So, unfortunately, I purchased a game called Champions Online earlier this month. I had been a beta tester for quite some time, and while at first I enjoyed it, over time it grew into a non-purchase due to many factors - mostly developer complacence on issues that required either a lot of attention, or complete reworks. Sadly, just before open beta hit, the game actually had some good patches and I started enjoying it again and purchased it on launch. I haven't logged on in weeks (impressive for a game that has been out for less than a month), but much like a shitty stock investment, I feel obligated to continue to read the patch notes if nothing else for a good laugh.
While skimming over the patch notes of what amazing changes I'm missing by not logging into my active account, I came across this gem:
"Superstats are now hard-capped at 32% damage. This is a temporary fix to prevent hurting game balance, and over time this will be changed into a soft cap."
Now, let me give some background, here.
CO is a game that promised more freedom in your characters. You can pick any skill and focus in any stat. There are no classes or races. Obviously, this would be a tempting offer, if Cryptic had not butchered the premise. One of the pieces of this system was "superstats" - basically, you choose your primary stat for which to calculate your damage. Want a big tank character? Choose Constitution, so you'll have lots of health and be able to do damage as well. How about a super-intelligent hero? No problem - pick intelligence as your superstat and you're good to go.
Mostly, this system was fine and dandy aside from a few critical mistakes. One of these major mistakes was that while stats begged to be dynamic, the powers were hard-coded to work with only one or two stats. Did you go Intelligence and want to pick up the Force Field power? Too bad, Force Field is enhanced by the "Ego" stat only, so yours will suck - no matter what (unless you're willing to sacrifice the ability to - y'know - do damage for it).
To make matters worse, respeccing or "retconning" is ridiculously expensive. Unlike most MMO's, it is not a one-shot affair. You have to respec each individual ability, from the most recent choice on down the line, and this includes EVERY minor choice or change to your character. You pick superstats at level 5. If you are level 30 and want to change that, you're pretty well fucked.
However, even then, with proper planning you can manage to avoid issues like this. It's terrible design to give players the most important decisions of their character's life early on, sure, but it's at least somewhat workable. Until, you know, they fuck it all up with a patch.
Now, with this 32% hard cap design, they are basically telling you this: "ok, you need X amount of this stat, but only so much! Any more is an almost complete waste! You can focus on something else in the meantime, until you level up and then you need X more of your primary stat!". Even worse is that you get two superstat choices, and of course one of them you generally want to be your main, with the other your secondary. Now you're basically forced to have two powers that are capped at the same obscure number, and dump the rest into whatever else is appealing. Also, I should mention that while 32% sounds like a lot, it most certainly isn't in CO's case. Just as with CoH, they made the terrible mistake of basing all of CO around percentages. The game seems to be designed around the 50% mark as far as I've seen, and even then a lot of damage powers are lackluster, so this change is just a big "we're nerfing it until we think of something better" slap in the face.
I suggested (one of many things), for a long time, the complete removal of superstats. It is bad enough that every melee power in the game is based on strength, making your melee-focused character permanently gimped if you happened to not pick strength as a superstat. But this is just hideous design. Sadly, every ounce of the game is filled with obnoxious design choices like this. It's one of those cases where it literally feels like the designers are on an eternal coffee break and the coders are left to survive as they will. It really saddens me as the game has pretty good art and a very well-coded character creation system, but the designers completely let everyone down and once again an MMO is going to fail due to poor design. Makes me sick. There has been about a dozen of these major knee-jerk nerfs since launch. On launch day they haphazardly implemented a change that essentially said "reduced movement speed of all characters by 15%".
Even worse, a week before launch they had completely changed the XP curve - in a game based entirely on advancement through questing (and I mean entirely: a mob will give 150 xp where a quest will give 25,000). Roper then came out and said that closed beta had not given them enough information. First of all: What the fuck? All of closed beta was 2 test days a week. If you needed more data, OPEN THE FUCKING TEST SERVERS. Secondly: Even if you desperately want to change the xp curve, you can't. Your developers can't just magic up hundreds of new quests. Hilariously, this change was then completely reverted, although they pawned it off as "oh, we adjusted it too far, so we scaled it back some. It's still changed, though" - even though it was 100% back to normal and they were just trying to save face. It was literally as if a designer came in to the office, played through the tutorial for the first time in months, and then screamed at a coder that leveling was too fast and to make it slower. Then the beta crowd got a hold of it and tore Cryptic up for it. I cannot imagine that situation going down any other way. You would have to be a complete fucking idiot to even think of the idea, and yet, there it was, not even just implemented in their closed QA circuit but unleashed onto the beta. I can't imagine it went down for any other reason other than chain-of-command stupidity.
Maybe one day I will give this game a proper YGIBAYSFB, but it is worthy of much more rage and facepalm than seen in this post. As for now... Cryptic designers and/or Bill Roper, your design is bad and you should seriously consider a new profession.
