So the often touted Issue 9 has finally (2 months late) made it to Live status and while I wandered thru the Test Server (yes..a place where you, the paying customer can PAY to beta) and toyed with things here and there (posting honest opinions as I went)I was hoping that it would be somewhat better than I expected.

Sadly, that is not the case.

Loading times between Zones is up about 200%. Lag and skipping is up. Numerous people have DCs and on my very first Login after is going Live, I froze during load in and had to CAD to shut it down. Processor Usage on both was pegged at 100% and my Drive was paging as fast as it could (and I have 2 gigs of RAM here plus a 256 vid card).

For people with high level characters or characters at Cap you are going to have to shell out serious coinage to upgrade you toon with Invention Enhancers. Basic Recipes were going for 400K for a level 25 Recipe...a single Recipe. That's what it cost me to upgrade to a full suite of Single Origin Enhancers at that level. A Costume Recipe for Dragon wings was sold for 25 Million. For the record, that's the kind of cash I carry on my Main. Some people are getting insane drop rates and going to the Consignment House and raking in money hand over fist (one Forum-ite professed to have made 450 Million in 7 hours of play) while others are getting squat. Rumors abound with regards to some sort of Tray bug that prevents drops if one of your trays is full. All in all, its one big out of whack cluster fuck that was poorly planned and poorly executed after being Beta'd by a hand picked crew of "friends and family members" of the Dev staff. Lighthouse is showing his SOE origins by trumpetting a massive increase in new players logging in when they turned on all of the old expired accounts to try and lure some players back that had left. After this weekend I'll wager that those "new players" are going to evaporate along with some old ones.

Statesman's Task Force.....8 Heroes have to show up to start and you had better have 8 at the end with serious debuffs or you justed wasted hours of your time. One of the final Arch Villains laughs at Tankers status protection, holding them and sumarily disecting them at her leisure. This was discovered by a group of Tankers from Tanker Tuesday who got crushed...not beated....crushed. Debuffs are a must...not an option. Nukes and Shivans won a few of the successful runs while Mega Debuffs saved the rest. Fun fun.....just what I want to feel Super....watching my Hulk ass get beaten down because none of my abilities work.

The Consignment House (Auction House) is a stab at creating a Player Economy in a genre that really doesn't lend itself to one. Are there Heroes with incredible financial resources? Sure...Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, Daniel Rand, Booster Gold, Blue Beatle and so on. Do you see these guys rushing out in their Super Suit (tm) to barter and bargin for things in some insane Super Hero Stock Market? Nope.....off screen and by people who WORK FOR THESE VERY RICH MEN. Villains? There are some with the cash but many just take it....if I have a battle suit that can lift your house, are you gonna stop me from taking your wallet? Even if they do have the cash they have minions that deal with the drudgery. Not in good olde Paragon City....nope, you get to pillage a warehouse for some tech you aren't smart enough to come up with and then if you don't want or need it to build your Quasi Neuclaic Transducer or whatever....you take it to a Super Hero Flea Market and trade it or sell it. Stupid idea that is already being abused on a scale that beggers the imagination. Honestly, it makes the UN Oil for Food program look like an honest and completely above board operation. 25 Million for a recipe to make a set of wings?!? Come on....its a set of blueprints you could buy on Ebay for 7$.

And finally, we see a continuely increasing focus on PvP. The completely unimaginitive manner in which PvP is executed in this game boggles the mind. Does it have a new wrinkle? Sure...PvP in three dimensions with dynamic movement abilities is fantastic. Beyond that, every update has some "tweak" designed to "balance" the various ATs which in this case means make them homogeneous. In short, everyone builds the same handful of toons with a different look because its the only thing there is. Does it change up a bit each time there is a "tweak"? Sure but only until that state of sameness reasserts itself. I have a character that I can rock a PvE enviornment with...I've Tanked with him and he's as squishy as they come. I worked hard to iron him out and make him unique but in PvP he is completely useless and I would have to make him into something completely different to even begin to be effective in PvP. How completely broken is that?

All in all, it continues a downward spiral that has taken a Game about being a Super Hero and turned it into a game about being Cookie Cutter Gang Bangers. Sad.

Instead of looking at is as a Comic Book Reader who was making a game, they are going at it as Game Designers who might read a comic here and there and are following the same tired olde "tried and true". In the end, its going to fail miserably.

Glad I already found something else to hold my attention.