloween.  I think a few months down the road when STO beta is in swing, and we will see if we have a "real" content patch  (like adding a whole new zone) coming down the pipeline.

Then again, its easy to forgive stuff when you are having fun with a game.

[UnSub]

My forgiveness is being stretched by a Nvidia bug issue that sees me either BSOD (if I'm running Fullscreen mode) or CTD (if I'm running Maximised Windowed mode) within about 20 minutes of each session I try to start. Even running in safe mode doesn't do anything regarding improving my stability.

There is some suggestion that ChampO is causing certain Nvidia cards to run excessively hot very quickly, or might not be distributing processor and graphics card load particularly well.

It's annoying, that's for sure. It's giving me time to work through the challenges in Batman:AA, but I actually wanted to lvl up my ChampO main before the Halloween Event hit.

[Glazius]

What do you spend resources on in CoX? I still need to play that.

CoX has a real economy now, sadly. Basically after nerfing the hell out of everybody they created an invention system that lets you get back the what was nerfed (plus a lot more) in exchange for having to grind and grind and grind and grind and grind for "money" (there are various forms of "currency" in the game, too many actually) and drops.

In CoX each power has 1 or more "slots" to which you can add "enchancements" (you add slots to powers as you level up). These enhancements boost various aspects of each power like giving the power more damage or a better chance to hit. These were in the game from launch. The invention enhancements work the same way except that they are grouped into "sets" and if you have more than one enhancement in that set in the power you get a various bonuses (the enhancements in the set in that power have to be different ones to get the bonus). It's these bonuses that can signficantly boost the power of your character if you are willing to grind for the money and/or drops needed to buy/create these invention enhancements.

Thanks to the invention system CoX is flooded with Influence seller spam now, which I suppose is an indication there's a functioning economy, where before there was virtually none as once you got to max level there wasn't anything to use your money on other than buying/altering costumes.

Yeah, I remember chilling at max level and just buying extra level 50 enhancements to rank up every slot, because why the hell not. Still had an 8-digit bankroll.

A couple of benefits to the system. First there's the general inflation that benefits low-level resource gatherers - and since you gather resources by punching mans, that means everybody.

Second, you can go one or two removes from top tier - or use a set with an underrepresented element, like fear, confusion, or sniping - to get some pretty amazing standard bonuses pretty cheap. The set bonuses aren't stellar, but they're pretty nice if you get enough pieces.

They cut off emails from strangers, which was the current favorite method of influence spam. Global tells had already been squashed. I wonder if they're going to go back to globals or if they're just going to die.

Well, they probably won't give up.

[March]

My forgiveness is being stretched by a Nvidia bug issue that sees me either BSOD (if I'm running Fullscreen mode) or CTD (if I'm running Maximised Windowed mode) within about 20 minutes of each session I try to start. Even running in safe mode doesn't do anything regarding improving my stability.

There is some suggestion that ChampO is causing certain Nvidia cards to run excessively hot very quickly, or might not be distributing processor and graphics card load particularly well.

It's annoying, that's for sure. It's giving me time to work through the challenges in Batman:AA, but I actually wanted to lvl up my ChampO main before the Halloween Event hit.

This must be hitting me too... have GTX260 with updated drivers and every 20 min the game freezes the entire system... must reboot.  Will cause me to hit cancel button shortly.

[Kageru]

It looks like they're also working on another nerf-bomb on the test server. I can understand they need to do so to try and get the powers into some sort of balance. Especially when they're trying to balance PvP and they have free power selection. What I can't understand is why they thought doing it during live, when it costs them subs, was a remotely sane idea.

[Malakili]

It looks like they're also working on another nerf-bomb on the test server. I can understand they need to do so to try and get the powers into some sort of balance. Especially when they're trying to balance PvP and they have free power selection. What I can't understand is why they thought doing it during live, when it costs them subs, was a remotely sane idea.

There wasn't enough closed beta test to test all the content, let along power balance in PvP at various levels.  Frankly, I wish they'd just realize PvP balance is hopeless. Sure, nerf things that are just stupidly overpowered, but playing a ticky tacky balance game is just  a waste of time.

[Lantyssa]

What I can't understand is why they thought doing it during live, when it costs them subs, was a remotely sane idea.

Hi.  I'd like to introduce you to Jack "Never Met a Nerf He Didn't Like" Emmert.

