How do you duel other players in a game with flight and other travel powers? Why is player vs. player combat (PvP) relevant in an MMO where every player is, to some degree, a good guy? Champions Online Producer Rob Overmeyer and PvP Designer James Laird tell us explore these questions and tell us all about what makes player vs. player combat unique in Champions Online, before getting to the heart of the matter: how best to kick other players in the tights in Champions Online PvP!


Ten Ton Hammer: Cryptic Studios is unveiling several new PvP concepts tonight, one being dueling. Can you tell us a little bit about what makes dueling unique in Champions Online? You mentioned that dueling players would be able to see certain effects that other players wouldn’t?

All powers will be balanced for PvE and PvP, so feel free to bring a katana to a gun fight.

James: The people that are dueling see the boundaries - they see this big sphere that denotes the boundaries, becuase if you fly too high, you’ve left the duel as well.

Rob: You don’t want everyone to see these spheres all over the place. If every thirty feet people wanted to duel you’d see a world of these weird domes, like a moonscape or something.

Ten Ton Hammer: So I offer the duel, my opponent accepts. What happens next, aside from me getting my butt kicked?

Rob: A giant rocket shoots down and shoots this beam around the two duelers. We drop it right in the center between the two players so you’ll always know how far apart you are; it’s right in the middle. One of the coolest things is that you can duel in-air. A rocket comes in and hovers and spins and casts a full sphere.

James: If you fall to the ground, you lose.

Rob: So if you have duelers that have powers that knock people out of flight, you can use that to win.

Ten Ton Hammer: So the spheres are larger than what you usually think of when you think duel boundaries?

Rob: It’s big, I want to say its a 200 foot radius, but you can fly around and use super speed inside it easily. By the same token, you can accidentally go out of it if you’re not careful.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there any reason to duel, other than bragging rights of course?

Accessibility is big for the Champs PvP team. No need for cold feet. (har har)

James: Nope, you don’t want to have to duel to do well. It’s a fun thing. You do get rewards through the regular PvP - the Ultimate Tournament of Champions [UTC - team based deathmatch by tiers], BASH [free for all PvP instances], and Apocalypse [objective-driven PvP event instances] - you get items and experience, acclaim, costume options, vanity pets, stuff like that. In UTC and Apocalypse, every time the match ends, you get scored based on how well you helped your team. A healer who did a lot of healing will get more points than someone on the other team that got a lot of kills but didn’t help their team.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you going to do any stat tracking with duels, see a player’s win / loss maybe unlock some vanity perks or something?

James: Not with duels, currently. We should add tracking.

Rob: It’s an easy thing to add, actually. Where’s my laptop? (laughter)

Ten Ton Hammer: From the practical angle for players, do you foresee players testing out their PvP builds using this mechanic?

James: I hope so. There’s a lot of depth to the powers system. All the powers work in both PvP and PvE, but I’m sure people will find the ideal PvP build in time, and I hope they spend a lot of time doing that.

Ten Ton Hammer - Before we leave the dueling concept, is this “sanctioned” PvP? Is there a lore tie-in?

Rob: Yep, there’s a Hero Games logo on the rocket. It’s ostentacious, it’s out there in the open. The hexagon on the dome is actually the dome of the Hero Games logo.

Champions Online brings you this classic moment in Looney Toons history.

Ten Ton Hammer: With UTC, do you anticipate doing in-game events around it, since it is a sanctioned thing? Get some true tournament action going?

Rob: We plan to support the community as much as the community grows and wants to be supported. I know that’s a pretty generic statement, but we want to have organized games and reward players that take part. Not just with UTC, but with BASH and Apocalypse too. It’s fairly easy to build.

Ten Ton Hammer: So you mentioned PvP-based item rewards. What are these items, and what makes an item awesome for PvP in Champions Online?

James: So in low levels of a tier, you want PvE drops, in high levels of a tier, you want PvP drops, so you get this back and forth. Even if you’re just doing PvP, it’s still worth your time to duck into PvP for some good gear. The costume unlocks - the luchador pieces - are what you get for costume pieces.

Rob: Essentially, what we wanted to have was gear only attainable through PvP and that gear unlocking things that are only attainable through PvP. That’s the luchador costume sets, and past that is vanity pets and perks. So maybe you get a thousand kills in PvP, then you get a think which you can turn in for another thing. One concept I was working with just recently was luchador action figures. I want little action figures that follow you around. (laughter)

One of the concerns from the boards was that players would have to have a set of PvP gear and a set of PvE gear. I think they’re 100% interchangable. We do want you to PvE and then PvP and then go back to PvE. It’s better if you do that. But there are no PvP stats, there’s character stats and power stats.

