You know what, give Cryptic a break. They said it was a limited time offer. There are all sorts of sales in this world, and pretty much all of them are limited time and while supplies last.

There are all these people bitching and complaining about how bad Champions is and how they are going to cancel their preorder, and now they bitch because they lost the chance to buy the lifetime subscriptions. Well, I guess those people should have bought it while the supplies lasted instead of complaining eh?

Just silly. If you wanted one of these offers, you should have grabbed it. Just like any other deal/sale that you might discover in a consumer driven sociey - buy it if you want it and don't bitch when it sells out.

@Brian!

Why should we give them a break?

They said "Limited TIME offer" not "Limited Quantites offer"

They said the offer would be available until Sept. 1. It wasn't. So they lied.
END OF STORY.

I was already on edge after how bad the beta ran, how unfriendly, unintuitive, chaotic & just plain unworking / broken the teaming system is. Almost impossible to get the same quest as the rest of your team as sharing almost never works. (which also makes sidekicking COMPLETELY pointless)

Also the framerate is horrible even on a good rig. The bloom effect makes the game look like a Barbra Walters interview. The color selection is lacking (sure they want to keep it 4 color comic looking but the palate hurts the eyes after a while).

The instances are too small. 100 people for the MAIN zone, Millennium City? Nowhere near enough. + The instances themselves are annoying & take you out of the immersion.

Bugs out the Wazoo. a brief list off the top of my head

- when trying to get into a zone near cap, even if your team is in it you get "Game server connect fail" and DCed.

- If you go to a dif instance, like say the powerhouse, and the zone your team is in approaches cap; you cant get back to your team. You have to either sit there and wait for people to exit. or ask your whole team to switch to another instance. In which case they're transported away from the quest and everybody has to start all over again.

- Mouse sensitivity is out of wack w/ look speed. No adjustment for it in options.

- Cant move powers to right side of tray, for aesthetic seperation or simply to avoid hitting the wrong key. All are auto moved to the leftmost open spot.

- energy building to test powers is almost non-existant in the powerhouse.

- UI scaling system is completely broken. You make it bigger (say you play on a HDTV) and things like for ex the Bank, the UI goes off the screen & you cant move it around. Half the UI boxes are unmoveable.

- little bits that show the game is not finished & debugged. Even Chief Surnhoff (in the tutorial zone) tells you the interact button is F (like it was long ago in closed beta); BUT it is Z now!

- hitting z to interact is too sensitive & they need to make a timer on it cause sometimes u hit z and it goes through the whole interaction screen and u cant go back to see what it was.

- search window is useless, instances arent even numbered. now way to search by a persons stat focus so it's all a crapshoot. They learned nothing from CoH's excellent search. (also the search columns arent resizeable and the UI problem comes into effect again w/ everything being cut off/unreadable)

- team members names are like a dark powder purple/blue. really hard to see. but other peoples names of ppl who are in other teams but not yours are in bright neon green? that makes no sense.
etc...

I should have listened to the little voice in my head when I head that most of the people who ran Cryptic stayed at NC, while Jack left w/ the company name.

Because of this I'm canceling my pre-order. I'm not spending $60 to beta test an unfinished & unfun game for 6 months. And I'm not spending $50 on a game which will be $30 next year. At which time I will be playing TOR anyway & dedicating my MMO time to that.

CoH gets to keep my money for another year. Cryptic / Atari, good luck w/ your disaster of a game.

@Arrow

You sound exactly like the people complaining about this offer. You bitch about them not keeping available until the first, but that is like 1/20th of your post. The rest of your comment rages on how sucky the beta was.

So then, why complain about not being able to buy the lifetime subscription? Clearly the game sucks right?

Sounds like you just have an axe to grind. I will agree that Cryptic's customer service and communication with their players is bad. They seriously need to fire their PR staff and bring in new blood. And thier game still has lots of bugs in it (better now) but I think there are some core things missing that should be in release (like even a good LFG system or even stealing WAR's Open Groups).

But regardless, the wild threats are just silly. Play CoX, Play CO. Whatever. Voting with your dollar is a powerful thing. Complaining that you can't buy a lifetime subscription when you clearly don't like the game is pretty weak. I would have felt sympathy for you if you would have been raving how this is your favorite game and you were just saving up your dollars and how you love CO anyway and will subscribe, albeit disappointed. Then I might have rallied to your cause.