Sorta miffed, the only reason they are FINALLY doing this is to match the same feature in Champions Online. And I'd bet 10 bucks this Issue comes out around the same time Champions Online ships.
For years they told players that they COULD do this as it wasn't hard per-say just very time consuming, and didn't fit within the budget allotted to the devs to actually do it.
Let's see. They said they could do it, but that it would take a long time to do. If it's coming out
now, then that means they've been
working on it for a long time.Thus, according to you, Paragon studios must have known what Champions launch date was going to be for a 'long time' in order to coordinate releasing this feature around the same time! That's beyond genius, that's prophetic.
Look, Paragon studios was founded by the 15
Cryptic employees who were working on City of Heroes/City of Villains when Cryptic sold the IP and game to NCSoft. NCSoft offered those guys a job where they could continue to work on the game they'd been working on, and they
all opted to leave Cryptic and do just that.
Marvel Universe Online was in development at Cryptic for a while
before that switchover happened, so the people who were working on City of Heroes before then and core group of people who are working on it now were all part of the same company. 15 of them were continuing to work on CoH/CoV and the rest were working on MUO, which is now Champions Online. All of that is established fact.
It's no surprise that both games have a
lot of similar features. The company working on Champions Online is also the company who launched City of Heroes/City of Villains and supported it up until NCSoft acquired the game...at which point some of them continued to support it. They all read the complaints and suggestions about their game on their forums. They'd be idiots to not take something as commonly requested as this to heart.
What I personally find surprising is that Cryptic at some point decided that the best way to implement those features would be to dump the game and start over on another very similar game from scratch. As a City of Heroes player who subscribed to that game for years, that kind of rubs me the wrong way. I feel like some of the people at Cryptic didn't think the game that I've enjoyed playing was as lofty as something like Marvel, and they were perfectly content to just milk me for my $15 a month while they put the bulk of their focus into developing the new, shiny, prestigious Marvel Universe Online. I really think this whole Champions Online was them scrambling to repackage the game into something that they could make back some of their money on after the Marvel/Microsoft partnership fell through. They've admitted that some of the Champions Online game is built on the things that they had done for Marvel that wasn't tied directly to the IP. So the Canadian wilderness of the Weapon X program becomes the Canadian wilderness of Champions Online.
Meanwhile, the former Cryptic employees who are now part of Paragon studios opted to put the features the players asked for into the game the players were actually playing. Those guys could have stayed with Cryptic and worked on something else, or gone elsewhere, but they chose to join NCSoft and continue working on the game. Whether I always agree with the choices they make and the directions they take, I at least know that those guys want to be working on the game I've enjoyed playing.
But whatever, to each their own. If dozens of 'fantasy' themed MMOs can all exist simultaneously I'm sure that 2 or even 3 'super-hero' MMOs can as well.