James: One thing I’ll mention is that Apocalypse has a lot of PvE elements. So if you’re more comfortable taking on stationary enemies, you can work on the NPC enemies and turrets and let your teammates handle the other players to an extent.

Ten Ton Hammer: So tell us a bit about Apocalypse, since that’s also something we’re seeing for the first time tonight.

James: So Apocalypse is a kind of map, the Apocalypse instance that we’re playing is in Stronghold.

Ten Ton Hammer: Stronghold was a sort of supermax for supervillains on the PvE side, right?

Stronghold hasn't been holding so strongly these days.

Rob: Yes, so Stronghold was a lair where you go in and Menton was taking over everyone’s brains. Think of the Apocalypse instance as sort of a training exercise (with really realistic supervillain sigs [signature characters - i.e. from the Champions lore] where the heroes are practicing to prevent the villains from escaping. You dealt with Stronghold at level 20ish and this you’ll get to around 31. Both sides can summon other sigs. Heroes have Ironclad and Witchcraft, but can summon Justiciar, Kodiak, and Sapphire. Villain sigs are Talisman and Medusa, with the ability to summon Black Dog, Mindslayer, and [unintelligible from the recording, if you know, email me!].

You can summon them every three minutes from a console. The more of those summon consoles you control, the more you can summon. I think the normative gameplay will be that players rush to get their first summon in, find someplace to fight, then fight over control of the other consoles and try to get the big whammy in.

I think what James said is exactly right: PvE players are going to go in and encounter these NPC sigs that they’ve encountered before and think, “Hey, I’ve fought Mindslayer before, I know what he does, I know how to beat him.” We want to make players feel comfortable and come in and test the waters.

James: And if you have a PvE team that works well together as a lair team, as a raid team, they’re going to do well at PvP. Those same roles are going to translate well into PvP.

Rob: Since it’s skill and stats and gear and power choice and grouping ability, I think PvEers can jump right in. One thing the community brought up is - how are they going to compete with a 14 year old that plays 80 hours a week. We flatten the levels by tier, so if you’re level 12 you’re going to play as level 20. There’s no gray ganking, there’s no you’ve been playing for 30 days and look like a luchador and I’ve been playing for one day and only have mission gear. Through practice and sort of crossing that line, I think people will realize that and step over that line.

Ten Ton Hammer: How does that leveling to the top of the tier work in PvP? You don't get any new powers, right?

James: You don’t get new powers, you keep the powers you have, but they’re scaled. You get sidekicked up to the level of the map. The level 20 still has the advantage of more powers and playing time, but there’s no artificial level disparity.

Ten Ton Hammer: One difference I’ve noticed between PvE and PvP in Champions Online is that in PvE, villain and super villain characters have very visible “tells” that tell you when it’s a good idea to block or move. Are there plans to integrate this concept into PvP?

Crowd control works well in all situations, unlike purples and reds.

Rob: That’s actually come up a couple times whether we’re going to have the freems, the power tells, for players. But I think everyone’s going to know, like with the might powerset chunk of rock throwing thing, when a player stoops to tear up some ground, everyone knows what’s coming. When the mental player puts his fingers to his temples, you know there’s a mental blast around the corner.

James: A lot of the really powerful powers have the really long chargeups. So you’re going to learn that when the archery guy strikes a pose for three seconds, you need to block. You will see the chargeups visible.

Ten Ton Hammer: This is a little bit off-topic, but with the blocking mechanic, I’ve noticed that sometimes there seems to be lag between when hit shift to block and when my character appears to be blocking.

Rob: It’s the animation, block is in effect as soon as you hit the shift key. Smart players will use block in conjunction with swapping roles. So you can swap real quick if you need to be more defensive because everyone’s attacking you.

James: I’ve noticed that I use block a lot just to get out of a fight. If I’m taking all the aggro from enemy players, I just block and back up so my teammates can cover me.

Ten Ton Hammer: You mentioned that all powers can be used in PvE and PvP. Crowd control abilities are either gimped or all-powerful in MMO PvP. Is CC useful in Champions Online?

Rob: Crowd control is 100% useful in Champions Online, to a fault I think.

