Champions Online's Chris Matz talks on F2P changes, PvP, and the future of CO page 2

Massively: There were a lot of big changes in the F2P launch, but Force was radically altered. It got a new damage passive, and we got Inertial Dampening Field. Could you weigh in with us on that?

Chris Matz: I've read quite a bit about that and quite a bit about Mindful Reinforcement and the Force shield as well. We are looking at the Protection Field mechanic and how it interacts with MR and looking at whether we're going to need to change anything.

Regarding Inertial Dampening Field, the stacking coming from groups trying to stack it a whole bunch is definitely concerning to us, and we're looking at what we can do to solve that. I have a couple of ideas. We don't want to change its effectiveness on a single person — one person using it I think is totally fine right now, but getting lots of people to stack it is problematic so we're looking at how to solve that.

As for Kinetic Manipulation, we just felt like Force was in a weird spot compared to other ranged DPS sets, [which] all had a passive to buff up their damage. Force is more oriented towards control, but if people want to go for a DPS Force build, they should be able to do that.

Are you worried at all about the resurgence of Force Cascade spike builds using the new passive?

We were obviously concerned with that too, so we tweaked the cost of FC to be a little more expensive when you have an energy form up. We [also] made sure that things that were proccing energy forms way more often than they should be (and weren't respecting energy form cancels) were getting fixed so that wouldn't be as problematic. A lot of the worry about FC comes from the PvP realm, and while we do want to address those concerns, we also don't want to wreck PvE for the sake of PvP balance.

There are a whole lot of PvP grievances, and one of the big ones is the current proliferation of "pet spam" PvP builds and the player desire to have a "target nearest hostile player" keybind. Could you comment on that?

I've read a ton of forum threads about pet spam, and we don't have a whole lot to say at this point. We've talked about it internally, and we're a little concerned about some of the solutions, which basically circumvent a lot of the thinking in a PvP environment. While I realize that there are problems specifically with Xbox controller players, with a mouse it's reasonably easy to click on a player even if they have say, 15 pets out. Giving a button that says "I can automatically ignore everything around me and target someone who is my enemy" is pretty strong, and so we haven't decided what we're going to do on that route. We're still discussing what we want to do.

It is actually pretty hard to click on someone if he shrinks himself in the costume creator.

There are definitely some issues there, and it's a little out of my realm, the targeting system at that level. I'd love to have a good solution to that problem, but I don't know what it is.

Well it might not be what people want to hear, but it is good that you guys are looking into it and they're not being ignored. I wanted to talk a little on melee balance, both in PvE and PvP — especially on the issues of inter-set balance for the melee frameworks and the melee vs. ranged issues in PvP.

That is definitely a tricky subject. The melee pass put a lot of new changes out a while ago. We tried to fix the discrepancy from the other direction, where melee was at a disadvantage to ranged builds. In some cases I think we might have over-fixed that, but I don't feel like melee is completely dominating. We see plenty of ranged builds that are doing very well.

I think the larger problem is some of the discrepancies between melee builds, say using Dual Blades vs. Fighting Claws vs. Might. I think there are still issues we're working on solving, and we made a lot of changes in F2P, but we haven't made all the changes we wanted to make. There are more changes for various frameworks on the way, and we're trying to make that playing field from melee to melee a lot more level. There's a lot of posts about Fighting Claws in specific that [show that players] feel like they're missing a lot of things that the other sets have, and we will be addressing those issues as we find them, certainly.

On a similar topic, the Avenger role feels weak, especially compared to the Brawler role. Are there any plans to adjust the balance there? What about the huge damage benefit from Focus and Enrage, which melee characters can benefit from and provide more +DMG than an offensive passive?

There are definitely some strong things there. We're looking at Avenger — we specifically meaning me, actually. I've talked with a number of people about it on the PTS forums. There are definitely some things there that I'm aware are totally not great. I have some thoughts on what I am going to be doing, but I can't share anything just yet. I can say we are definitely looking at the Avenger role. There have been comparisons with Avenger and Brawler but also comparisons between Avenger and Sentinel, which is not great, because Sentinel is supposed to be a support role and people are using it for DPS instead instead of the role we intend them to be using. So there's definitely some weirdness there, and I'm taking a look at them.

I wanted to talk about Teleport. In the F2P launch, and I'm pretty sure this is a bug...

It is. [laughs] It's already been fixed. Yeah... that bug got introduced by fixing Teleport effects happening when you're ending your teleport, like the extra second of continuing to fly and the extra second of stealth. Fixing that broke the other interactions, and we've already fixed that. It should be coming to a PTS build soon.

For Teleport in PvP, we added in a lot of travel power removers in to various powers for characters, especially Archetypes to be able to deal with that. Obviously Teleport is... um... strong, and we have this balancing act of making teleport feel like you're actually teleporting and not making it too powerful. It's a weird balance to walk, and with the changes in F2P you can see we're really trying to figure out where that balance is. We're still playing with it.

So the C-Store just released Lightspeed. How much influence did you have on that?

There was definitely talk about that about what can we do with travel powers, like, "Do we want to make a totally new travel power that's unique?" and my answer was really, "No, I'd really rather it feel like a costume," so that's what we did. It's exactly the same power as Superspeed because we don't want to be selling a new travel power that's totally unique. We don't want to be like, "Hey, Teleport costs 10 dollars, have fun!" That's not the right way to handle Teleport. [laughs]

Next, I wanted to talk about the endgame, and I've written a few articles on things people can do in the endgame. There are definitely a lot of complaints of no endgame, which I'm sure you're aware of, and I wanted to pick your brain on that.

That's one I can't really talk a whole lot about. Like you said, we are definitely aware of it. One of the problems that I can touch on is people not really wanting to do it, and I think that mostly has to do with the reward structure. I have this issue as well. I play a lot of MMOs, and while doing endgame stuff is really fun, it's a lot less fun if I'm not running after that next upgrade. Once I've got best in slot and there's nothing I need to keep upgrading, it's fun for me for a while to be powerful; not having that next thing there is hard for me, and I can totally understand that. I can't say much on it at this point because we are discussing this pretty heavily right now internally. I don't have a timeline for that, but I would expect to hear more about that in the reasonably soon timeframe.

Crafting is often commented on as not being fun in Champions. Care to weigh in on that?

We've talked about that recently in here as well. Actually, before F2P we discussed whether we wanted to do anything for F2P launch with our crafting system. We feel like we got better bang for the buck improving the things we did work on than we would spending a bunch of time working on the crafting system. That doesn't mean that we won't be working on it, but I don't have anything right now to talk about it yet unfortunately. We are discussing it. I'm kind of sorry I'm dodging all of your questions right now, but...

I'm a little sad I can't hear your opinion on the endgame, but not being able to hear your opinion because work is being done right now is good too. Thanks for the interview!

Good talking with you.

Thanks to Chris Matz for letting us pick his brain about all the new changes with the F2P launch!