[CO] State of the Game: June 17, 2010

Invitado Vie 18 Jun 2010, 14:27

[CO] State of the Game: June 17, 2010 64cea92ad345b6436a40e0ce36c9215d

Greetings Champions!

Over the last month, we've been hard at work finishing up our first
Adventure Pack: The Serpent Lantern. I'm happy to say that The Serpent Lantern
is now LIVE and ready for you to play! Once again, your testing and
feedback has been very important in making this update great.

The Serpent Lantern

This is our first Adventure Pack, and we learned a lot when building
it. We had to devise a way to make the content scale with both team size
and character level, for example. We also had to find a good way to let
people leave off in the middle of the adventure and pick it up again.
We look forward to everyone's feedback now that it's live. Tell us what
you like and what you don't like so we can improve these very cool
updates.

The Serpent Lantern has a whole lot more than just the adventure,
though. Some highlights:

We added the Difficulty Slider, which will let you choose to
make instanced missions more difficult. Doing so will increase your
rewards and some maps will also drop better items. We expect that we'll
make some changes to the slider; players on the test server are already
clamoring for an even harder mode!
The events of the Serpent Lantern also showcase the newly revamped
VIPER villain group. They have new weapons, spiffier uniforms, and are
generally a nastier and more formidable force to be dealt with. Everyone
seems to think these guys a whole lot more fun to take on now.
We've normalized the energy builder powers so they all have
approximately the same efficiency. In general, this increases the damage
they do across the board by 17 percent.
We've heard many complaints that teaming seems less efficient than
going solo. We crunched a bunch of numbers and significantly increased
the teaming bonuses for defeating critters and the bonus for completing
crossover missions.
Veteran Rewards are granted to players based on how long they've
subscribed to Champions Online. Every hundred days of subscription, a
new set of bonuses are granted to you. You earn costume parts, retcon
tokens, XP buffs, and cool devices. Details here: http://www.champions-online.com/veteran_rewards.
A zillion bugs were squashed.

Full details for the changes in Serpent Lantern can be found here.

Summer Update

Our next update is targeted for early August. We have several
Supergroup and quality of life features on the way.

We're adding place to put Supergroup news, the roster, link to a
website and so on. We're also adding an event calendar which will let
you create events, sign up for them and leave comments. We're also
adding a way for Supergroups to describe themselves for recruitment.
Players will be able to search them like they can search for individual
characters today. I'm pretty excited by what we've got planned for
Supergroups. We'll get you updates as we get closer to going live.

A good number of new emotes are on the way. More dances! We're also
redoing the user interface for emotes a bit so it's less cumbersome. The
place to bust those moves is at the renovated Ren Center. We're
rebuilding the amphitheatre around the Powerhouse entrance to provide a
big stage for contests and other events. We also built a better place
for the tailors to hang out.On the powers side, we are updating the pet powers. We're still
working out the details, but we're focused on making them overall more
fun to play. They are currently a bit clunky, requiring you to dismiss
all of them to respawn and so on. We hope to clean that up and make it a
lot smoother.We're also planning on updating the in-game store so it's a lot more
usable. For example, the pictures that you can only get from the web now
will be built into the game so you don't need to swap between them to
figure out what you're buying.

And as always, we're fixing bugs and tweaking. It's shaping up to be a
fun update.

Community

I'd like to give a great big welcome to our new players. We've had
quite a few new heroes join up over the past month, which is awesome.
For all you new players, don't forget to invite your friends and family
to Millennium City! The Champs
Referral Program gives you cool stuff if they sign up.Our new website is now live, and it looks great. I know I find it a
lot easier to get around. I hope you do too.

Our next "Play with the Devs" event is June 17, 2010. Some of us will
be playing The Serpent Lantern. Others will be hanging out as always to
chat, PvP or do pick-up missions.

I hope to see you there!
-poz

Link
to the forum post

Fuente