[Tannhauser]

Just played after the patch.  Lots of folks are complaining about increased mob damage.  I agree.  If I attack 1 mob, 3 others rush out and I'm dead in less than 5 secs.

I hope it's a bug and not 'working as intended' because I'm not feeling very heroic.

[Khaldun]

I'm sticking to my "amateur hour tryouts" theory about this live management team, Emmert's nerf proclivities aside.

What they've been doing since live makes no sense at all. When they identify an overpowered ability like minimines, they don't just nerf it, they plow it under the earth and sow it with salt. But besides that, focusing mostly on balance issues right now is just plain stupid: I cannot see what their strategic plan in the medium-term is. (I'm pretty convinced that they've written the game off as a long-term prospect.)

They have three populations at launch: min-maxers bored with their current MMO(s), genre fans who are mostly going to be doing concept characters, and a small weird core of groupies and fanboys whose inner motivations are obscure to me.

The min-maxers cannot be retained over the long haul. It doesn't have any meaningful guild system, so the social connections and small-group loyalty that keeps people subbed to a game like WoW even when they're bored with it aren't in play here. There isn't enough repeatable content or raid-type content to keep min-maxers or hardcores around, either. The thing that might keep min-maxers in the game for 3-4 months is the openness of the character design system plus the relatively gentle levelling curve: that's kind of a challenge to an achiever-type player, to design the absolutely best build using a fairly wide selection of powers/types of powers. The Elitist Jerks mindset will probe a single class design in WoW for numerically slight advantages: here's a game where there's some really interesting research to be done on flavor-of-the-month builds. So you can at least retain these guys for a little bit. Unless you dick around with powersets and mob behavior constantly, often incomprehensibly or brutally. Then these folks get sick of having the rug pulled out from underneath them, it's no longer a challenge unless you're really stubborn about beating the devs.

The concept character players are the only really potentially sticky population of subscribers, because if they fall in love with a character that's really an expression of an idea they have, they'll have a very hard time giving it up. But they can be discouraged if they find it impossible to play that character in the way they imagine a superhero should feel in a superheroic world. If you make them do the equivalent of fighting rats with a wooden sword and tissue-paper armor, they're probably gone. If you completely nerf the living shit out of a power that they're attached to for the concept, they're probably gone.

In either case, you gain nothing by wild, drunken nerfcapades through the powersets and mob difficulty. You're not gaining anything in terms of keeping people from getting to 40, tons of people are close enough now, not just the hardcore poopsocking types. The only reason to protect your endgame is if you have an endgame or plan to have one soon. You're not setting an appropriately nerfed standard for later content additions, because from what I can see, they have no serious ambitions to introduce major new content in the next three or four months.  If you just leave the game alone, or make small incremental adjustments to overpowered stuff, you'll keep the concept players happy: they don't really need new content that desperately, they're happy to level up alts, etc. The min-maxers will play with the character design for a while yet, and while they'll ruin PvP for anyone not willing to make FOTM builds, so what? PvP isn't a driver for this game anyway except for people trying to perfect FOTM building.

A gentle hand on the nerf tiller = maximized subscriber base for four to five months, after which you're dead anyway if you don't have a better game with more content. A crazed, incomprehensible hacking away at balance issues? Quick bleeding out of almost every population inclined to stick around for a little while.

[Ghambit]

Everyone knew the game needed to be more "gritty" to fully succeed, but Emmert and his ilk approached it from the wrong angle.  Instead of interesting mission design and compelling end-game content, they opted for spreadsheet heroics... i.e. the lazy way - because they have no skill in the former.  These spreadsheet heroics mean ultimately nothing, because they were implemented way too late in the dev-cycle, and serve to do nothing but drive players away - whilst extending play (buying time) via grind.

I tell ya' I'm also pissed that a product involving Savage Worlds is so crappy.  Although ironically, SW is losing street cred. these days (big surprise).  Both suffer from being Fast, Furious, Fun with no persistent depth... and are unable to give long-term compelling play along with gritty content w/o a dickless simple-nerf.

Lastly, ChampO is one of the most unSandboxey MMOs I've ever seen.  This means the game lives or dies on the backs of the devs.   It's not like players can make their own fun at some point in the game, so they're just forced to unsub once they hit the brickwall.  The whole game design was fubar from day 1.

