Dollars and ZENts in Champions Online

ZEN does not make me relaxed and contemplative, I'm afraid.

“ZEN” is the pseudocurrency that Perfect World is using across all of their games.  Which is very nice, but some of the “microtransactions” it enables are not so micro.

1 ZEN = 1 cent (USD)

$50.00 = 5,000 + 300
$30.00 = 3,000
$20.00 = 2,000
$10.00 = 1,000
$5.00 = 500

So you only get a discount break in $50 increments (where you get $53 worth of ZEN).

But what does that give you?

So we were looking at our different options here, if we want to continue playing CO.

A F2P account gets you a soul-cramping 2 character slots.  Worse, they are restricted slots — you are limited to a one of 10 canned archetypes / power paths, scattered amongst the five roles (ranged, tank, melee, hybrid, support). Another 2 dozen or so are locked.  Each of those is about 1125 ZEN, say $11.  So if you want a blaster, you can get a fire, bow, or rifle blaster, but not an electricity or TK or etc. blaster without ponying up the bucks.

As well, those power sets need slots to go into, beyond that initial 2.  You can buy slots 2 at a time, for $14 ($7 each).

But if you want a Freeform slot — letting you mix and match power paths and primary/secondaries — that costs a whopping $50 (on sale this weekend for a low $25).

It’s hard to put this cleanly into CoH terms.  Paragon Market Points were 1.25 cents each.

  • Each player had a dozen character slots on each of a dozen servers.  144 character slots, right there.  Additional slots (for a given server) were $4 each (in packs of 5). But each of those slots could be almost anything.
  • While not all archetypes were F2P, most were (everything except Mastermind, Controller, Kheldians and Arachnos). Those were available for $15. Further, within all the archetypes, nearly all powers were available — so if you were a Blaster you could be any of the dozen different types of blasters, Primary and Secondary.
  • Additional new power sets were $10 (800 pts), about equivalent of the archetype power sets in CO — but that $10 in Nature Affinity, for example, could be used for a Defender, Controller, Corruptor, or Mastermind.
  • The combos of Primary and Secondary (plus Pool powers) provided much more freedom than the fixed archetypes in CO.  While not quite as freeform as the Freeform slots on CO (which lets you make pretty much any sort of combo you want), they are still much more flexible setup than most.

Bottom line, CoH was a much better bang-for-buck than CO in this category.

Beyond that, we have “real” account full of 8 characters, levels 9-19, all of whom are considered “freeform” by CO (back in the day there was no penalty, and lots of discussions of the best secondary powers to take with primary sets, with the few canned archetypes of the period considered substandard).  There doesn’t seem to be a way to access those characters as a F2P character (you can only buy new freeform slots, at $50/pop, not activate old ones), unless we re-up our subscription at $15/mo.  And, honestly, not feeling the impulse to do that yet.

3 thoughts on “Dollars and ZENts in Champions Online”

  1. Recognizing that you like the supers genre, I can’t help but think that – in your search for a new MMO – you would be better served switching genres away from CoH; it makes the differences more glaring, and narrows the margin of enjoyment on the stuff any new game might do better or differently than CoH.

  2. There’s something to be said for that, Doyce. I do like the supers genre, both because I’m a comic book guy and because it provides a built-in wide array of character possibilities, often without some of the travel issues that plague other genres.

    That said, it’s not essential, and looking in a different direction could be good idea.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *