Free Weekend Turns Into Free Frustration I Didn't Need.

This weekend was apparently Champions Online's Blood Moon Weekend - their version of Halloween, I suppose. I was pretty eager to give this superhero MMORPG a try, especially since it was being offered for free up until Monday morning at 10 A.M. I downloaded the launcher easily and then began to patch. And then I wated. And waited.

And waited.

...And waited some more...

Fast forward to Saturday morning. The game still wasn't patched and up to date yet. To make matters worse, Steam needed to patch and update too. This means I had to restart my Champions Online patch, tossing more frustration into my face. By this point I was so annoyed I thought about throwing in the towel, but I perservered and restarted the client. It went back down to 0%, though the size of the file it needed to patch was much smaller. This was a small bit of consolation, but not much since I needed to still patch an additional three hours before the client was finally ready around 7 pm Saturday night. Then trick or treaters started appearing at my house, so I had to put off playing again.

I finally found a small slot of time to play the game at last and begin to enjoy the free weekend. I start up the game client, everything seems great until I noticed the graphics rendering is off. Way, way off. So off, that I couldn't even really make out what that strange blob was on my screen...until I realized it was supposed to be my super hero. So I messed around with the video settings for a while, to no avail. Rebooted the system, tried again. It didn't work.

Now I have thrown in the towel. This obviously was not meant to be, and well...I shouldn't get this frustrated and angry over something that is supposed to be free. This was a wonderful showcasing of how awesome Champions Online has been so far, and while I normally wouldn't make an assesment over how a game is just from the shitty client patcher or the fact that I don't have the correct video driver for something, I think it's fair enough for me to say: Thanks Cryptic, but no thanks. All you've given me this weekend was a free headache and relief that I don't feel the urge to blow $35 on your game because frankly, it won't even run properly and I spent most of your free weekend just trying to play it.

Thank you, and goodnight.