Lifetime and 6 month Champions Online subscribers have their own little axe to grind with Cryptic at the moment. We were all (allegedly) duped into buying a long subscription by the promise of guaranteed entry into the Star Trek Online closed beta – a promise that Cryptic is not honouring.

Any fool can see that the above is obviously not true. STO closed beta is still in its infancy and unless they start open beta without inviting me first I will not be able to accuse Cryptic of foul play. Indeed Cryptic could invite me to closed beta with only 1 day left and they would still have honoured their end of the bargain.

The reality is that Cryptic are bound to invite all the lifetime and 6 month subscribers well before the end of closed beta but the community drums are still a’ banging. Why?...

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First of all apologies for the distinct lack of activity on this site over the past month – this is NOT due to any abandonment of Champions Online on my part but rather due to a wonderful and unexpected change in my life that allows me very little free time for the moment – make of that what you will!

This is not true of all the Champions Online community however and even the most faithful of fanboys is fretting over the markedly lower server activity (oh how transparent the actual player activity is with a single server and numbered shards) and the now ubiquitous ‘I’m leaving, and here’s why...’ threads posted not daily, but hourly on the official boards.

As always, we here at Muppetfleet focus on gamer community sentiment and a certain roleplaying community member best known for ‘speaking’ as if he were a pickup-truck eating a chainsaw embodies that community better than most.

Kruunch is one of the faithful; sure he hasn’t been on the boards since day dot, but his boundless enthusiasm and good natured optimism has kept the old school community smiling throughout many of the CO trials and tribulations (tribble-ations to come?) since those heady closed beta days.

Head on over to the boards and check out his very own homemade megathread about how his faith was recently shaken while trying to convince a guildie that the lvl 40 endgame was worth waiting for. His epiphany was of a decidedly unfaithful nature as the lack of purpose to Champions endgame finally dawned on him...

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Much brain cancer is to be avoided by simply never visiting the official Champions Online boards, not least because repeated visits seem to yield only the same tired subjects but rolled into different thread titles. To ease the pain of wading through the muck we have compiled a list of the most common offenders, their general content and how the thread is likely to end:

“The Downtime Debate”

Concept: Thread created by a US west coast/Aussie player enraged by Cryptic’s decision to close the server for daily maintenance during their ‘peak’ playtime of midnight+

General Content: Normally in the form of a petition to alter the downtime to an hour that affects European players instead, this thread will amass a few positive /signs before some unruly European bod comes in and tells the Americans to FU.

Likely Conclusion: Thread will descend into tense Euro/American relations with several posts dedicated to the origins of the English language, the relative size of continent player bases and the odd busybody pointing out that petitions are forbidden on the forums. No formal agreement will be reached other than that everyone outside the US hates Americans.

“The Percentage”

Concept: 99% of these threads will contain in their title an arbitrary percentage of players either for or against a topic; 1% of these threads fails in this regard.

General Content: The OP will reveal his statistical evidence on how the vast majority of the playerbase supports his opinion. 30% of the replies will agree wholeheartedly, 45% of the replies will call him an imbecile, 25% of the replies will discuss something completely irrelevant to the OP and 100% of the replies will contain spelling mistakes, grammar errors and gamer angst.

Likely Conclusion: By the third post someone will point out the arbitrary nature of the OP’s statistic at which point the thread will derail into an argument about the overpowered nature of teleport in PvP – regardless of the original topic.

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