Greetings Champions!

Over the last month, we've been hard at work finishing up our first Adventure Pack: The Serpent Lantern. I'm happy to say that The Serpent Lantern is now LIVE and ready for you to play! Once again, your testing and feedback has been very important in making this update great.

The Serpent Lantern

This is our first Adventure Pack, and we learned a lot when building it. We had to devise a way to make the content scale with both team size and character level, for example. We also had to find a good way to let people leave off in the middle of the adventure and pick it up again. We look forward to everyone's feedback now that it's live. Tell us what you like and what you don't like so we can improve these very cool updates.

The Serpent Lantern has a whole lot more than just the adventure, though. Some highlights:

• We added the Difficulty Slider, which will let you choose to make instanced missions more difficult. Doing so will increase your rewards and some maps will also drop better items. We expect that we'll make some changes to the slider; players on the test server are already clamoring for an even harder mode!
• The events of the Serpent Lantern also showcase the newly revamped VIPER villain group. They have new weapons, spiffier uniforms, and are generally a nastier and more formidable force to be dealt with. Everyone seems to think these guys a whole lot more fun to take on now.
• We've normalized the energy builder powers so they all have approximately the same efficiency. In general, this increases the damage they do across the board by 17 percent.
• We've heard many complaints that teaming seems less efficient than going solo. We crunched a bunch of numbers and significantly increased the teaming bonuses for defeating critters and the bonus for completing crossover missions.
• Veteran Rewards are granted to players based on how long they've subscribed to Champions Online. Every hundred days of subscription, a new set of bonuses are granted to you. You earn costume parts, retcon tokens, XP buffs, and cool devices. Details here: http://www.champions-online.com/veteran_rewards.
• A zillion bugs were squashed.

Full details for the changes in Serpent Lantern can be found here.

Summer Update

Our next update is targeted for early August. We have several Supergroup and quality of life features on the way.

We're adding place to put Supergroup news, the roster, link to a website and so on. We're also adding an event calendar which will let you create events, sign up for them and leave comments. We're also adding a way for Supergroups to describe themselves for recruitment. Players will be able to search them like they can search for individual characters today. I'm pretty excited by what we've got planned for Supergroups. We'll get you updates as we get closer to going live.

A good number of new emotes are on the way. More dances! We're also redoing the user interface for emotes a bit so it's less cumbersome. The place to bust those moves is at the renovated Ren Center. We're rebuilding the amphitheatre around the Powerhouse entrance to provide a big stage for contests and other events. We also built a better place for the tailors to hang out.

On the powers side, we are updating the pet powers. We're still working out the details, but we're focused on making them overall more fun to play. They are currently a bit clunky, requiring you to dismiss all of them to respawn and so on. We hope to clean that up and make it a lot smoother.

We're also planning on updating the in-game store so it's a lot more usable. For example, the pictures that you can only get from the web now will be built into the game so you don't need to swap between them to figure out what you're buying.

And as always, we're fixing bugs and tweaking. It's shaping up to be a fun update.

Community

I'd like to give a great big welcome to our new players. We've had quite a few new heroes join up over the past month, which is awesome. For all you new players, don't forget to invite your friends and family to Millennium City! The Champs Referral Program gives you cool stuff if they sign up.

Our new website is now live, and it looks great. I know I find it a lot easier to get around. I hope you do too.

Our next "Play with the Devs" event is June 17, 2010. Some of us will be playing The Serpent Lantern. Others will be hanging out as always to chat, PvP or do pick-up missions.

I hope to see you there!
-poz