I really wanted to love Champions Online. I wanted to believe the hype but in the end, I was let down. That's not to say the developers aren't trying because they are listening to the fans of the game, but there exists still too many problems with this game.

Champions started out as a table-top RPG. When Cryptic Studios brought Champions over to the MMO format, they didn't re-balance the classes very well. The classes themselves are wonderfully elaborate, but they are built for huge teams playing together - something that is often difficult to achieve in MMO games.

Despite a lot of patches, respecs, and trial and error Champions doesn't let you solo very well. This hurts more because it was advertised as a solo-friendly game. The high-damage classes are easily killed, and the characters with high defence have very little in the way of damage. Experience is given mostly from mission completion, which solves the problem of grinding; however, if you can't finish a mission because you keep dying, it becomes an exercise in frustration.

While I'm complaining about the missions, why don't they scale with your level? Since everything is out in the open, chances are there is usually someone else camping your mission. Spawn camping is something that just angers me in ways only an MMO can. It's part of why I refuse to play World of Warcraft, and a big part of my dislike of Champions. I get the idea. It's an immersive quality, saving people on the streets, but it's not supposed to take an hour to finish a simple “Kill X number of bad guys in this area” mission. The spawn rates are pretty good, but I would much rather have a door I could go into and slaughter everything in the building – much like a certain other hero-themed MMO game.

After three months, menu navigation is still counter-intuitive. It shouldn't take five minutes to find the option to change my costume, it should be a hot-key. Many of the menus are just messy; in places it looks like they decided not to worry about the menus and to focus on making the game pretty.

The community so far is even more depressing. Teams and Supergroups: good luck finding them. The largest team I was ever in was three people. It was disappointing that I didn't have the chance to experience a full team of eight heroes. And Supergroups are worse; I talked to no less than three Supergroup “recruiters.” The guidelines they put in place were like an elitist clique, and I was the dumpy nerd in high school. I did manage to get into a Supergroup once, and then was promptly kicked out because I wasn't level 25 or higher, which is what Sir Supergroup Overlord demanded everyone be for that group.

Another of the big selling points of the game was getting your own nemesis at level 20. It sounds like a good idea, in theory but in practice, it doesn't work. Your nemesis is an AI-controlled baddie who can randomly spawn and kick your butt whenever the AI decides it's time for you get to knocked down a peg.  I never bothered with the nemesis, on the advice of a very high level player. I was actually told to wait on the nemesis until at least level 35, because my chances of being killed by it were lower. Which is why this mechanic fundamentally fails since no one enjoys being pounded on repeatedly by a far superior computer controlled opponent.

Despite Cryptic's efforts, it's very hard to move a table-top RPG into the MMO world.  Dropping the live human control and turn-based timing wouldn't have been an issue if there had only been some major re-evaluation of the game mechanics. Champions Online has a lot of great and wonderful ideas, but the lack of polish on some key features has definitely ruined it for me. I might retry this game in a year and see if it's improved; if it has, I will definitely let people know. There are too many other quality MMO's available for this to be recommended.