Champions Online's Bill Roper talks retcons, powers and more part 2
How will you be dealing with the high price of a substantial retcon?
We've been analyzing the overall economy of the game. The huge challenge here is that we've only been up for 17 days and we needed a reasonable amount of time to pull post-launch, Live Shard data on global resource flow. This then means we have to work with ratios of these numbers and address the relationship of economic ratios between synergistic and disparate systems. As with any economic model, it's far more complex than you imagine. So during the past couple of weeks we've been working on tuning the entire economy of the game, but we haven't pushed any changes into the live environment.
Our concerns that we simply weren't giving out enough resources to meet the requirements of certain areas of the game were confirmed. We're attacking this on multiple fronts and are pushing a new economy model to internal QA test tonight and (if all goes well) onto our Public Test Shard this weekend.
Amongst a host of other things, we're also making the retcon pricing curve much gentler so that players can undo more decisions at any time. It's important to note that although we're tuning the overall costing model of retcon during this phase, a substantial retcon will still have a high price. The heroic, thematic intention is not to just let players constantly change their fundamental character concept. But at the same time we want to make it possible for them to completely retcon their character if it's their goal.
When will the C Store fully open and what are some examples of items to be sold in it?
We wanted to get some more items created so we could expand the inventory of the store before allowing players to buy Cryptic Points. The store has been open since the beginning of the game with 13 different action figures available for players that received Cryptic Points as part of pre-sale offers. I anticipate the C Store being better stocked and points available for purchase in 2 – 3 weeks.
Will Blood Moon deliver content to help fill mission gaps in the mid-to-late game zones or will it be a separate update entirely?
We'll have content to fill in the early 30's content gap on Monster Island onto our test shard within a week or so. This content will then get into the game as soon as it passes testing after that. The new content is designed as repeatable "destination areas" that have multiple missions running through them and they change as the missions progress. Moving forward, we'll continue to make content both to provide new experiences for players leveling and for those that have reached the level cap.
Can we expect a steady cycle of content updates similar to Blood Moon and what are some of the things players can look forward to?
We are dedicated to continually offering something for the players to look forward to. Blood Moon is just the first of the numerous updates we'll be doing throughout the rest of the year and beyond. And this is, of course, beyond the constant tuning and tweaking
Looking beyond Blood Moon, what features or ideas that didn't make launch would the team like to see implemented as soon as possible?
We have a list of things that just missed the cut that we're working on now. This includes being able to skip the tutorial after having completed it once with a hero, improving the functionality of the teaming system, doing some refurbishing to the very popular Powerhouse, and a few other things that we just haven't prioritized yet. The common thought is that when you launch an MMO, the work just begins – but it really is great to have the opportunity to grow and expand the game experience.
