You know what, give Cryptic a break. They said it was a limited time offer. There are all sorts of sales in this world, and pretty much all of them are limited time and while supplies last.

There are all these people bitching and complaining about how bad Champions is and how they are going to cancel their preorder, and now they bitch because they lost the chance to buy the lifetime subscriptions. Well, I guess those people should have bought it while the supplies lasted instead of complaining eh?

Just silly. If you wanted one of these offers, you should have grabbed it. Just like any other deal/sale that you might discover in a consumer driven sociey - buy it if you want it and don't bitch when it sells out.

@Brian!

Why should we give them a break?

They said "Limited TIME offer" not "Limited Quantites offer"

They said the offer would be available until Sept. 1. It wasn't. So they lied.
END OF STORY.

I was already on edge after how bad the beta ran, how unfriendly, unintuitive, chaotic & just plain unworking / broken the teaming system is. Almost impossible to get the same quest as the rest of your team as sharing almost never works. (which also makes sidekicking COMPLETELY pointless)

Also the framerate is horrible even on a good rig. The bloom effect makes the game look like a Barbra Walters interview. The color selection is lacking (sure they want to keep it 4 color comic looking but the palate hurts the eyes after a while).

The instances are too small. 100 people for the MAIN zone, Millennium City? Nowhere near enough. + The instances themselves are annoying & take you out of the immersion.

Bugs out the Wazoo. a brief list off the top of my head

- when trying to get into a zone near cap, even if your team is in it you get "Game server connect fail" and DCed.

- If you go to a dif instance, like say the powerhouse, and the zone your team is in approaches cap; you cant get back to your team. You have to either sit there and wait for people to exit. or ask your whole team to switch to another instance. In which case they're transported away from the quest and everybody has to start all over again.

- Mouse sensitivity is out of wack w/ look speed. No adjustment for it in options.

- Cant move powers to right side of tray, for aesthetic seperation or simply to avoid hitting the wrong key. All are auto moved to the leftmost open spot.

- energy building to test powers is almost non-existant in the powerhouse.

- UI scaling system is completely broken. You make it bigger (say you play on a HDTV) and things like for ex the Bank, the UI goes off the screen & you cant move it around. Half the UI boxes are unmoveable.

- little bits that show the game is not finished & debugged. Even Chief Surnhoff (in the tutorial zone) tells you the interact button is F (like it was long ago in closed beta); BUT it is Z now!

- hitting z to interact is too sensitive & they need to make a timer on it cause sometimes u hit z and it goes through the whole interaction screen and u cant go back to see what it was.

- search window is useless, instances arent even numbered. now way to search by a persons stat focus so it's all a crapshoot. They learned nothing from CoH's excellent search. (also the search columns arent resizeable and the UI problem comes into effect again w/ everything being cut off/unreadable)

- team members names are like a dark powder purple/blue. really hard to see. but other peoples names of ppl who are in other teams but not yours are in bright neon green? that makes no sense.
etc...

I should have listened to the little voice in my head when I head that most of the people who ran Cryptic stayed at NC, while Jack left w/ the company name.

Because of this I'm canceling my pre-order. I'm not spending $60 to beta test an unfinished & unfun game for 6 months. And I'm not spending $50 on a game which will be $30 next year. At which time I will be playing TOR anyway & dedicating my MMO time to that.

CoH gets to keep my money for another year. Cryptic / Atari, good luck w/ your disaster of a game.

@Arrow

You sound exactly like the people complaining about this offer. You bitch about them not keeping available until the first, but that is like 1/20th of your post. The rest of your comment rages on how sucky the beta was.

So then, why complain about not being able to buy the lifetime subscription? Clearly the game sucks right?

Sounds like you just have an axe to grind. I will agree that Cryptic's customer service and communication with their players is bad. They seriously need to fire their PR staff and bring in new blood. And thier game still has lots of bugs in it (better now) but I think there are some core things missing that should be in release (like even a good LFG system or even stealing WAR's Open Groups).

But regardless, the wild threats are just silly. Play CoX, Play CO. Whatever. Voting with your dollar is a powerful thing. Complaining that you can't buy a lifetime subscription when you clearly don't like the game is pretty weak. I would have felt sympathy for you if you would have been raving how this is your favorite game and you were just saving up your dollars and how you love CO anyway and will subscribe, albeit disappointed. Then I might have rallied to your cause.

If they are going to offer a normal 6-month plan on billing, then I doubt it will be essentially giving you 2 free months at normal pay, or come with the costume piece and STO online beta access.

You're right Nick. I realized that after posting. Though I'd hope you'd still get the discounted price, just not the other stuff.

No, not wow. CO.

When Cryptic announced yesterday that supplies were running short they did state that the 6 month offer would be available again post-launch. It just won't have the extras that the (now sold out) promotion had. The lifetime sub, however, is not currently planned to be brought back.

Just wanted to point out to the people saying it was hard to find that it was stated on the main page, and there were still 500 6-month and 1000 lifetime subs left at the time of the post.

http://www.champions-online.com/node/286510

Shame Doctor Comics' erudition can't be focused on less trivial matters.

Except, of course, that Cryptic has stolen nothing, murdered nothing, and deceived nobody. This is not a crime, and is not shaking the macrocosm, causing a grave and tragic imbalance that will result in the death of everyone involved. This was a very simple, "oops, we didn't write that down."

If anything, this is to be applauded. Most MMO companies, as tradition dictates, would have simply ignored all the whining, moved on and maybe deleted all the negative posts, sweeping the whole thing under the rug (like WoW's forum "error" that somehow resulted in losing the first few, buggy months of gameplay complaints on their forums).

Chances are, it was one or two people who were in charge of producing the advertisement, and nobody spotted the lack of a disclaimer. It is a quality control error, and while there is probably just one person to point a finger at, the whole company is willing to stand up and take the blame...and apologize. Which means a lot more from a company than one person apologizing.

Well done, Cryptic. Thank you for acting in an ethical manner. And pay no attention to false prophets who come bearing rather strained Shakespeare comparisons.

meh? So you're saying it's fine for a company to announce special pre-release deals, then with five days till the deal ends, suddenly say "sold out lol"?

If nothing else, that's terrible business practice - I was considering getting the 6-month one, today or tomorrow, and then I find out that I'm too late? with no previous knowledge of a cap? that stings, a little.

What I'm saying is that it's clearly a slow news day.

Serious!! What part of “limited time offer” do you people not understand?? They had a limited amount and they were going to stop offering it on Sep. 1st But guess what ?!?!? They ran out!!!

Ya it would be cool if Cryptic would release a few more but guess what ?!? Those would run out too!! And the people complaining would probably miss it as well and still be whining!

If you’re not going to play Champions Online because of this then awesome!! We don’t want you in the game anyway because you would probably be QQing about everything .. go back to playing WoW.

For the English challenged...limited time offer does not, in any way, shape, or form, imply limited quantity. It means the offer is good for a limited amount of time (again, not quantity).

It's perfectly reasonable to assume that a limited time offer would be available until X date regardless of quantity sold. If this was truly due to limited quantities, at no time did Cryptic relay that information. Instead, they simply said "Hey! You have until Sept 1st!"

Last I checked...Sept 1st has not passed. Pulling this offer is tantamount to false advertisement. A wise lawyer might look into this.

A lawyer...oh saints preserve us from the litigious!

@dukrous - If you actually read the post where they announced these offers, they say "available for a limited time" as well as "while supplies last." Any outrage from suddenly discovering these offers were limited is the fault of the consumer.