Today was a good day to keep playing Champions Online. This was actually the first MMO I started playing after quitting WoW 4 years ago. In that time, I mostly played single player FPRPG games like the Thief series, Fallout 3, and Skyrim. I started playing CO with a single player mindset, and spent a few months just playing solo. It also didn't help matters that I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to the people I play with. The main thing that got me into WoW was the fact that it had RP servers to keep the non-RP folk (mostly) separate. I felt more confidant approaching other players in that game; something that I didn't feel logging on CO due to the different server architecture. I would speak up in zone chat occasionally, but I never really pushed to make any connections. When I actually did join a guild, (supergroups in CO) I found I had joined one where there was never anyone around, just a big roster of inactive players with one or two logging in occasionally.
Today I felt like pushing a little harder, so I called up COs guild finder on the social panel, and had a look for social, RP lite guilds. A bunch came up, with names and recruiting info, complete with hyperlinks to their websites. Problem is, none of them are clickable. It would really be nice if I could click on a hyperlink within an MMO, and have the game safely minimize and launch my browser. Also sorely missing is an indication of how active that guild is. The average number of players from the guild who logged in over the past 24 hours alongside the average number of hours logged in by each player, would make choosing an active guild so much easier.
But the worst flaw in the guild finder was the fact that I can't just click a button to see a list of currently online players from that guild. I had to click on the player finder tab, type the name of the guild as a search parameter and hope someone was online. When I went back to the guild finder tab, it had cleared itself, and clicking search again with the same exact settings I used before (social, RP lite) showed NOTHING! The list of guilds I was looking at was just gone. I had to clear the settings, search (which gave me a list of every guild in the game), enter my parameters again, and search again in order to get the original list back, though it wasn't exactly in the same order. I don't know how problems like this got past quality control for so many years..... it boggles the mind.
The good news is that I eventually found a nice guild which allowed me to get a bit further in one of the games Adventure Packs. APs are standalone storylines that lead the player to some exotic location beyond the city and culminate in a huge boss battle. This one was called Resistance and it takes the player into an alternate dimension where the city is a war zone ruled over by a madman. It had a very nice storyline and I enjoyed the fact that the player gets to pilot a giant robot at one point. There's something very satisfying about being surrounded by hundreds of tiny soldiers and watching them go flying when you kick.
Then we got o the final boss battle and it was a doozy. There was just me and another player up to that point, and we got clobbered. Now here's where terrible game design reared it's ugly head. For some odd reason, the designers decided to lock players from returning to the battle unless everyone died. It wasn't so bad when there was just two of us dying relatively close to each other, but it got really annoying when we finally recruited a 3rd player with buffed out healing abilities who couldn't seem to get herself killed!
So I sat there, staring at an impenetrable shield, unable to do anything for almost 10 minutes. It brought my enjoyment of the game to a screeching halt, and made me wonder why the designers thought that was a good idea. A much better solution would be to have the player fight some lower level monsters and maybe disable a shield generator in order to earn their way back into the battle. There's nothing fun about being locked out with nothing to do while the rest of your party continue to fight for their lives.
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