Retcon changes in today's Champions Online patch
by Kyle Horner 
Sep 2nd 2009 at 11:00AM
Filed under: New titles, Patches, News items, Champions Online
So here's the biggest improvement: Players can now Retcon as far back as they'd like regardless of level. There's been significant changes to the inner workings of the system, but for details on that we suggest you look for the official explanation.
Looking at the the cost of a full level 20 retcon, it still seems a little higher than it should be -- or is it? Unlike pretty much any other MMO, Champions Online doesn't restrict your ability selection based on a class. The problem Cryptic is facing is that if they allow for cheap 'n easy respecs, players may never want to roll a new character, which would kill the replay value of any MMO significantly coupled with the fact that you can also redesign your character as well. Retcon prices will probably still receive tweaks and changes, but when and to what extent is hard to say.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Pingles said on 11:20AM 9-02-2009
How about Retcon prices increase over time? Give new folks and Cryptic's new patches time to grow on everyone and just increase the prices every week or so.
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mrblister said on 11:30AM 9-02-2009
So glad I canceled my preorder. It really does appear that the devs have no clear direction on what they want the game to be or where they want it to go. It really is unfortunate because I had such high hopes.
Oh well.
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Aganazer said on 11:55AM 9-02-2009
Can't say I blame ya. If all I heard about was the hysteria coming from the game, I'd never even suspect that it might actually be a lot of fun to play, which it is.
GRT said on 1:11PM 9-02-2009
Yeah, the crybabies on the forums are blinding casual observers to the fact that the game is really fun to play, if you're into this kind of game (pretty fast combat, superheroes, levels and quests).
mrblister said on 1:36PM 9-02-2009
I played the CB and the OB. I have tried it and what I saw of it was generally enjoyable but nothing amazing. It's the constant rubberbanding by the dev team that turned me off.
Dravi said on 7:53AM 9-05-2009
I tend to disagree with this theme that CO was 'fun' to play. It wasn't really fun at all. It was slightly annoying, Somewhat dull and a bit repetative.
What was fun about it?
All the powers are buyable because there is little difference between any of them apart from the name, fire blast, ice blast, sonic blast, pysionic blast....the difference is in name alone.
The quests were generally generic and repetative...kill 10 cultists, kill 20 escaped prisoners, kill your time doing the same thing over and over gain. The odd escort quest thrown in for variation.
I do agree on one thing and this is probably what is making some people say the game is 'fun' There is no down time, you regain your 'power' by fighting with certain powers, and that I suppose is what makes some people think that the combat is fun.....I disagree, while I agree that it is a great system and should be employed by more games to give almost continual gameplay, I disagree that it constitutes fun.
Psychotic Storm said on 11:37AM 9-02-2009
I think the retcons are still way too expensive.
but that reaches a main problem, if the changes are so vast you need to change your heroes concept at such a basic level just to play, then there is a fundamental flaw in them.
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Scragend said on 11:51AM 9-02-2009
Hang on a sec, in the early days of CoH to respec you had to do one of the trials. You couldnt test powers out in CoH before you trained them. The powerhouse system is great, the cost to replace your last power is free as long as you dont leave the powerhouse, simple. If you've borked your character you have to pay, if the devs bork it during a patch a free respec/retcon should/usually is issued.
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Aganazer said on 11:58AM 9-02-2009
They made some fundamental fixes to the Sorcery set in yesterday's patch. I got a free full respec. I guess they don't consider their adjustments to the other various powers to be significant enough to warrant a full respec.
rheric said on 12:04PM 9-02-2009
This is a good first step, for this particular issue. I think Cryptic is running up against a lot of people who just aren't used to the flexibility of a classless system (myself included!). I see the sense in not giving out free retcons to everyone, but I a lot of people would appreciate a significant reduction in cost.
It doesn't matter that I can reset my character all the way back to creation if I can't afford to do so with the resources (in-game currency) I have.
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Bryan said on 12:06PM 9-02-2009
After the change yesterday to how the game plays, the FUN i had the day before and all through beta was gone. I could care less about this retcon crap, I want the fun gameplay I had before yesterday back. Now I can't even complete certain SOLO missions due to henchman and villians attack power being increased so much. Oh well.
I canceled my preorder as well, good thing I procrastinated on going to the store to get it. I'm just hoping this is a lesson for Cryptic for when Star Trek Online releases, they better not pull this crap on that game.
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java.scholl said on 12:23PM 9-02-2009
lol, such a hubub that people make wrong decisions about powers after day one. What freaking nonsense. Test and try out characters I say. My goodness what a buncha whiners ... I say do what CoH did, or put a lvl limit on when you can or cannot respec... like every 5 or so lvls. Man, no other game has the freedom that Cryptic has brought to the table. Does Aion, Wow, Lotro, or anyother game give ya a) a respec that is way to flexible like Chamipions b) have a team that caters to the fans every freaking day like Cryptic?
