Hi, my name is Render, and I'm a Champions Online Lifetime subscriber.
I feel like such a sucker. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. I had some mad-money to spend, friends were raving about the game, I'd played it during beta and enjoyed it. Without a subscription fee, I wouldn't have to feel like I should cancel something else (like CoX) to balance the budget, it was a one-time splurge. (I haven't been on CoX or these forums much for some time, but I haven't cancelled my subscription, and it has had nothing to do with CO, STO or anything like that... it's just been a RL sandwich that I don't want to get into in this post.)
That was before the Launch Day Nerf and my realization that there were only 5 pairs of defensive powers that don't mix and match, are practically required to play solo (denying you offensive passives) and only scale based on specific stat pairs unlike, well, everything else. The best guide I've seen to CO char creation has a massive wall of text and tables at level 5 to explain this... followed by a 'Do I really need to know this? Well, sorry, but yes.' section.
Unless you get very lucky (or got a Full Retcon) your first CO character(s) will be horribly gimped, but because you don't start seeing the LT/Boss equivalents in numbers for a while, it doesn't become painfully obvious until level 15-20 or so. And if you do get lucky, the game apparently gets boring fast. (This according to a friend who raced to the level cap, got bored and cancelled faster than I could get my main char from 15 to 20.)
During beta, it wasn't obvious that there wasn't any game balance; the game was substantially easier. Everyone was awesome. (Sort of.) After the omni-nerf the game got much harder, to the point where I wasn't playing the game I thought I had purchased, but it was too late to cancel. I got one character to level 20, used my Retcon... and am currently afraid to leave the Power House and lock in my build, because nothing I've tried in their Danger Room knock off has been satisfactory. Aside from that char, I have one alt that I've actually played beyond the tutorial (which you can now skip, thank god.) One. I've created a baker's dozen beyond that, playing with the costume creator, but never felt motivated to actually play them. By way of comparison, I have 12 alts on Virtue that I have played into the mid-teens or higher.
The only reason CO is still on my machine is because I don't need the drive space and I can't cancel my subscription, so I might as well let it hang around in case I feel like using the character creator to make NPCs for the RPG I'm running in my garage. (And I think I like CoX's costume creator better, anyway. Despite being more limited, the options it does have just look better than their counterparts on CO. And it's better organized. And you can actually see your goddamn weapons in it.)
I liked STO during the beta, but I was afraid to buy it because of the CO bait-and-switch. Seriously, Cryptic. WTF?
I feel like such a sucker. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. I had some mad-money to spend, friends were raving about the game, I'd played it during beta and enjoyed it. Without a subscription fee, I wouldn't have to feel like I should cancel something else (like CoX) to balance the budget, it was a one-time splurge. (I haven't been on CoX or these forums much for some time, but I haven't cancelled my subscription, and it has had nothing to do with CO, STO or anything like that... it's just been a RL sandwich that I don't want to get into in this post.)
That was before the Launch Day Nerf and my realization that there were only 5 pairs of defensive powers that don't mix and match, are practically required to play solo (denying you offensive passives) and only scale based on specific stat pairs unlike, well, everything else. The best guide I've seen to CO char creation has a massive wall of text and tables at level 5 to explain this... followed by a 'Do I really need to know this? Well, sorry, but yes.' section.
Unless you get very lucky (or got a Full Retcon) your first CO character(s) will be horribly gimped, but because you don't start seeing the LT/Boss equivalents in numbers for a while, it doesn't become painfully obvious until level 15-20 or so. And if you do get lucky, the game apparently gets boring fast. (This according to a friend who raced to the level cap, got bored and cancelled faster than I could get my main char from 15 to 20.)
During beta, it wasn't obvious that there wasn't any game balance; the game was substantially easier. Everyone was awesome. (Sort of.) After the omni-nerf the game got much harder, to the point where I wasn't playing the game I thought I had purchased, but it was too late to cancel. I got one character to level 20, used my Retcon... and am currently afraid to leave the Power House and lock in my build, because nothing I've tried in their Danger Room knock off has been satisfactory. Aside from that char, I have one alt that I've actually played beyond the tutorial (which you can now skip, thank god.) One. I've created a baker's dozen beyond that, playing with the costume creator, but never felt motivated to actually play them. By way of comparison, I have 12 alts on Virtue that I have played into the mid-teens or higher.
The only reason CO is still on my machine is because I don't need the drive space and I can't cancel my subscription, so I might as well let it hang around in case I feel like using the character creator to make NPCs for the RPG I'm running in my garage. (And I think I like CoX's costume creator better, anyway. Despite being more limited, the options it does have just look better than their counterparts on CO. And it's better organized. And you can actually see your goddamn weapons in it.)
I liked STO during the beta, but I was afraid to buy it because of the CO bait-and-switch. Seriously, Cryptic. WTF?