Roll-A-Die=Dakorma

Also thanks for the cursed archetype I do still play, my friends have just been a bit more interested in playing Rogue Trader lately.

"Is my reference too underground for the Codex?"

Yes. Well this codexer anyway - I still don't know what fucking game you guys a talking about. Champions Online?? I thought that was free-to-play now? (because it was a failure).

Wait a sec. Just checking the F2P Matrix and it seems theres no longer any additional benefit (calculations aside) to going Life Time. I could've sworn there were 3 tiers of accounts. Now that Character creation and all those benefits are avaliable to gold (£15 monthly and up), I'm not sure if I should spend £190 on a lifetime sub when I can spend £42 on a very generous time of 6 months.

Hold on a second. If I'm not going lifetime and saving about £150, why don't I just buy a 6 month subscription for STO as well, rather than wait a month until F2P ? I even get 30 days of free trial after my purchase, so I don't have to spend money on a 6 month sub if I don't like it.

Fucking Choices and Consequences, how do they work ? How do you adults balance this shit. This doesn't bode well for my attitude later in life.

Lifetime is the same as Gold, and its additional benefits are not listed in the F2P Matrix. The two main things for Lifetime are: Immediate access to Club Caprice VIP Lounge (people don't hang out there, but the teleport card there and the various vendors and stuff there are useful) and 8 additional character slots on top of the standard Gold amount + other crap.

http://www.champions-online.com/lifetime

The real thing is if you consider the deal to be in your favour once you factor in the amount of time you're going to play. I have gotten my money back (discounting all the cash I've poured into the cash-store), but you'd need to play for over a year to get positive, but on the other hand you have permanent access so it doesn't need to be continuous. It's really about which you consider a better investment, subscription or lifetime.

Hmm…No. I think in the end, It'll be better if I go for a 6 month sub. Thats still plenty of time for me and I get the most important thing - Freeform character creation. Everything else is a bonus, though the monthly stipend and adventure packs are certainly nice to have.

So, you guys think CO is better than DCUO (now also free to play)??

Man, that wasn't my impression - though I only played CO for the first month on release - DCUO, which I've only just recently tried out for a few levels - seems much better to me.

Has CO improved that much?

Better customization, more potential for unique characters, even with the Archetypes system. Deeper combat, better mission design in certain areas, easier to grind up levels with friends. Doesn't separate people into 3 main questlines in the start, adds a variance of questlines later. More distinct travel powers, which do not suffer from the need to all have roughly the same ability to get places. Most of all, doesn't make you feel like you're in Sidekicks 101.

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: The thing with DCUO is that the game has a ridiculously low amount of customization on all fronts. Costume-wise it's obvious. You could argue that the weapon style + powerset offers some, but that's not the case. See, the weapon balance is fucked up, and most weapons you'll just upgrade to cover the combos you'll use, and multi-hitters like Staff are OP due to the number of hits influencing your energy recovery. With powersets, it's worse: For all roles, there's precisely ONE build that functions adequetely, with any deviation being either 1) waste of time or 2) detrimental. This is due to the limited number of power slots and even more limited number of useful powers (the game has powers that literally do nothing beyond counting for other effects, ie Ice Bash), and because of the importance of stats all your extra power points are going to the stat upgrades in Signature Powers (all signature powers but those suck btw, except Hard Light Shield).

So, now you're locked into limited customization, but that doesn't matter since the game itself is a lot of fun. WRONG. When you hit the level cap, it takes a few days and all the fun's out. And why? Because the endgame fucking sucks. You'll be gearing till the end of time for PVE, since there's no point in PvP (and some retard thought having separate defense stat for PvE and PvP was a smart idea). The problem is that each Hard Alert you do takes a long time, and you'll be doing them over and over and over and over again since they give jack and shit for tokens you need for gearing (oh yea, you can't even just repeat a fast one because only one daily token reward per instance), and Duos and Challenges give even less.

Third and the killer one is that the non-gameplay controls in DCUO fucking suck. Chat is a mess, finding people is convoluted, you have next to no control over your interface and most standard features like looking for friends' activity on the game site are simply not there.

Subscribing is also of no purpose, since the only thing DCUO subscription does is removing inconveniences (cash limit).