Give Cryptic the space they need and deserve.. so far, I've had a great time, enjoyed the world.. loved the humor, missions, character creations etc. Have there been frustrating time... sure.. but man, it's day 2 of the game.
Some people get caught up on so many things, are probably the same people that would feed a baby steak and cheese and friggin yell at them that they haven't crawled outside fast enough to take out the freakin garbage.
And yes... I need to switch to decaf. Thanks fer lettin me rant. ;)
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MrGutts said on 12:47PM 9-02-2009
People didn't make the wrong decisions about powers on day 1, they made decisions based on 3 days worth of play time prior to this patch that changed game play and how the powers work or don't work.
So they made choices based on how powers and advantages worked at the time, not based off of Mondays patch that changed major mechanics of the game itself. So the major bitch is that most folks just what a full retcon of all the powers because such drastic changes happened.
PeterD said on 1:07PM 9-02-2009
Java.scholl, none of the games you listed have the ability to completely gimp your character based on choices made during development except maybe WoW, and guess what, WoW has unlimited, fairly affordable respecs.
That said, I don't think there's a problem with the retcon system when it comes to normal play. If you WANT to completely revamp your entire character when you're level 30 that should be obscenely expensive. However, people are NEEDING to change their characters as the result of a patch that significantly nerfed players while buffing enemies at the same time.
They should just give out a 1-time free respec token to all current players that will let them re-pick all powers and abilities. There's no real reason not to do this as it will make pre-order players happy while not affecting the long term replayability of the game (i.e. alts).
Aganazer said on 1:16PM 9-02-2009
What are these powers you guys took that have left you with an unplayable character? I have tried powers from seven different sets just yesterday and none of them seemed to broken that you would not be able to complete content anymore. I played for 15 hours yesterday under all kinds of circumstances and I see no cause for all this hysteria I am seeing today.
Jack said on 12:23PM 9-02-2009
Waiting for DCU Online!
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Drago Dracini said on 4:50PM 9-02-2009
I love Champions, problem is that retcon is set up really bad. They should stabalize all prices and make people able to choose the skills they want to unlearn insead of having to go back and reformat the entire character.
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Phone-Guy said on 12:53PM 9-02-2009
Cryptic's behavior is nothing short of their namesake. The power nerfs combined with the mob difficulty and damage increase leaves me believe that the following scenario happen. You have Jack or someone of equivalent importance looking at the metrics for Character leveling ratios and pushing a panic button. They call a meeting with the head of each dev team and ask them for a solution. Each team goes back to their people and implement changes to solve the problem. First Combat & Careers looks at it and decides, well players can kill monsters to quickly and are never in danger even from mobs 4 - 5 levels above them. So the solution cut down the effectiveness of defenses and lower damage output from the highest used powers. So meanwhile over on the other side of the building. The head of missions team is having a similar meeting. They decide that experience from missions is the problem. Since players can complete them faster than intended the best bet it to lower the XP and remove bonus XP for completing missions of a higher level. So both teams run their readfiles up to the internal server. The QA team looks at the changes verifies the changes are correct but most likely notes that both changes are bad and send them back as verfiied working. Meanwhile more stress is added and they decide to push the changes to live in a attempt to sort it out before launch.
In this scenario which I hope is correct, the whole issue is caused by two teams not communicating that they planned on fixing the problem and the internal server version was pushed without them releasing. The reason I hope this is the case is that they will fix the issue. This would also explain the reason allot of this stuff was missing from the patch notes.
I myself understand and accept the power changes for the most part, some of the numbers are really messed up at the moment. A level 10 rank 3 power that does less damage than a Level 3 Rank 1 tier 1 counterpart. Or the fact that Rank 3 invulnerable is only applying about 5% damage resistance on some characters. I like the increased mob XP and the mob difficulty but the mission experience needs to be fixed. They don't have enough content to cover the now glaring gaps that the XP Nerf has torn open.
Though as was brought up on the Champions forums, the addition of News Paper style missions or Player driven arc content would fit in and remove the bad spots in the XP curve.
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PeterD said on 1:14PM 9-02-2009
What I find disturbing is that they did almost exactly the same thing at the end of the City of Heroes beta. Nerfed players, buffed mobs, nerfed xp, increased the xp curve. It seriously hurt the fun of the game and cost them a lot of potential subscribers by making the game seem grindy and slow. Since NCSoft bought CoH the game has gotten faster and more fun, and more like it was in beta.
Champions Online is supposed to be a fun action-based superhero MMO. Remaking it into an EQ style grinder (which even EQ isn't anymore!) is just a bad idea. I'm not sure what Jack Emmert's "Vision" is, but it seems to be based more on dragging out the game (and subscriber time) and less about fun.
Jaiyeson said on 1:32PM 9-02-2009
I feel disgust for this company right now. All they would have to do to appease most of us is give us a free complete retcon since they they changed how much game mechanics worked.
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