... but for champions online. Yet I feel that I see a lot of familar stuff there.

PvP Article: http://pressxordie.com/2011/09/04/ex...ne-part-8-pvp/
Original Thread on the CO forums: http://forums.champions-online.com/s...d.php?t=131985

How striking the parallelism between our games. Come on PW and hire some more help if that's what it takes. 2 games with huge potential.

However, PvP is a completely different beast and, thus, requires an entirely different approach. The first thing being “You will die a lot”. I cannot explain how bad you will get curbstomped. The later the level at which you get into PvP, the worse you’ll end up. You can try and solo a giant flaming monkey, you will get destroyed by another player. Sure, I may be over-emphasizing your inevitable poor performance, but that’s one of the main problems. You play PvE for most part. You think your character is amazing and indestructible. No mob can pin you down. You are your own hero. Then you try PvP and that illusion shatters. Mobs don’t have block breakers, relevant travel power removers, or a sense of self-preservation. You start asking yourself “How can someone one-shot me? It’s not fair!” You blame the system, the imbalance, the players who just pick the best powers without regard to their character’s personality. You blame everything you can, because you love your character.

This sounds so familiar it could have been written by a STO pvp regular!

Yes, because if you are competitive, you pick the best at your disposal. If you aren’t picking the best, you are handicapping yourself and are a scrub.

Is this written by Jorf's pseudonym?

Even with all the imbalances in PvP, and cleaning up Cryptic needs to do, it is insanely fun.....

So PVP balance is a Cryptic-wide problem and not unique to STO? That doesn't make me feel good about the hopes for restoring pvp sanity in this game. Except here, pvp is once again becoming unfun bigtime.

So, my final verdict on this whole topic? It is fun and a mess. I can see myself playing more on my new PvP character in the future, without a doubt. If the thought of PvPing was appalling for various reasons, but you like competitive play in other games, it is worth rethinking your attitude. The moment you accept that the only way to get better is to lose, you’ll have much more fun. Make a dedicated PvP character if your current ones are not compatible. Start from Tier 1 instead of playing with level 40s right at the start. There’s something beautiful here under the whole mess. The powers and resistances are a mess. The matchmaking is a mess. Maybe if more people stick through the negative stigma associated with PvPing in this game, Cryptic will divert resources towards fixing it. In an ideal world, it would be the other way around and Cryptic would fix it to get more people into it.

Yup. certainly makes it look like Cryptic doesn't care much for pvp corporate-wide. I hope PW encourages them to change this attitude, and soon.

You guys are surprised anymore? :p

Or was this just the last bit of trekkie that had hope for the future dying inside?

Well with the curb-stomping of noobs it's the same with pvp in any game. They expect a pvp encounter is going to be as long and drawn out as a pve encounter and they wind up sorrily mistaken.

There are other issues with these 2 games that sets them apart from the many others I have played. My main concern is the timelyness of the issues being dealt with. Honestly though I do blame atari. That company is worthless and they really stuck cryptic with a pile of <bleep> imo.

Not to mention an economy where most places of work are downsized to the point of hearing crickets, added a crummy company reputation alongside and I think it's pretty good they've done as well as they have with our game. Atari knew they couldn't handle the understanding of depth in a game as advanced as an mmo, maybe they'll conquer the realm of facebook gaming.

Just trying to add words of encouragement whenever posssible cryptic. I play both of your games. Hopefully soon they can be finished and we can be on to new content again. Obviously we all like most of what you've done so far or we wouldn't be here.

Not surprised. Just still hoping. People forget this isn't very old of a game, as well as the ink barely dry from PW signing as the new mothership.

It's almost 2 years old and is infinitely worse than RIFT which is barely six months old. Why do I compare them? Trion is also -very- small, and guess what? The game is far superior.

2 words. Yeah, so?

A question, why are you here?

If you are trying to make a point I think you are failing miserably.

Also isn't rift like wow?? Gag me with a sensor probe!!!! Infinitely better my @$$!!

The article I pretty well agree with. It definitely applies to both Champs and STO. Cryptic either doesn't understand the balance of powers well enough, doesn't listen to people who do often enough, or doesn't put enough time to adjusting them.

That said, I like the power reviews they've been doing in Champs lately, and the way they've been taking a good hard look at power sets one at a time. It really has given some real improvements to those sets. But while they do that, other things get left on the wayside.

Even still, though, in my experience, Cryptic is far more responsive to these issues than any other MMO company I've seen yet. They really do have some fun games underneath the mess, and they can have some great PVP, but they don't seem to put enough into tweaking it all.



As for Rift, I gave their trial a shot, and I was completely unimpressed by it. The big Rift events, while they added a very much wanted dynamism to the game that most MMOs never see, seemed far too samey same to actually be interesting. In fact none of the variety of enemies seemed to fight noticeably different from each other to appear to be more than cosmetic.

The class and power balance was atrocious, as I found that any class without self healing was basically doomed to have to rest after each 1v1 encounter and would likely die if they aggroed too many mobs (something that was extremely easy to do with how close mob placement was), while a squishy chloromancer mage (a healer type) could handle more, and kill them faster. Rogue types, while they were theoretically able to do more damage, took too much damage to be able to move from one encounter to the next without resting, and often ran out of stamina far too quick to actually pull off the combos they needed to do in time to actually kill stuff as fast as they could. PVP was much the same way.

The gameplay itself was slow and dull, especially compared to Champs, and the UI was quite clumsy with far too little space given for all the abilities you would get.

Of course this is only from the perspective of a trial, but if they wanted to sell it to me with what I saw, they definitely did not come close. The only real interesting thing I took from that game was the Rift events and the dynamism they added to the world. Having enemies take over friendly towns and having to fight them off was a pretty cool idea that no other MMO seems to do.