When Cryptic announced that players would have to pay for the upcoming Champions Online expansion, the backlash from the community was noticeable. It was so noticeable, in fact, that Executive Director Bill Roper revealed in this week's State of the Game address that the expansion will now be free for all players.

Champions Online: Revelation, which was formerly known as Vibora Bay, is scheduled to launch in mid-March. Roper said it is designed for levels 37–40 and will have a new level 40 repeatable Lair with all new high-end rewards for experienced players.

Roper admits in his letter that Cryptic has "had a real failure with communicating to our community over the past couple of months." He lists a number of ways the company plans to fix this problem, and one of them is the return of bi-weekly Ask Cryptic segments. The newest one contains answers to some hard-hitting questions, such as how the game can succeed considering its "current lackluster performance."

Roper's State of the Game address and the Ask Cryptic segment are posted after the jump.

State of the Game: February 9, 2010

We have a lot going on right now both at Cryptic, and with Champions Online in particular. There are huge changes afoot, and rather than spend a lot of time with the preamble, let’s sink our collective teeth into the meat of the matter.

Scrubbing the Kitchen Sink

As we all know, the Kitchen Sink patch had numerous issues that made it onto Live. The reasons for this boil down to two key areas:

Things That Used to Work Stopped Working:

Basically, there were changes to the core code that automatically merged with our older code and we didn’t see all of the effects of these before they went Live. Token changes, for example, caused a lot of things to stop working properly in Champions. We use tokens for a lot of things in Champions and when the token system was recently optimized, it caused any token-based missions to stop working properly - namely UNITY and Patrol missions. There was also the AI fixes which were made which affected the attack rates of every enemy in the game that slipped past us all.

Lack of Comprehensive Testing

There were only a few players on during the time the Kitchen Sink Patch was on the Public Test Shard, and we simply didn’t allocate enough QA testers. There were so many issues we were anxious to address, that our desire to get fixes out to the players as soon as possible completely backfired. There are truly an astonishing amount of changes in this patch, and we simply should have spent more time testing them before pushing the build Live.

Moving forward, our updates will spend more time in internal test before going to the Public Test Shard. We’ve already increased the size of our Champions QA group, and the designers have been playing much more on the internal servers. We are also much more aware of the changes coming into the core game engine through other projects and have taken steps to increase communication internally to avoid being surprised by those changes.

Currently, we’re putting new builds up on the Public Test Shard, addressing the current reported issues with the Kitchen Sink patch. If you’d like to help us make sure we’re getting it all, play on the PTS and provide us your feedback in this thread.

Improving Communications

We’ve had a real failure with communicating to our community over the past couple of months. You’ve been vocal about it, and we hear you. In fact, we’ve taken some pretty big steps to fixing this, and I wanted to share our goals with you to address this. There are a lot of things we used to do that fell by the wayside, and now that we have StormShade back on the team full-time, we’re going to be bringing back a lot of the things you have always told us you look forward to seeing and hearing:

Ask Cryptic

Bi-weekly posting by the developers answering your questions as compiled by StormShade.

GM Blog

A general support-oriented Blog where our Game Masters discuss what's being done to address your concerns, talk about bug status, and so on.

Developer Chat

A monthly live IRC chat with developers from the Champions Online team.

State of the Game

Bi-weekly posting by me (Chronomancer) to provide insight into the high-level vision for the Champions Online universe and address hot-button issues.

Game with Cryptic

We’re putting together a new all-company supergroup so you can find us in the game and share adventures. We’re also going to do more PVP events so you can pit your skills in The Hero Games against the devs!

The Champions Universe

Add more Champions Fiction to the website on a monthly basis.

New Fan Art

Post new Fan Art to the website on a monthly basis.

New Screenshots

Post new screenshots for use by community sites on a regular basis.

New Wallpaper

Post new wallpaper images for use by community sites on a regular basis.

Developer Special Features

Everything from what builds we use to tips on how to get through Lairs to, well, whatever we can come up with so you can see how we see the game.

Website Overhaul

The Star Trek site is awesome, and next up for the web team is an overhaul of the Champions Online web page. We can’t wait to see what they have up their sleeves!

You can also expect to see a greater presence in the forums by the developers overall. We’ve been really nose down working on the game for quite a while, but we recognize the need to stick our heads up and at least just say hello!

Champions Online - Revelation

In my last State of the Game, I talked about how we’re adding a whole new area to Champions Online. The expansion formerly known as Vibora Bay (always our working title) has a new, more descriptive name: Champions Online – Revelation. The half-angel / half-demon Therakiel is bent on bringing forth the end times. Now, it is up to you to join a team of the greatest heroes the world has ever known to stop him.

We’ve had continuous discussions for many weeks regarding the Revelation expansion and how it should be delivered to our community. I am very glad to announce that while we built Revelation to the quality and expectations of a paid expansion pack, we are making it available for FREE to our players.

Revelation represents some of the best work to date on Champions. The expansion features an epic storyline filled with noble heroes and terrifying villains and is set in stunning new environments. We've incorporated many suggestions from the community as what they want from the game - new game play areas, new powers, new rewards, and greater challenges are just some of the additions.

