Cryptic Makes Next Champions Online Expansion Free to Appease Angry Subscribers
Things aren’t going well for Champions Online, Cryptic’s half-baked MMO that I tried to warn you about before the game even released. In an attempt to appease angry subscribers, Cryptic has decided to make the next planned expansion, Vibora Bay (now called Revelation), available for free. I guess Cryptic saw the light and thought it may not be in their best interests to rip-off the same people they screw on a daily basis, especially those poor bastards who purchased lifetime subscriptions.
Revelation will be available on March 10, 2010.
Cryptic State of the Game, Wherein They Act Humble and Apologetic:
We have a lot going on right now both at Cryptic, and with Champions Online in particular. There are huge changes afoot, and rather than spend a lot of time with the preamble, let’s sink our collective teeth into the meat of the matter.
Scrubbing the Kitchen Sink
As we all know, the Kitchen Sink patch had numerous issues that made it onto Live. The reasons for this boil down to two key areas:
Things That Used to Work Stopped Working:
Basically, there were changes to the core code that automatically merged with our older code and we didn’t see all of the effects of these before they went Live. Token changes, for example, caused a lot of things to stop working properly in Champions. We use tokens for a lot of things in Champions and when the token system was recently optimized, it caused any token-based missions to stop working properly – namely UNITY and Patrol missions. There was also the AI fixes which were made which affected the attack rates of every enemy in the game that slipped past us all.
Lack of Comprehensive Testing
There were only a few players on during the time the Kitchen Sink Patch was on the Public Test Shard, and we simply didn’t allocate enough QA testers. There were so many issues we were anxious to address, that our desire to get fixes out to the players as soon as possible completely backfired. There are truly an astonishing amount of changes in this patch, and we simply should have spent more time testing them before pushing the build Live.
Moving forward, our updates will spend more time in internal test before going to the Public Test Shard. We’ve already increased the size of our Champions QA group, and the designers have been playing much more on the internal servers. We are also much more aware of the changes coming into the core game engine through other projects and have taken steps to increase communication internally to avoid being surprised by those changes.
Currently, we’re putting new builds up on the Public Test Shard, addressing the current reported issues with the Kitchen Sink patch. If you’d like to help us make sure we’re getting it all, play on the PTS and provide us your feedback in this thread.
Improving Communications
We’ve had a real failure with communicating to our community over the past couple of months. You’ve been vocal about it, and we hear you. In fact, we’ve taken some pretty big steps to fixing this, and I wanted to share our goals with you to address this. There are a lot of things we used to do that fell by the wayside, and now that we have StormShade back on the team full-time, we’re going to be bringing back a lot of the things you have always told us you look forward to seeing and hearing:
Ask Cryptic
Bi-weekly posting by the developers answering your questions as compiled by StormShade.
GM Blog
A general support-oriented Blog where our Game Masters discuss what’s being done to address your concerns, talk about bug status, and so on.
Developer Chat
A monthly live IRC chat with developers from the Champions Online team.
State of the Game
Bi-weekly posting by me (Chronomancer) to provide insight into the high-level vision for the Champions Online universe and address hot-button issues.
Game with Cryptic
We’re putting together a new all-company supergroup so you can find us in the game and share adventures. We’re also going to do more PVP events so you can pit your skills in The Hero Games against the devs!
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