Behind the Mask: The perfect ten

I neglected to mention a few weeks ago (two weeks ago, actually) a very important event: Behind the Mask had its one year anniversary in the end of March, and I intended to do something special. Although we could do something boring like recap the journey of my first year of Champions Online or something, that doesn't really sound like much fun to me. I've had some good times playing CO since I started writing for Massively, but CO is a themepark, so my summary would be something like, "I roleplayed a lot." Sure, I have a few high-level characters, but I probably wouldn't have had as much fun playing CO if not for roleplaying and the social landscape of the game.

If you're a long-time reader of this column, you know I complain a lot about Champions. In some respects, that shows I'm invested in the game, and I really care about whether it succeeds. On the other hand, it also means that sometimes my column carries some bias. In true Behind the Mask-fashion, here is the real summary of my last year of playing CO.

If you read my rants about roleplayers, this should be familiar ground.

10: I am not your soapbox

I think that generally speaking, the CO community has a larger-than-normal sense of entitlement. Just bring up "lightspeed" in global chat some time and watch the lifetimers flip about how they deserve everything for free. I try to integrate myself into the game's various communities, and my in-game identity is public knowledge (@Auspicious). Unfortunately, this means that when the devs do something that players don't like, players try to get me to fight for their agenda.

I do read the forums and keep up on issues, but the goal of my column is to educate, inform, and entertain readers. It's nice that the devs sometimes read my column, but sending a message to the devs isn't the point.

9: I'm pretty sure I ranted about this before

On my list of things I hate about roleplaying, godmodding is really high on the list. I roleplay a lot, and while I try not to take RP personally, godmodding just isn't fun. I recently roleplayed with someone whose profile claimed he was 13.7 billion years old. I'm not even joking. He was a lore nerd (like I am) and acted like a complete jerk who knew everything. In general, that was a terrible day for RP -- I'd just escaped from another roleplayer whose character existed in every time at the same time.

I'm not trying to put shackles on your RP, but your thousand-year-old dragon character who knows the origins of the universe and can slay demons without a second thought (note that actually killing demons is extremely hard in the Champions universe) needs to get a total retcon. I am totally sick of perfectly good roleplaying ruined by people who know more than anyone can know and can do more than anyone can do legitimately through in-game means.

Roleplaying a godlike character, even with flaws, is too much.

8: Teleport

It's my favorite travel power. In fact, my main character's main power is extra-dimensional movement. It's also a huge, glaring problem in PvP.

For the majority of duel encounters, teleport isn't fun at all. Experts just ignore it (they can see through it), but most players aren't experts and don't carry extra perception gear. This can be seen as a non-problem; after all, most of PvP is about having the right builds, and having a poor build or a hard-countered build means you just automatically lose.

Perception gear isn't that much of a stretch from a build, but there's a big difference. Legendary +perception items are rare and super expensive, while normal legendaries are reasonably affordable or farmable. This creates a huge gap between "haves" and "have nots," even more so than other gear situations.

I've seen so many duels rendered irritating simply because the loser would spam teleport every time he was losing. When play like this is encouraged, PvP is made less fun and thus less attractive for new players. While most duelists just encourage the soft rule of no teleport in duels, this is a poor alternative to a real solution.

7: Offensive roles, buffs, and...

Everyone knows that offense buffs are a huge mess. Enrage and Focus outstrip offensive passives in raw damage, and in general, the game heavily favors defensive passives and survival over full-out damage.

This problem reverberates all the way through the entire game. I wrote an entire article on why Avenger archetypes are harder to play. The devs recently pushed some buffs to Avenger to Test, and while they're a step in the right direction, they're nowhere near the level of the other non-Guardian roles and not even close to the power level of Brawler, which has too many ridiculous perks for no real reason.

6: Lemuria, or "I love gravity"

Some things don't really go together. Peanut butter and cheese, ketchup and eggs, Patrick and swimming. I hate the water. It might be because I almost drowned in a swimming pool as a kid (I'm allergic to chlorine) or because I just hate the feeling of being wet. Water's not for me, and neither is Lemuria, CO's underwater zone.

