Someone tries to explain the way stats and gear interacts in Champions Online. Good on them. I’ve been playing ChampO since alpha (before gear and stats!) and I have never understood it.
Casual games can certainly benefit from a “easy to pick up, hard to master” mentality, but ChampO seems to have an “easy to pick up, hide all the evidence that might help them understand the game” thought process behind it.
World Class Villains 
Dangit, UnSub, I had no idea you’d moved from MMORPG to your own blogsite. I’ve got a mess of catching up to do.
I’m wondering if the problem with Champions Online isn’t so much that they “hide all the evidence”, but that you *need* the evidence to make an effective character. I only played for a brief time, but I compared the experience to my time playing City of Heroes, and what struck me was how easy it was to make a useless character in ChampO. It seemed much harder in CoH to gimp yourself, whereas the Build Game seems more important in ChampO.
In CoH/V it is much harder to gimp yourself because every powerset combo can solo and / or support a team. At the worst, one combo might not be as effective as another, but you can still do things.
In ChampO, you can completely gimp yourself and also run into enemies that are insanely hard to beat if you don’t have the ‘right’ powers. Personally I haven’t found it hard to get a team together, but there isn’t any specific reward for teaming / support roles, so they aren’t favoured.
Ironically, the very flexibility that ChampO trumpeted as moving superhero MMOs forward actually turned out to be an Achilles’ heel for the title.
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