There's more buzz about Fallen Earth than this thing, which is just hilarious to me.  Kind of dumbfounding, but hilarious.

[Ingmar]

Don't mistake the levels of buzz for different products here at f13 for what the 'real' levels are out in the wider gaming world. Sandboxy things like FE will *always* get more buzz and more chances to succeed/fail with the set of people that post here; beyond the walls of our ivory tower things are likely different. I mean come on, how long has Metaplace have its own subforum?

I'm not going to end up subscribing to either game, mind you, but CO isn't getting the props it deserves for the class system, which is ambitious and cool and perfect for a superhero game. It is also going to be extremely complicated to balance, and that is going to mean nerfs. People who say "oh they should have gotten them out of the way in beta" I think don't realize what a huge undertaking balancing a system like that is. If they waited for it to be perfectly balanced before releasing, we wouldn't be seeing this game ever.

EDIT: And they - and everyone else with an MMO - should nerf sooner rather than later, IMO. Sitting on an unbalanced game for 5 months and THEN springing nerfs on people who have become really accustomed to things is a much worse idea, and Cryptic learned that lesson after the (completely necessary but not well-presented) enhancement revamp in CoH.

[Lantyssa]

If a game is unbalanced, then there should be buffs as well as nerfs...

I'll give them getting the concept of free-form power selection correct.  I'll still harp on them for poor execution and lack of insight.  As a second MMO from a company, it's really inexcusable.

[Malakili]

If a game is unbalanced, then there should be buffs as well as nerfs...

Which is why the Sorcery power set received across the board buffs with this patch.

[Ingmar]

If a game is unbalanced, then there should be buffs as well as nerfs...

I'll give them getting the concept of free-form power selection correct.  I'll still harp on them for poor execution and lack of insight.  As a second MMO from a company, it's really inexcusable.

Generally speaking, nerfs are always, always, always a better balancing tool than buffs. You'll never flood your economy or break your leveling curve with nerfs; buffs that don't work out properly can easily do that, and will cause far more damage to your game as a whole.

Anyway, it all depends where you want the balance point. There's no requirement that buffs accompany nerfs if the issue is you want the performance point of the players to be around where the lower classes/character types are performing.

[Typhon]

Whoops!

Okay, so the topic is totally irrelevant, I know. But here's an update on where things are today:

•Critter damage was decreased last night, however players report an increase. We are investigating this immediately to find the cause.
•Defenses from items were not touched in the patch, yet players are reporting a decrease. We are also investigating this.

As you can see from the above points, neither of the changes that the community is reporting were intended, and the designers are ripping apart the code as I post this to get to the root of the issue immediately. We apologize profusely for the frustration this is causing you today, and I'll update this thread with more news when I get it. Thank you all for your patience.

Daeke

UPDATE:

Critter damage - They are indeed dealing too much damage, due to a bug related to their maintained powers. We're working right now on a fix, and we can hopefully do a quick patch tonight (along with the free retcon) to fix it.

Item stats - This issue is affecting all items below level 11, and has to do with assumptions the game makes based on when your equipment slots should be filled. We're going to revert the changes to how they were before this morning with the next patch (again, hopefully tonight).

Thanks again for your patience while we resolve the issues.

then, later in the thread

But people were reporting these problems in the brief time it was on the test server, people were saying the patch wasn't ready last night, and it went live anyway.

So, yeah, maybe they should start looking at the feedback in the test forum.  Course, an actual QA department might help as well.

[Khaldun]

Don't mistake the levels of buzz for different products here at f13 for what the 'real' levels are out in the wider gaming world. Sandboxy things like FE will *always* get more buzz and more chances to succeed/fail with the set of people that post here; beyond the walls of our ivory tower things are likely different. I mean come on, how long has Metaplace have its own subforum?

I'm not going to end up subscribing to either game, mind you, but CO isn't getting the props it deserves for the class system, which is ambitious and cool and perfect for a superhero game. It is also going to be extremely complicated to balance, and that is going to mean nerfs. People who say "oh they should have gotten them out of the way in beta" I think don't realize what a huge undertaking balancing a system like that is. If they waited for it to be perfectly balanced before releasing, we wouldn't be seeing this game ever.

EDIT: And they - and everyone else with an MMO - should nerf sooner rather than later, IMO. Sitting on an unbalanced game for 5 months and THEN springing nerfs on people who have become really accustomed to things is a much worse idea, and Cryptic learned that lesson after the (completely necessary but not well-presented) enhancement revamp in CoH.