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James: That’s something we’re looking at in our focus testing. Players are complaining that it’s too effective.

Rob: Coming from the group that’s putting together the PvP stuff in the game, we’re all pretty hardcore PvPers and have been for a very long time. We’ve all played the games where the CC war was just insane - when your a melee DPS guy and you’re like, what am I going to do? That guy has 500 yard roots or mezzes or stuns. We went in and said, well, let’s just take really hard chops at this, 5 minute cooldown timers for every power that’s called a hold. and that kind of thing. That was a little bit brutal, but what we can’t have is a PvE mechanic for powers and a PvP mechanic for powers. That’s death for any game.

So I think what we do is, like James said, we’re continually looking at it and trying to come up with a better solution. We have a resistance buff that’s applied to you when you get held to make the effectiveness of the next hold applied to you reduced. But there are holds that are charge holds and if they charge up all the way, it’s math.

James: I’ll also comment that a lot of holds are really useful for players with melee powers. In the builds we’re playing today, you’ll notice that all of the melee characters have some kind of hold that allows you to run up and beat on an enemy. The holds don’t last a long time, but it’s long enough for them to get in a good gauntlet chainsaw or what have you.

Ten Ton Hammer; So I’ve got to ask, when I’m being held (that sounds funny), a UI element tells me to press F to break the hold. So I press F, angrily, repeatedly, and nothing seems to happen. The countdown timer doesn’t accelerate. What am I doing wrong?

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Rob: It does. I don’t think the UI is representative, just like shift and blocking. You don’t have to hit F, you can hit any of your attacks. It’s really misleading; maybe that bar is ticking down a little bit and maybe it increases a little bit too. But it actually works.

James: I think it builds endurance too.

Rob: It does. When you attack the holds, you’re building endurance so right when you break free, you can lay out a big huge attack.

James: By the same token, there are some effects that reduce the effectiveness of holds, or increase the effectiveness of holds.

Ten Ton Hammer: How long does a typical PvP session last?

James: We’re aiming for 15 minutes, we try not to have it go on much longer than that, though sometimes it doesn’t take nearly that long if one team is steamrolling the other team. We want it to be fast and furious and exciting.

Rob: There’s a sense of finality to Apocalypse too. When the other teams sigs get into your base, things start getting frantic and go south. But if you have someone smart enough to sneak off and get to your consoles and send reinforcements into the other team’s base at just the right time, you can turn it around. It’s a lot of fun.

Ten Ton Hammer: And this is just the start?

Rob: Everything you’ve seen in beta and everything you see tonight is just the start of tons and tons of cool things. I won’t say what we’re working on in the future for Apocalypse, but it’ll probably veer less toward villains and more toward big scary things.

Ten Ton Hammer: So which styles of Champions Online PvP are your favorites right now?

Rob: I really like the boxing arena, the first UTC, and Apocalypse Stronghold. I like BASH, just how fast and crazy it is with your teammates shooting you.

When a problem comes along....

James: I really like our latest UTC map, which hasn’t hit beta yet. It just looks completely awesome. Lava, lava everywhere. For people with knockback, it’s going to be beautiful. Disrupting flight over the lava, too - it’s going to be fun. That’s the 31 to 40 UTC tier - I don’t want to do that to people that are just learning PvP. I’m not that sadistic.

Rob: It was so hard for us not to make it competely over-the-top. I think some of us - me - were like, ‘We should have lava spurts... that grab you and punch you in the face and make you explode!’ (laughter)

Ten Ton Hammer: Are environmental hazards something you want to do more of in the game?

Rob: Definitely, I’m a big fan of the trapster maps, but we don’t want to get too complicated or have too many things going on at once.

James: We tried that with some of the original UTC maps, and people were too busy fighting to realize that this gets electified if I hit that switch over there. It was too much.

Rob: At the end of the day, the PvP team wants to look at the boards and gather feedback and reasonably react to that feedback in the next update and really give them what they want. If they want king of the hill or capture the flag or the electrocution switch, it’ll go in.


Watch for the second part of this interview later this week, as we’ll hit up Rob Overmeyer and James Laird for some Champions Online PvP tips to put you on top of the leaderboards. A big thank you to James, Rob, and Cryptic Studios for their time!


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Champions Online Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Jeff joined the Ten Ton Hammer team in 2004 covering EverQuest II, and he's had his hands on just about every PC online and multiplayer game he could since.

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