Yes! Another free retcon coming very soon! It’s like Cryptic is reading my mind. If you’ve been saving up your free retcons like I have, no reason to save them any longer. Go crazy.
I just had a lot of fun fiddling with championBuilder and completely redoing my level 39 hero. It was almost scary hitting the retcon button and seeing all my past choices wiped out. It felt like she was losing her identity. What a strange feeling.
Previously, she was a darkness hero with a side emphasis on munitions. I kept her darkness theme, but she now has powers from NINE different frameworks. While I did select some of the ‘best’ powers in the game, I focused more on picking powers that have a strong synergy. She uses powerful ranged magics to cripple and destroy, then leaps in with death blades to end their suffering. It works well because after a few seconds, her enemies are knocked down, feared and snared, which makes it easy to cut them down.
Anyways, enough about my hero…
Bill Roper (the producer) posted a very enlightening developer’s blog discussing his thoughts about the economy. It’s well worth reading, but here is the TL;DR version:
Cryptic knew retcon prices were too high, but they wanted to observe and analyze the Live economy before committing to any changes. They want to fix the economy properly now, instead of flip flopping up and down, potentially causing future problems and angering the players. The economy of an MMORPG is incredibly complex and they needed time to figure it out.
Currently, the game is not giving out enough resources to the players. To fix this problem, white upgrades drops will be nearly doubled and selling them will return a lot more resources. The value of high end upgrades will be dropping a little, but overall, the players should have more resources. In addition, players will get more resources from defeating enemies and finishing missions.
Retcon prices are still not finalized, but it should be much gentler for the players. Undoing recent choices should be much easier, but a substantial retcon will still have a high price.
Another free retcon for everyone! The changes will be coming to the Test server this weekend.
Everything sounds great. Bill did a good job explaining the problems, the reasoning behind Cryptic’s actions and what they plan to do to fix the problem. Hopefully, the reality of the changes will be as good as it sounds. It is the details that matter.
I still expect retcons will be very expensive, but hopefully I’ll have the money to afford it.
There is only one problem. My main hero is already level 39. She has done almost all the missions already, so she missed out on the higher monetary rewards from killing monsters and finishing missions. She’s going to be a poor level 40, especially since I wasted so much money already on expensive retcons.
It is in my best interest to stop playing CO now and wait until the economic changes reach the Live server. Lucky for me, Aion’s head start begins this Sunday!
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