Ardrea

I was at about 103B before I lost interest in playing after the announcement. It was nice to know that I could get anything I needed for any new character I wanted to try. I was also able to give inf to friends who seemed to need it and to gift prestige to Supergroups I thought were cool for their bases.

Well, so long as I'm looking, I found this Samuraiko video of the big Virtue dropship event from 2008. One of those zipping pixels there somewhere in the crowd is my character too -- that event was a complete blast!

Years and years ago, I was considering joining this game called City of Heroes, and a friend recommended I check out some of the player-made videos highlighting the game. The one I found first was this one. In a moment of nostalgia, I looked it up, and watched it again, and felt the same sense of awe at seeing a game that made super-powered characters come to life that I felt before.

I'm currently playing GW2, and I like it.

Yes, it's an NCSoft product, but I see two reasons not to "hold CoH against them". First, we simply do not know the specifics about why CoH is being closed and who is actually at fault. We don't know if it was actually meeting it's RoI targets or even profitable at all, what agreements had been made between PS and NCsoft prior to the Freedom route being taken, or whether there were legal/licensing issues as some have speculated. Second, tax codes aside, corporations aren't people, the people who run them sometimes have to make decisions they'd never do if it were their own personal matter. Disliking a company for a business decision they make is like disliking the north wind -- sometimes it's just gonna blow, but not from malice.

Across the ULB COMMS System, a flash message arrives.

Cybersecurity in the Etoilles reported first; three days, minimum, to shut down, clear, and restore operating functionality to Sky Control, the whole system being taken down simultaneously to refresh from a three-week old read-only checkpoint. Even then, they couldn't be sure; too many systems had cache memory in too many places. Paragon's War Wall Control had similar problems, and they couldn't even contain their systems yet. Too many supposedly isolated processors had been hit, and some were responding to external instructions, but no one could identify just -how-. Paragon's war walls could be taken down at will, and the Etoilles were defenseless from above. It didn't take a criminal mastermind to see where this was going.

The conference room had been full of Vanguard brass; but even that couldn't keep the Longbow and Arachnos representatives from hurling invectives at each other. Marshal Drammond had insisted that the virus was Longbow's creation. Everyone knew their Cyber Division had been preparing specialized defense system worms since the first Praetorian invasions and Longbow's capture of advanced clockwork designs. Talitha had to position herself carefully; Longbow would immediately suspect a plot if she spoke in their defense, and Drammond already considered her a traitor.

She had plans for him, indeed, but those would be held for another day. Today, she had seen the execution traces taken from the compromised control core in Vanguard's lab; that code wasn't human origin, but there were bits and pieces that seemed ... out of place. The day-zero hacks, the compiler signatures ... Borland? Really? Who used that anymore? ... it had the superficial look of human codes, but the convoluted infection kernel of the code had to have been developed by an AI, and one that wasn't well trained for modern ExArch computers. Far too clever. If it wasn't alien, then a new cyber-criminal had broken us into a new paradigm. Vanguard Agents in the field had to be warned against the former; and if the latter, it wouldn't be Vanguard's concern for long.

Vanguard knew what the Rikti used Dropship hulls for. The skies over Paragon, the Etoilles, and other major cities had suffered from bombardment and invasion before. Still, it wasn't a given anything of the sort was imminent. What was needed was preemption. Let them know they would not simply be allowed to amass forces while Earth's defenders cowered in fear.

Message traffic on Vanguard's Ultra-Low Band COMMS network wasn't exactly rare. Still, critical bits and pieces of intelligence necessary for Earth's defense against many threats, including the Rikti, were sent out from time to time so that those agents of Vanguard, formal and informal, both in Paragon and the Rogue Isles, could be aware.

Inside the Vanguard Office in Cap au Diable, Assistant Deputy Undersecretary Talitha Laurent, designated UNSCSHA Special Projects Directorate liaison to Vanguard, quickly reviewed the ULB-COMMS message she'd painstakingly constructed from the various sources of Intel available to the Special Council and Vanguard, and then pressed the "SEND" key.

I have a character who can perform as a Catholic lay minister. She's available for the sacraments which can be performed by those not in the priesthood in her civilian identity, Rebecca Johnson; and can, under certain circumstances do a little more in her (secret) hero-identity, Dreams of Solace. In that capacity, she's an ecclesiastical ward of the Knights of Malta, and as it's often said, roleplay to learn more. In her civilian identity, she's a middle-school teacher and social-worker, and can offer basic counseling and therapy.

She's a blue-sider only.

Hi everyone!

I expect I'll be returning to CoH between now and "Mako Week". Only part time, at first, but I will be more consistently in-game and participating in roleplay as time goes on.

Hello Virtue roleplayers. I've been out of game for about a month now, and will be out for a while longer. I've been feeling some "CoH-burnout" for quite a while, and am off roleplaying in a new MMO in the mean time.

-@Andreah.

The Admins need a separate Admin Zone Event channel. This new channel would work exactly like current Admin, but not extend outside of the zone the Admin is working in. They could announce events' starts, critical updates, and endings over normal Admin, and then confine their event chatter to the zone it's taking place in.

I would remove the crash from Super Strength's Rage, and compensate by making it not stack with itself. Casting another one would terminate the existing one.

I've given it more thought.

The change log for the next issue would include a short note buried amongst all the goodies:

"Updated server-side random number generator to use a new algorithm."

Go back and add accomplishment badges to every story arc in the game.

Hmm....

Add a new, secondary experience system. By achieving certain goals or finishing certain tasks in specific, and goal/task appropriate, level ranges, a character earns "Achievement Points". Achievement points can be allocated to powers to improve or alter them in unique and interesting ways.

There'd be about ten of these, and one would have an opportunity to earn them about once per five-level range band. A level 50 character with all ten achievements would be noticeably more powerful and more flexible than one without.

If one levels past these achievement opportunities, there's no possible way to go back and get them; e.g., doing the tasks via Oro would get any associated badges and such, but would not count as a "worthy achievement".

Regeneration and recovery are both scaled to how far down the bar is; only reaching their maximum rates near the bottom of each bar.

To-hit and Damage are both modestly debuffed on the character if the character's health is low, and recharge and defense are both modestly debuffed if the character's endurance is low.

Paragon Market would sell a power that, for 500 points, would turn any character you select into a rikti monkey for ten in-game minutes. Someone else's character you select, that is.

For 1000 points, it affects their whole account.