Gaming: Champions Online

My characters, L-R: Pendekar Keramat, Durjana, Penjejak Neraka (Main), Flame Lord, Kesatria Angkasa.

My latest MMO foray has been Champions Online. As one of my articles from before, I was testing City of Heroes and I found that although the character creation was fun, the game itself was slow (IMO). So when Champions Online decided to come out to Open Beta phase, I was compelled to test the game. Suffice to say I was happy with the game and was planning to subscribe after a the first month of the game going live has passed.

Why not immediately? As any MMO gamer know, the first month of any MMO is usually frought with constant bug fixes and rebalancing. So I do not want to experience that. Not to mention there will probably be a lot of server down time as they apply new patches. That was my original plan anyway. However, my friends bought the game for me when my birthday came. So, being impatient, decided to subscribe even though my original intent was just to test to see if the cd-key was valid or not. Not that I don't trust my friends but more to make sure that the product works.

The game is now into its second month and it is still undergoing massive patches and fixes. However, the frequency is starting to slow down as they manage to fix the majority of the game breaking bugs. Unfortunately though, I seem to be experiencing a very weird network problem with the game. I am fine when I play the game alone but when I team, I get bad rubber banding which makes it unplayable. This situation is worsened since my main character has reached level 27 and most of the missions from that point requires teaming. In light of this, I decided to level up my ALTs to 20 so that I can decide whether to keep or scrap those characters.

Cryptic is trying to fix the network issues some users are having. I hope they fix it soon. In the meantime though, I am still having fun with the game. It is amazing how different the game can feel by what travel power you chose!