Champions Online Interviews and State of the Game
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The first interview is up at IncGamers:
With hindsight, what didn't work so well and what would you do differently if you had that time over again?
Unfortunately we had to make a large balance pass on the first day of wide service. This really was a reflection of our not having the balance down right before we launched our head start program, but if we didn't do what we did, the game would have been trivialized in terms of time to play and difficulty. We're very close to what we want as an overall balance now, so now we're looking at how we make smaller, surgical changes to tune and tweak powers, items, missions, and so on.
The other is at ZAM:
ZAM: You've already made some additions to the game where gaps in the content were located. Do you have any other areas that you're looking at where players might feel that they don't have enough to do at a certain level?
Roper: We filled in the content shortages in the 31-34 range with some destination-based, repeatable missions on Monster Island. Along with the Blood Moon event, we're also adding in a series of ARGENT-themed missions in Millennium City to address the potholes in the 18 21 level ranges. Additionally, we're adding the ability to for heroes to do (Crossover Missions.) This allows any player to share a special version of a mission they're on with another player even if that person isn't eligible for the mission - has already completed it, doesn't meet the pre-requisites, isn't high enough level, etc. Crossover missions have reduced rewards for mission completion compared to the primary version of the mission, but since we haven't had this in the game at all up until now, it's all bonus experience and resources!
And a bit on the Blood Moon event from the "State of the Game":
There's been some confusion as to what level heroes can and can't get into the gateways after completing the open mission. So to make this simpler, we've made it so anyone that is commonly in Millennium City can jump right into the event. We've also removed the level restrictions on the mission to save the souls of the undead heroes. You should now see the mission appear for your level. The crypt critters will remain the same level as the enemies outside - so at lower levels, you might find yourself in some pretty tough situations. This is the PERFECT time to join a team and sidekick up!
Also, the intent was not to just have heroes blow through this event in an afternoon. This is why we set the open mission timers as high as we did. We knew that players on the Public Test Server wanted the timer to be shorter because of our smaller test time windows. Now that we're in the live environment, we're seeing a wide variety of times to complete this mission chain. To make this particular event more casual-play friendly, we're going to reduce the timer on the mission so those of you that play for an hour a night have the chance to get into one or two of them.
Finally, we fixed a couple of bugs that cropped up where Vanguard's beacon stayed on even after he is defeated, and Flechette II & Vigil's portals are not properly re-spawning.
