fixing-class-imbalance
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Behind the Mask: You're fired
At the time this episode of Behind the Mask was written, neither Hideouts nor Aftershock had been released. I could run a hype post about hideouts, but they are not on PTS (or at least, we can't access them), which is worrying. In fact, the recent patches have been extremely frustrating for a lot of Champions Online's veteran players. Last week, the huge patch that integrated Vivox voice chat also broke the snot out of the game; it ruined everything from team chat to mission doors to certain parts of the in-game C-Store. It even broke the difficulty slider! I haven't even played CO in the last week due to the bugs. It's pretty frustrating. Combined, these things make me really mad. Hideouts haven't been tested by players at all, and they were intended to roll out on Wednesday. The Vivox patch was pushed full of game-breaking bugs that players knew about in advance. Remember the kitchen sink patch? I thought the sloppy, impulsive, not-listening-to-players mentality that Cryptic had back then was dead. It needs to stay dead. I will not, however, be roped into writing a gigantic, mega-DOOM column this week. We can save those types of columns for EVE Online. Instead, I'm going to rant about something familiar and relevant to everyone: archetypes, and specifically, how the current archetypes are bad. I've already covered this ground, but I'm rearmed with research and rage. This week, we're throwing the Inferno archetype under the bus. He's not terrible by any means, but... to be honest, we can do better. A lot better.
