Ask Cryptic, decryptified

Cryptic has reinstated the “Ask Cryptic” as part of the firestorm of “Communicate, dammit!” messages Jack Emmert got when he published an open forum note asking how Cryptic could do better. This week’s installment:

Halorin: Where does Champions Online fit into Cryptic’s plans a year from now? Two years? Three? And what resources are Cryptic willing to invest in the game see those plans to fruition?

Jackalope: We’ve just started working on the next step of widening the Champions Universe and we’ve nailed down our ongoing content plans. In short, you can expect to see new adventures every other month (roughly). The content will be far more story based and focused on the background of the game. Meanwhile, we’ve got some other things afoot (and some of you might be able to deduce what that is) and we’ll talk about it more soon.

A dedication to new content, background-focused, is probably just what the game needs right now.  The questions on everyone’s mind, is (a) what levels, (b) will it be pay-for-play, and (c) will it be persistent content or one-off (or even repeating) event stuff.

Darth-Log: How confident are you that Champions Online can succeed considering its current lackluster performance and in lieu of upcoming competition? What have you learned, what are your short term considerations and long term goals?

Chronomancer: We remain dedicated to the Champions Universe, and we have plans to continue to grow it. While our numbers of players is less than we would like, it is also more than several other MMOs that continue to service their communities.

The question is, how much service can you provide if the money model isn’t there?

The upcoming expansion is an excellent example of our plan to make the game bigger and better while also addressing the desires of our players.

And make more money.

We learned a great many lessons from Champions, and I think you can see some of that knowledge expressed in how we ran our beta testing and approached content creation in Star Trek Online.

STO has been a much more pleasant (not flawless, but improved) experience.  Though the nature of the different and its pervasiveness makes it hard to believe that’s all due to lessons learned from the CO beta/roll-out.

Game development is continued learning, iteration, and alteration to fit the needs of an ever-changing market. A game that was a huge hit five or ten years ago probably wouldn’t do anywhere near as well today. The interests and demands of gamers have changed. So we have to learn from our mistakes as well as our successes and move forward.

(Mumbles, waves hands, what’s so special about CoX anyway, nothing to see here, move along.)

In that regard, we’re going to be focusing more on creating content to provide multiple paths of advancement within Champions Online. The plan is to create more of what you want in smaller bites so we can do them on shorter timelines.

Creating more parallel material is definitely a Good Thing.  Doing it in small bits is also a good idea.  Think of each of the “zones” in the desert — rather than recreate a whole desert, you could easy crank out one or two more zones of that sort in the course of a couple of months (if you had good writing).

We also want to provide more ways and reasons for players to group, which is what much of the Flashback and Difficulty Slider work has been focused on.

The difficulty aspect suffers not from a “slider” but from uneven mob strengths and missions.  Making it easier for people to group or PUG would be useful — and since the server scales groups, even if the population is down it shouldn’t be difficult to do.

In the long term, we’re working on creating new stories, game play mechanics, and locales for the Champions universe. We’re increasing our presence in the community and being more open and communicative with you so you know what we’re thinking and working on. And perhaps most importantly, we’re continuing to look for ways that we can make Champions a better game.

All of which is (a) unquestionably a good thing, and (b) very unspecific.

FongSolo: What is Cryptic doing, or even planning behind the scenes to rebuild good faith in the company and this product that many of us paid the lifetime subs for?

Arkayne: Aside from a ton of things that we just can’t talk about right now, but will be very soon, we’re actively making a couple of changes around here: We’re stepping up the communication. We’re going to do more Ask Cryptics, more Dev Chats, we’re going to be in-game, playing with you more, Our GMs are going to start letting you know the status on the current bugs, and the entire development team is going to start being more active on the forums. On top of that, we also moved Stormshade back to Champions. We know you don’t know him well yet, but believe us when we say, he gets really loud when you guys aren’t happy. Oh, and that “soon” we’re talking about up there, that’s not a “soon(tm)” that’s a soon, as in as soon as humanly possible soon.

Communication is definitely an area where Cryptic has fallen down.  It will be interesting to see how this new resolve works (and how long it will last).

Derangement: Are there any plans to eventually include more non-seasonal content as part of a free update, or will you be focusing the revenues from monthly subscriptions on bug fixes and otherwise upgrading the game’s core, while relying on microtransactions for added content?

Stormshade: We have plans to add more free content to the game very soon, not seasonal stuff, and we’ll be talking about that shortly. (Sorry gang, you’re not getting a Valentine’s Day Event, but we do still love you.)

Frankly, I’d rather see fewer events and more persistent content, so this is a good thing.

Heathenish: I’d like to know what the relationship between STO code and CO code is. Because this past patch seems like you guys just dropped the “improved” STO engine right back into CO. Seems like a crazy thing to do, but for instance the direction-reversing and crazy camera bugs seem to have come straight from STO beta. Also, are both games sharing the same server? It doesn’t seem fair to have login problems because some other game is flooded.

Poz: Champs and STO share Cryptic’s global services: the chat and mail server, the account server, and proxy servers. The games themselves do not share any servers. As you noted, the account server is what we’ve had some problems with due to Star Trek. Unfortunately, we couldn’t safely change how our system works and split the two games apart there. Many of the load issues are fixed already, and we have programmers whose highest priority is keeping the account server working smoothly.

It makes sense as a model, and is probably the right thing to do — if it’s done well.

IchbinVol: Will there be any reason to have a theme based character in the future? Perhaps a synergy bonus for having a certain set of skills?

BigOtter: That’s actually one of the goals of our Tier 4 powers being introduced in our upcoming expansion – to provide high-end thematic meta-powers for each of the power groups.

Hmmmm.  An interesting idea.  I love CO’s mix-and-match concept, but super-heroes are all about theme.  If I were starting a supers game from scratch, I’d see how I could divorce powers from FX.  I.e., there’s no reason most of the various powers (maybe splitting melee vs ranged) wouldn’t work if you could do them each with any number of visual cues.

Btw, I find it fascinating that we’re getting so many different Dev names showing up in this.  That’s probably a good thing.

DawningDestiny: When is the melee rebalancing coming? You’ve talked a lot about it, but I’ve seen nothing that wasn’t a nerfy baseball bat to the face when it comes to melee. It’s by far the most underwhelming, underpowered set in the game. So yeah, what’s your timetable for that fix?

Akinos: Our melee review is currently underway. It is a massive review that involves 5 full framework reviews as well as an overall look at melee as a whole. It’s too early to give an ETA but rest assured is it being worked on.

Good to hear. It seems to me that there are problems both with melee overall in CO and with some power sets beyond that.  I’d rather they take time to do it arguably right, than rush out ill-considered bumps and nerfs.  At least … take some time.

Overall:  a lot of generic filler (“We love you! We will continue to love you in new and exciting and surprising ways! Please love us!”) with some promising nuggets of possible truth.  The right message, at a minimum.