Scared to Choose

Another week has passed since I started playing Champions Online and while I'm still enjoying myself and think they did quite a few things right, there are still some lingering issues that are seriously detracting from my enjoyment of the game.

Without a doubt, the biggest issue in the game is the retcon system.

Champions Online offers the player a LOT of choices. In all honesty, it probably offers too many choices. If you had no idea what you were doing and didn't research your character at all, you could VERY easily make a character that would be completely unplayable. While this isn't inherently bad in and of itself, the fact that there is no way to undo these choices, is where the game is broken.

As mentioned previously, the respec system (retcon) in Champions is unbelievably expensive. While their last patch did make a change to allow people to respec more than their last ten powers, the price of doing so is so exuberant, that it's pretty much impossible to respec all but the last 3 at most. Furthermore, since the price to respec previous powers is a linear-ish increase, the cost of undoing a mistake made relatively early in the character build is astronomical. I wish I could throw some hard numbers around it, but it easily turns into 10-20x the amount of money a character at your level would expect to have. Also, the price of respeccing increases as you level and the respec costs are based on possible powers (meaning ones if you have an unused power point it still affects the price of respecs) rather than actual powers. The combination of these two things basically means that respeccing is just plain and simply impossible. Even if you spent all your time just grinding for resources (something I would NOT recommend) you would essentially be fighting an uphill battle as you would level up (thus increasing the respec costs) faster than you would be making money. The system is absolutely and completely broken.

The side effect of having a broken respec system is that I find myself terrified to buy any new powers. How do I know it won't suck in 2-3 levels? I literally spent over an hour in the power house last night trying to decide which power to take and eventually logged off not having purchased anything. At the end of the day, they have made the game less fun for me because of this limitation. That is honestly all there is to it.

I think the smart thing to do would be to price respecs based on overall number of powers respecced, rather than per respec. Let me see if I can explain:

The first time I respec any power (and I can undo ANY choice I made, even an early one) it would cost me say 1000 resources. Then, the next time I respec any power, it would cost me 2000 resources; similar to the way respecs in WoW cost 1g, then 2g, etc. The beauty of this system is that it allows a person to relatively easily undo a single bad choice. If I made a bad decisions 14 decisions ago, I don't want to undo the past 14, just that one. They could also implement a cool down on this so if I don't do any respecs for say a month or so, the price of respeccing halves. While I can't vouch for everyone, I don't think the general populace really wants to be able to afford to undo EVERY choice made; that would be analogous to being able to respec in WoW from a Rogue to a Warlock. That would be silly. However, if I took a Rogue skill at level 10 that I don't like, I shouldn't be forced to pay to undo 70 levels of good choices just to fix that one.

In its current form, the retcon system is enough to make me want to stop playing the game. Unless it changes, I will NOT be paying for a second month and that is the reason I will mark in the cancellation form.

Expect more of my thoughts on the game in the next few days.