I'd like to reassure everyone we consider Revelation to be of a quality and quantity that is very worthy of a price tag. It is still legitimate expansionary content, the same as it was designed to be. But our community means everything to us and we’re incredibly excited to be able to get this massive update out to you all.

We're working on a full package of Revelation screen shots, write-ups, item and costume descriptions and images, a teaser video, and much more that will be released very soon. Revelation is designed for levels 37 – 40 and will have an all new, absolutely staggering level 40 repeatable Lair with all new high-end rewards for our most experienced players.

See you online, Champions!

 

Ask Cryptic: February 8, 2010

You all had a ton of great questions for us, and we've sent them out for answers! Want to know if your question got answered? Well, take a look and see! Then, make sure you join us in one week's time when we post our next Ask Cryptic!

Halorin: Where does Champions Online fit into Cryptic's plans a year from now? Two years? Three? And what resources are Cryptic willing to invest in the game see those plans to fruition?

Jackalope: We’ve just started working on the next step of widening the Champions Universe and we’ve nailed down our ongoing content plans. In short, you can expect to see new adventures every other month (roughly). The content will be far more story based and focused on the background of the game. Meanwhile, we’ve got some other things afoot (and some of you might be able to deduce what that is) and we’ll talk about it more soon.

Darth-Log: How confident are you that Champions Online can succeed considering its current lackluster performance and in lieu of upcoming competition? What have you learned, what are your short term considerations and long term goals?

Chronomancer: We remain dedicated to the Champions Universe, and we have plans to continue to grow it. While our numbers of players is less than we would like, it is also more than several other MMOs that continue to service their communities. The upcoming expansion is an excellent example of our plan to make the game bigger and better while also addressing the desires of our players.

We learned a great many lessons from Champions, and I think you can see some of that knowledge expressed in how we ran our beta testing and approached content creation in Star Trek Online. Game development is continued learning, iteration, and alteration to fit the needs of an ever-changing market. A game that was a huge hit five or ten years ago probably wouldn’t do anywhere near as well today. The interests and demands of gamers have changed. So we have to learn from our mistakes as well as our successes and move forward.

In that regard, we’re going to be focusing more on creating content to provide multiple paths of advancement within Champions Online. The plan is to create more of what you want in smaller bites so we can do them on shorter timelines. We also want to provide more ways and reasons for players to group, which is what much of the Flashback and Difficulty Slider work has been focused on.

In the long term, we’re working on creating new stories, game play mechanics, and locales for the Champions universe. We’re increasing our presence in the community and being more open and communicative with you so you know what we’re thinking and working on. And perhaps most importantly, we’re continuing to look for ways that we can make Champions a better game.

FongSolo: What is Cryptic doing, or even planning behind the scenes to rebuild good faith in the company and this product that many of us paid the lifetime subs for?

Arkayne: Aside from a ton of things that we just can't talk about right now, but will be very soon, we're actively making a couple of changes around here: We're stepping up the communication. We're going to do more Ask Cryptics, more Dev Chats, we're going to be in-game, playing with you more, Our GMs are going to start letting you know the status on the current bugs, and the entire development team is going to start being more active on the forums. On top of that, we also moved Stormshade back to Champions. We know you don't know him well yet, but believe us when we say, he gets really loud when you guys aren't happy. Oh, and that "soon" we're talking about up there, that's not a "soon(tm)" that's a soon, as in as soon as humanly possible soon.

Derangement: Are there any plans to eventually include more non-seasonal content as part of a free update, or will you be focusing the revenues from monthly subscriptions on bug fixes and otherwise upgrading the game's core, while relying on microtransactions for added content?

Stormshade: We have plans to add more free content to the game very soon, not seasonal stuff, and we'll be talking about that shortly. (Sorry gang, you're not getting a Valentine's Day Event, but we do still love you.)

Heathenish: I'd like to know what the relationship between STO code and CO code is. Because this past patch seems like you guys just dropped the "improved" STO engine right back into CO. Seems like a crazy thing to do, but for instance the direction-reversing and crazy camera bugs seem to have come straight from STO beta. Also, are both games sharing the same server? It doesn't seem fair to have login problems because some other game is flooded.

Poz: Champs and STO share Cryptic's global services: the chat and mail server, the account server, and proxy servers. The games themselves do not share any servers. As you noted, the account server is what we've had some problems with due to Star Trek. Unfortunately, we couldn't safely change how our system works and split the two games apart there. Many of the load issues are fixed already, and we have programmers whose highest priority is keeping the account server working smoothly.

IchbinVol: Will there be any reason to have a theme based character in the future? Perhaps a synergy bonus for having a certain set of skills?

BigOtter: That's actually one of the goals of our Tier 4 powers being introduced in our upcoming expansion - to provide high-end thematic meta-powers for each of the power groups.

DawningDestiny: When is the melee rebalancing coming? You've talked a lot about it, but I've seen nothing that wasn't a nerfy baseball bat to the face when it comes to melee. It's by far the most underwhelming, underpowered set in the game. So yeah, what's your timetable for that fix?

Akinos: Our melee review is currently underway. It is a massive review that involves 5 full framework reviews as well as an overall look at melee as a whole. It’s too early to give an ETA but rest assured is it being worked on.