Official Post on Champions Online forums from GMTiyshen - Cryptic Studios Team
http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?t=135383

"Perfect World's acquisition of Cryptic Studios is complete! This is great news for Cryptic and we couldn't be happier.

We have exciting announcements queued up for the near future, too – announcements that may even detail significant improvements to our existing products and shed light on games we still have in development... Lots of awesome things are right around the corner!

But what about right-now-this-second-now-now?

Well, right now we'd like to reassure our fans and players that it's basically business as usual for us and you. Things are changing – and changing for the better – but the immediate changes we need to make to complete our separation from Atari and our integration into Perfect World are virtually all cosmetic. For example, Atari Tokens will shortly become Cryptic Points (incidentally, some may recall they were originally called Cryptic Points long ago). There's a lot happening on our back-end to facilitate that kind of change, but from an everyday user's perspective, it mostly just comes down to names and icons.

Of course, we'll provide exact details on the exact changes we make in the near future. As it stands, we're planning to roll out across-the-board separation work on August 18th, but some components are trickling out even now based on the needs of our game teams and their builds.

In short: There shouldn't be any inconvenience to our players, we're moving forward with a lot of great improvements to our games, more details will come soon, and we'll publish exactly what we do and how it impacts you all as it happens.

Thanks so much!

p.s. We're hiring!"

Well it's not as if CO could get any worse.

It's been getting better, the last Adventure Pack (Resistance) was really good.

I'd actually expect further improvements now they are free of Atari, who frankly haven't given a S**t about Cryptic, CO or STO for a long time now, well before CO-F2P anyway.

I have high hopes for PW and CO as a pair.  PW does some of the better Freemium games out there.

Personally, I just started playing around March, and have had great fun.  Subscribed after a couple of months because (1) I wanted all of the stuff that subscribers get for free that non-subscribers need to pay for, (2) I wanted the extra character slots, and especially (3) I wanted to build my own custom powersets.  For me, it made sense - it's fun, light-hearted, and easy to either socialize or solo.  I needed something less serious than WoW with the current stress levels I'm working with, and this worked better than others.

(I did recently start WoT as well, and that's a light stress releiver too.)

IMO having Perfect World own your MMO dev studio is better than having Atari own it.  Not really a complement for PW so much as not thinking Atari really knows what they are doing in general.

I like the game a lot!  I don't understand the complaints of many but to each their own.  It is an easy going game and I love the customization powers and costumes....never have I seen a game allow for so much!

Originally posted by meleemadness

I like the game a lot!  I don't understand the complaints of many but to each their own.  It is an easy going game and I love the customization powers and costumes....never have I seen a game allow for so much!

I enjoy the game too. I find it very casual to play.

My only concern is PWI's influence with trying to add pay to win CS options. Considering this is a very western based mmo I highly doubt the player base will put up with that sort of thing. Lets hope so and nothing would happen until their end game is developed anyway (they hinted this is a long way off).

CO is a really decent little game that feels about 75% complete content wise. The new comic books are simply amazing (along with converting adventure packs into new format). New comic is out soon enough too. Lairs and their invasion variant sound fun too and devs have said offer anything from small group encounters to full out raid level encounters (I imagine this will be almost a Rift like mechanic).

Ultimately what will fully flesh out this game is their promise for a real end game. They hinted it will be include an element of tiered gear, raid style instances and a level increase but they strongly emphasized that they want to do it in a unique way that fits with CO. This would mostly likely be far more story driven than typical Wow raids.

Nemesis expansion isn't really mentioned other than including it as elements into all their new content for now.

As it stands CO is one of those games you can keep coming back to at least for a little change and distraction. As time goes on more with more meat on it's bones, it will keep you back and happy for longer periods of time.