from the CO forums:

Greetings, Heroes!

We have a lot going on right now at Cryptic, and with Champions Online in particular. There are huge changes afoot, and rather than spend a lot of time with the preamble, let’s sink our collective teeth into the meat of the matter.

Scrubbing the Kitchen Sink
As we all know, the Kitchen Sink patch had numerous issues that made it onto Live. The reasons for this boil down to two key areas:

Things That Used to Work Stopped Working
Basically, there were changes to the core code that automatically merged with our older code and we didn’t see all of the effects of these before they went Live. Token changes, for example, caused a lot of things to stop working properly in Champions. We use tokens for a lot of things in Champions and when the token system was recently optimized, it caused any token-based missions to stop working properly - namely UNITY and Patrol missions. There was also the AI fixes which were made which affected the attack rates of every enemy in the game that slipped past us all.

Lack of Comprehensive Testing
There were only a few players on during the time the Kitchen Sink Patch was on the Public Test Shard, and we simply didn’t allocate enough QA testers. There were so many issues we were anxious to address, that our desire to get fixes out to the players as soon as possible completely backfired. There are truly an astonishing amount of changes in this patch, and we simply should have spent more time testing them before pushing the build Live.

Moving forward, our updates will spend more time in internal test before going to the Public Test Shard. We’ve already increased the size of our Champions QA group, and the designers have been playing much more on the internal servers. We are also much more aware of the changes coming into the core game engine through other projects and have taken steps to increase communication internally to avoid being surprised by those changes.

Currently, we’re putting new builds up on the Public Test Shard, addressing the current reported issues with the Kitchen Sink patch. If you’d like to help us make sure we’re getting it all, play on the PTS and provide us your feedback in this thread.

Improving Communications
We’ve had a real failure with communicating to our community over the past couple of months. You’ve been vocal about it, and we hear you. In fact, we’ve taken some pretty big steps to fixing this, and I wanted to share our goals with you to address this. There are a lot of things we used to do that fell by the wayside, and now that we have Stormshade back on the team full-time, we’re going to be bringing back a lot of the things you have always told us you look forward to seeing and hearing:

Ask Cryptic
Bi-weekly posting by the developers answering your questions as compiled by StormShade

GM Blog
A general support-oriented Blog where our Game Masters discuss what's being done to address your concerns, talk about bug status, and so on

Developer Chat
A monthly live IRC chat with developers from the Champions Online team

State of the Game
Bi-weekly posting by me (Chronomancer) to provide insight into the high-level vision for the Champions Online universe and address hot-button issues

Game with Cryptic
We’re putting together a new all-company supergroup so you can find us in the game and share adventures. We’re also going to do more PVP events so you can pit your skills in The Hero Games against the devs!

The Champions Universe
Add more Champions Fiction to the website on a monthly basis

New Fan Art
Post new Fan Art to the website on a monthly basis

New Screen Shots
Post new screen shots for use by community sites on a regular basis

New Wallpaper
Post new wallpaper images for use by community sites on a regular basis

Developer Special Features
Everything from what builds we use to tips on how to get through Lairs to, well, whatever we can come up with so you can see how we see the game.

Website Overhaul
The Star Trek site is awesome, and next up for the web team is an overhaul of the Champions Online web page. We can’t wait to see what they have up their sleeves!

You can also expect to see a greater presence in the forums by the developers overall. We’ve been really nose down working on the game for quite a while, but we recognize the need to stick our heads up and at least just say hello!

Champions Online - Revelation
In my last State of the Game, I talked about how we’re adding a whole new area to Champions Online. The expansion formerly known as Vibora Bay (always our working title) has a new, more descriptive name: Champions Online – Revelation. The half-angel / half-demon Therakiel is bent on bringing forth the end times. Now, it is up to you to join a team of the greatest heroes the world has ever known to stop him.

We’ve had continuous discussions for many weeks regarding the Revelation expansion and how it should be delivered to our community. I am very glad to announce that while we built Revelation to the quality and expectations of a paid expansion pack, we are making it available for FREE to our players.

Revelation represents some of the best work to date on Champions. The expansion features an epic storyline filled with noble heroes and terrifying villains and is set in stunning new environments. We've incorporated many suggestions from the community as what they want from the game - new game play areas, new powers, new rewards, and greater challenges are just some of the additions.

I'd like to reassure everyone we consider Revelation to be of a quality and quantity that is very worthy of a price tag. It is still legitimate expansionary content, the same as it was designed to be. But our community means everything to us and we’re incredibly excited to be able to get this massive update out to you all.

We're working on a full package of Revelation screen shots, write-ups, item and costume descriptions and images, a teaser video, and much more that will be released very soon. Revelation is designed for levels 37 – 40 and will have an all new, absolutely staggering level 40 repeatable Lair with all new high-end rewards for our most experienced players.

See you online, Champions!

Good news for the time being and a step in the right direction...so far.

Pretty awesome.

You know, you have to admit, even though Cryptic can really step in a big pile of dog doo sometimes, they're really good about admitting it and making it up to the community.

Originally posted by Blurr

Pretty awesome.

You know, you have to admit, even though Cryptic can really step in a big pile of dog doo sometimes, they're really good about admitting it and making it up to the community.

Something NCsoft never did with TR. Grrrrr.

be nice if they had lower lvl content....

Are those poweers and rewards only available to the lvl 40 player????

On the face of it that looks like Cryptic have decided their nose-diving opinion rating from the community needed a kick in the ass, hopefully this pro-active stance continues & they aggressively work to improve things.

The proof, as they say, will be in the pudding.

I think they realized the money they would make off Vibora Bay wouldn't offset the money lost by pissing off so many CO players, and scaring some STO players as well.

Good job Cryptic, for once you listened.

Originally posted by Tokken

be nice if they had lower lvl content....

Are those poweers and rewards only available to the lvl 40 player????

Tier 4 powers have been something we've been asking for since beta so that's been a long time coming.

As for lower level content, that has also been confirmed as in the works.

Looks to me like they felt the pressure of Issue 17 and Going Rogue.

This is good though, forcing competition will make both Paragon Studios and Cryptic step up the pace of their games.

This is good news. If the expansion gets good reviews i might come back for another month.

 Hopefully Vibora Bay is epic since it has been in development since Champions Online release. This might well be make or break time for Cryptic and this particular IP and hopefully it gets grand reviews.

 The backlash was to much lol they had to make it free. They missed out on many a lifetime sub for STO because of it being announced that Vibra bay would be a paid expansion. So that part was a given they had no choice but to make it free or lose far more money than they would have gained from it lol. 

The rest... we will have to wait and see how long it lasts. Cryptics no stranger to saying we're sorry and we will do better this time followed by a we really mean it this time guys lol. 

So hope they follow through this time. 

Originally posted by Tokken

be nice if they had lower lvl content....

Are those poweers and rewards only available to the lvl 40 player????

Level up and quit being a cry baby

I am surprised yet relieved they did this.   Even though its still not enough to make me want to resub atleast they are pointing in the right direction.

Someone on the official forums speculated that this expansion may not be the Vibora Bay that they were talking about, but instead it is a replacement for it.  Something else they may have been working on.    Time will tell if this is the case ofcourse, but it was an interesting speculation.

As for the new Tier 4 powers, Cryptic had said something about adding new Tier 4 powers into the power sets that were power set specific.   They were going to try and make Thematic builds more appealing.

I'll be keeping an eye on CO in the coming months hopeing the game does actually improve.   CO had so much potential and yet did a full face plant right after launch.   Hopefully Cryptic can rally and pull the game through.  Although it may be too late.