Am I the only one who can’t stop laughing at that?

Hyperbole much?

Your whole scenario in the first half of the article was pulled out of your ass. Another commenter has already pointed out that it didn’t happen, in fact the reverse was true, and my experience in the game backs this up – people are generally very well behaved toward one another.

The profanity filter was hilariously broken, but I’ve seen similar things in half a dozen other MMOs. It’s just not a serious problem – since you can always turn the filter off – and it’s usually fixed quickly, because it’s an amazingly simple piece of code.

Meanwhile, the game is a lot of fun to play, gives you more freedom to tailor your character than any other MMO, ‘boring’ tasks such as healing and buffing are actually fun because of the endurance building/spending synergies it takes to pull them off well, and the zones are huge yet have a lot of character, with each area themed and forming almost a mini-zone in its own right. There are regular patches delivering substantial improvements.

There are some weak points – the graphics rely too heavily on bump mapping and often lack proper textures (though this hasn’t killed EQ2 yet), the level of freedom in character creation makes it easy to create a far weaker character than people who know what they’re doing, PvP is a bit of an inferior ripoff of WAR’s scenarios, defensive abilities are strong enough to make one effectively invulnerable in PvP, and so forth.

But going on about its ‘death throes’ and making up little stories to justify your bullshit assessment smacks of having an axe to grind.

*Nugget enters shiny new area.*
*Nugget sees beautiful peacocks walking around.*
*Nugget is EXCITED!*
*Nugget chats to Nugget’s alliance: OOOH! PEACOCKS! THEY HAVE PEACOCKS!*

or rather, after the filter’s done with it…

*Nugget chats to Nugget’s alliance: OOH! PEA*&#$#! THEY HAVE PEA@&*^#!*
*Nugget’s Alliance: Huh?!*
*Nugget: -_- What I mean to say is, they have peafowl of the male variety here.*
*Nugget’s Alliance: lol*

*Deepnuggetsigh*

…at least I got a story out of it. XD

Another funny unintentional “cuss word” (I forget which NPC says it) is “Hero in,” as in, “There’s a hero in my lair.”

The main point of this article is that there are quite severe issues that need addressing in Champions Online, and due to mismanagement, the team has failed to address them, but added a perfectly useless chat filter instead. This is all too common in the MMO industry; I hope that pointing these things out will get developers to think about what they’re doing a little more carefully. This blog’s audience is fellow MMO developers, not gamers — so it is perhaps understandable that gamers who read it often miss the intent.

CO came out and almost instantly got trampled by Aion later in the month, but Aion’s filter (which I experienced during the open beta and I can’t imagine changed much a week later at launch) seemed much worse then whats described in CO. I’d take full word blockage, even from my NPCs, over fragmented words that force you to really try to figure out whats under the “#&#^@” before the “ed” at the end. Needless to say it gave me the headache when I fought through and came to understand that most of the words being said in Aion’s channels were perfectly clean words. But Aion is selling better, so does that make it OK? Or is this a blanket comment for all new MMO’s?

People seem to forget that all MMO’s have their issues when they’re launched, and you might be no different. No game is perfect out of the box, and that statement is becoming more and more true even on the console market now. CO is no different. WoW was a crashing wreck when it was launched (I know, I’ve played since launch) and it took the team a little more then 6 months to wrangle in the problems and get the game moving towards staying a success and there’s still plenty of problems they’re working through 5 years later. The Matrix Online, which I was a closed beta tester from the first round of testing, never cleaned up its act, retaining the bugs it had in beta even after Sony bought it from Warner Brothers all the way up till the servers shut down this past July.

I think what matters, and what you maybe getting at, is whether the team behind the game can fix the problems that are there. If they can’t, or get trapped under the same tarp that you say Asheron’s Call was stuck under politically, then I think its safer to recount why the game was a failure then, rather then do it now while the team seems to be genuinely trying to make things right. Unless of course your point is aimed at lighting a fire under the the developers of the game and not to incite the general public, in which case your forum choice seems a little odd.

I’m sorry sir, but to see you currently working on Star Trek Online as a systems designer when we all know Cryptic is making that game also just seems like your biting the hand that feeds. It just seems a little wrong.

(as a note, I play neither Aion or CO but I do keep up with news related to both games as I’m looking for the right game to jump to and get away from WoW permanently. I have played many games That have been Either minor successes (FFXI, SWG)and ones that have down right failed (The Matrix Online, Neocron)