Visually, Lemuria is pretty good-looking. There's nothing the devs can really do to change my perception of Lemuria, because it's a problem with anything truly 3-D in a game I'm playing. I like jumping mechanics a lot more than "flying" mechanics, so being put into a situation in which my AoE doesn't work right and I can't bunny-hop makes me less than enthusiastic. I still go to Lemuria, mainly because my hate of Lemuria is overshadowed greatly by my hate of...

5: Instanced missions

I played City of Villains for a really long time (what's a hero?), and the game had a good thing going with instanced missions. Instanced missions let you get a team together and have everyone on the same page working toward a single, known goal.

The problem with that game, among other things (like the archetype system), is that instanced missions are infinitely less fun than open-world missions. There's the problem of the warehouse map, but also the fact that open world missions give you freedom to choose how you'd like to tackle the objectives and give you multiple angles of approach.

Also, when you're doing missions in the open world, occasionally you bump into people trying to defend some NPCs or cover an area, and there's nothing like swooping in and dropping some heals or support bubbles to lend a hand. I love Vibora Bay's overworld, but the vast majority of VB's content is instanced, and it annoys the heck out of me.

4: Poor teaming and low mob experience

Sidekicking down to help someone with content in CO is sort of being merciful, because there's almost no benefit to you. Even if your friend gives crossover missions, they give terrible, non-scaling experience, and the mobs give poor experience, too.

Another reason I hate instanced missions is that I can't grind out three to five missions at the same time; I have to get the mission, run across the map to the door, then spend a few minutes plowing through the mobs to get to the end before repeating. The extra time I spend killing more mobs doesn't really give me any rewards.

When I'm teaming, there should be incentive to team; right now, the only reason to team up to do Serpent Lantern or Demonflame is for the challenge (and that's a pretty good reason). The only reason to do pre-endgame lairs is to put a little checkbox saying "I did it" in your list of completed quests. Of the issues with CO, this is probably the biggest and most important for the game's continued growth.

3: The missed opportunities

Although CO has a lot of powers, many of them are functionally similar. Venomous Breath isn't that much different than Fire Breath or even Shadow Embrace. Heck, it isn't even that much different than Gigabolt once you get right down to it.

When I first heard about Parry, I was super excited. My idea of a "parry" would be a block that gives a ton of damage resistance at first, then bleeds off quickly until it reaches the base after a few seconds. Instead, it does a mediocre amount of damage back to the enemy and is rarely worth taking over another block. That's a missed opportunity.

What about Tier 4s, debuffs, or the numerous powers that are avoided by freeform heroes? What about Specialist, an entire Archetype devoted to picking poor, underperforming powers with no synergy at all? CO is full of powers that could have been really cool but just suck because the additional functionality just isn't functional enough.

2: Ow, my immersion

Citizen NPCs are among the most annoying, stupid, and pointless things ever to be placed into an MMO. They're a good idea that went horribly wrong. There's nothing like roleplaying out in the city in a secret identity only to have some idiot civillian run up and say, "High Templar, you really did a great job saving us from all those aliens!" One of the things that I complained about in beta was when I would be doing street sweeping missions and some random guy would walk up to me while I was fighting and say, "Good job! I hope he dropped some phat lewt!"

Who exactly thought it would be a good use of dev resources to put this in the game?

1: The same thing in every game, except 1000 times worse

One of the selling points of Champions Online is supposed to be "your own hero, your own story." Nowhere in that does it say that "your own hero" won't be vastly inferior to other heroes or that "your own story" won't include wiping because your build was awful or you didn't know what you were doing.

The problem really isn't that people suck, because that's true in any game. The problem is that the bad people are really, really, really bad. In a game with classes, you at least have the base functions of the class to fall back on. In CO, the only given is that you have a block and an energy builder. When you get into a team to do a lair, your hope is that everyone will contribute. Sadly, that's not even remotely the case -- often, extra players are detrimental to a good core of two or three functional heroes.

Well, that about wraps up all my complaining for at least a little while. I've got quite a number of informative stuff in the works, so it's best that we get all that whining out of the way... at least for this week.

Wait! I haven't even started about buttcape farming or healer aggro or...

When he's not touring the streets of Millennium City or rolling mooks in Vibora Bay, Patrick Mackey goes Behind the Mask to bring you the nitty-gritty of the superhero world every Thursday. Whether it's expert analysis of Champions Online's game mechanics or his chronicled hatred of roleplaying vampires, Patrick holds nothing back.