Why Roper has to Go

With the release of last night's patch, Bill Roper has unequivocally demonstrated himself to be incapable of managing an MMO, let alone during its critical and challenging launch period.

Champions Online is already in a perilous state - it's future hangs in the balance today - and only a dramatic turnaround in attitude and competence by the leadership at Cryptic will have any chance of saving it.

Roper should do as Age of Conan Producer and Game Director Gaute Godager did after the botched launch of AoC and fall on his sword, and pass his responsibilities on to someone more competent. We know Cryptic has people with experience on (the only) successful superhero MMO. Put one of them in charge. Roper has already brought about the downfall of one much-anticipated game, Hellgate London. Let's not allow him to ruin another.

Last night's patch is the catalyst for me posting this. It was a monumental patch that changed the dynamics of the game substantially yet again in the short lifetime of this game. Never have I seen so much change in such a short period of time - not even in a beta. And these changes are not just superficial, they're sweeping - sometimes nerfing entire powersets, or like the infamous launch-day patch, nerfing everyone. It's now to the point where when you choose a power, you're just not sure if it's going to be nerfed in to the ground in a future patch. Levelling should be an exciting experience, not one filled with trepidation.

Not only has this patch changed many aspects of the game, but it continues Cryptic's mystifying approach to 'balancing' powers. Certain powers have been known to be overpowered. But instead of reducing their effectiveness or increasing their cost to put them in line with other powers, Cryptic has nerfed them in to oblivion.

A few examples are Eye Beam (used to increase in damage the longer it was maintained - now does trivial damage and is a waste for such a great looking power); Heat Wave (used to regularly do good damage and include a hold the longer it was maintained - now has a 20 second timer making it situational at best and superseded by other damage or hold powers on shorter, or no, timers); Personal Force Field (used to absorb a decent amount of damage before dropping - now a few hits and it's gone, plus damage is reduced from the force field before being reduced by blocking); Mini Mines (used to do far too much damage - now do drastically less making ranged AoE powers more potent than a PBAoE power that requires you to be in harms way). I could go on, but the forums have plenty of description of the powers that are no longer competitive.

Then there are the bugs. This patch was released to the euphemistically-named Public Test Server for just a few days, two of them being a weekend. In that time, the community was vociferous with its feedback - particularly about a couple of bugs that had sneaked in. Yet the patch went live, bugs and all. Not only that, but the devs appeared entirely unaware that the bugs even existed, only acknowledging them later - and now requiring another patch to fix. Not only this, but the bug makes the game unplayable for many. Makes you wonder what the Public Test Server is actually for.

What you see here is a failure of leadership, not development. Someone is responsible for the overall direction of the game, for the strategy for dealing with overpowered powers, for listening to community feedback and responding, and ultimately signing off on the changes in each of these patches. And that's Roper.

People are already cancelling their subscriptions. Many want to continue but are only holding their breath to see how the game fares a month or so after launch. Reviews are already out, with a few influential ones being highly critical of the flakiness of the game. Cryptic doesn't have long to get its house in order, and each day Roper continues steering Champions is another day closer to going the way of Hellgate.