Yes, but there's no requirement to nerf as stupidly as they're doing.

I also don't agree the enhancement revamp was necessary per se--or at least that they went about it so badly that it called into question whether the cure was worse than the disease. Much as now. The first lesson isn't nerf early or nerf late: it's don't be a mentally defective chimp when you start pounding on the nerf button.

[Khaldun]

If a game is unbalanced, then there should be buffs as well as nerfs...

I'll give them getting the concept of free-form power selection correct.  I'll still harp on them for poor execution and lack of insight.  As a second MMO from a company, it's really inexcusable.

Generally speaking, nerfs are always, always, always a better balancing tool than buffs. You'll never flood your economy or break your leveling curve with nerfs; buffs that don't work out properly can easily do that, and will cause far more damage to your game as a whole.

Anyway, it all depends where you want the balance point. There's no requirement that buffs accompany nerfs if the issue is you want the performance point of the players to be around where the lower classes/character types are performing.

Bad nerfs are pretty much six to the half-dozen of bad buffs, except that a bad nerf takes something entirely out of circulation from the choices that players make. When a class or power vanishes entirely from the ecosystem of player choices due to bad nerfing, there's a series of rippling consequences through the economy. Anybody holding items whose value is pegged to the nerfed ability or class is left holding nothing. Non-nerfed abilities or classes which resemble the nerfed ability or class or perform the same function tend to overwhelm that ecological niche within the game as well, because they're the only source of that functionality, and that produces a dependency which makes the economy more vulnerable in the long term.

More importantly, you have to consider the impact on retention. Bad nerfs have an immediate negative impact on players, and I suspect produce spikes of players unsubbing (worse in games where there's a large population of players at the end game with max level characters). Bad buffs take a while to have negative effects that are visible to most players, and if they push some people to unsub, it's usually only after they've realized what is happening to competition for resources (including spots in groups, etc.) and have resolved that no fix is likely.

Just from the standpoint of managing the best possible retention environment, I think the "nerf first, nerf often" school is a mistake. (Demonstrably so in the history of a number of MMOs.)

The really preferable thing is to have a subtle hand when it comes to nerfing, though. Cryptic didn't have that with CoX, and they sure as hell aren't demonstrating it here.

[Khaldun]

Rather notably, the forums have been down all day today. Who here thinks that's an accident?  Yeah, I thought so.

[Slyfeind]

Cryptic has not only their own previous MMO to draw experience from, but also over a decade of successful and failed MMOs from other companies. Yet there's still too much burying of heads in the sand, arrogance, misinterpretation of feedback, etc. They're trying to reinvent the wheel when they don't have to.

Their community rep jumping on the forums and admitting that big "Whoops" gives me hope. So...we'll see. But God, I'm tired of Blizzard being the only company that learns from others' mistakes. (And consequently, I'm tired of WoW, Diablo, and Starcraft.)

[Khaldun]

That dude is unusually honest--he's been straight-shooting a lot of stuff. Problem is, he's trying to straight-shoot some live management practices that I think are pretty amateurish at best. Sooner or later, someone's going to either tell him to shut up or he's going to get tired of having to try and explain a big boo-boo.

[Ghambit]

This kinda reminds me of when NCSoft hit the nerf-button on Tabula Rasa when their content team was lagging behind.  In the end, it killed the game for all time.  Not only was there not enough content, but the inherent grind became unbearable due to the nerf.

They'd have been better off just letting people enjoy the combat system, max a few characters, and work on finishing the game.  Cryptic is perilously close to doing the same thing.

[Slyfeind]

That dude is unusually honest--he's been straight-shooting a lot of stuff. Problem is, he's trying to straight-shoot some live management practices that I think are pretty amateurish at best. Sooner or later, someone's going to either tell him to shut up or he's going to get tired of having to try and explain a big boo-boo.

Judging by the mixed results of that thread, I'm thinking it might have been best to not say anything. Too bad. I liked hearing "We know, we fucked up." It was assuring to me. Ooo, I know! They should totally say "We're sorry we didn't listen to your feedback on the Test Server." That would make everything all better.

Seriously though, I can't imagine anyone gleaning much from those forums. It's the same old song and dance. Why do I care?! Gyah. I'm gonna download Fallen Earth tonight.