Captain_Photon

I'm making a note here: "Huge success."

Happy birthday, SG!

'Cause this is Thriller, etc.

Hah, I see what you did there. Very good.

Also - and this is something that people overlook every year whilst shouting down the annual "shouldn't we have an Independence Day in-game event?" suggestion - the game is set in the US. If we had actual government-sanctioned superheroes in the streets of Rhode Island, surely a pot-themed one would be noticed by the police.

Don't worry, they need 30,000 friends before that happens, and since everybody knows* this game is dying, they'll never reach that threshold.

* Where by "everybody knows" I mean "those clowns who come trolling this board about server merges insist".

Heh, you don't have to tell me. According to the account management screen over at PlayNC, I've got 52 months of paid time in on my account (which - ye gods! - amounts to nearly $800 once you factor in the costs of the actual CoH and CoV games!), and my highest-level character just reached level 49.

Last night.

I hold this as a sort of perverse point of pride; I'm actually going to be faintly disappointed when he reaches 50.

Heh, fair enough. It's just that around where I live, a tweaker is a person who can't sit still, mutters, sweats, compulsively disassembles household appliances, and occasionally gets electrocuted trying to steal the copper wires from electrical substations.

I don't get the prohibition on historical figures. Never have. Are they worried about being sued by the estate of Alexander the Great?

Yeah, that's the one I mean. He'd be doing the static "cowering in terror" animation, but he'd be moving at the same time, so he'd sort of be Prestige Power Sliding around. While recoiling and trembling in fear. A fixture of any mission that involved frightened civilians! And then they went and "fixed" it, and a little piece of CoH's charm was gone forever.

I do not think this means what you think it means.

But, for what it's worth, I agree with the rest of the sentiments expressed. This is the only MMO on the market today that I'm willing to play, and one of only two I've ever been willing to play (the other was SWG, and that was just because of the license, which wasn't enough to keep me). Even when you guys tick me off and drive me away (say, by never actually ending either of the stupid invasion events), you eventually find ways to bring me back - or, as happened this last time, I just get nostalgic for my characters and grudgingly re-up, only to discover that you've made changes while I was gone that delight me and chase away the remaining doubts about having given you yet still more of my money.

Okay, it's not quite so unreserved a flow of praise as the OP's was, but you get my point. City of Heroes is still my drug of choice, so thanks for that.

"Put it in a sack and toss it in the river."

If only it were the same old same old stuff from the previous year. Halloween used to be my favorite event, until they went and slapped the stupid zone invasion code on top of it. Maybe I won't mind it as much this year. Last year I was just so over the "zombie apocalypse" meme.

I did see that, but then, I thought its absence was a bug in the first place. Now if they'd only bring back Slidey SWAT Guy!

Having had an account on that game across that transition, I can understand why, though such a "turn back the clock" approach wouldn't really have much point in City of Heroes, I would think. Our equivalent of a pre-NGE SWG server would be... oh, I don't know... from before ED, maybe? Or the thing before it that made Tankers all butthurt, I forget what that was called.

No, wait, that wouldn't work, those were before City of Villains. Ha! I guess there's kind of a box there. No ED automatically means no CoV and, thus, no PvP*. Not many of the sort of folks who would bother setting up a private server in the first place would be willing to accept that, I suspect. Personally, I just wouldn't want to go back to playing in a world where there were no Enforcer costume bits. Half of my characters would be going around with no gloves on.

As for an "offline mode" for CoH in general, I've always rather hoped they'd do something like that, simply because sometimes I just can't be bothered to deal with other players. The same purpose could be served by a sort of reverse Hide function that hides everybody else instead of me, though.

* Shouldn't we keep the VP on the QT? Because if it leaks to the VC the VP could end up MIA and then we'd all be put on KP.

I was puzzled by that too, until I realized that it wasn't a declaration that it isn't another vehicles thread, it's an ironic self-facepalming sort of thing, meant to be read with the inflection, "Not another Vehicles thread!"

Who let the Rikti start making their own missions?

This sounds like a job for...

Oh, you got the ones who didn't show up for mine the first time I ran that mission. I'd seen it done before, so I knew what to expect. I went outside and readied myself for battle, I even broadcast that I'd just taken the mission so unsuspecting people who only wanted to change their hairstyle wouldn't blunder into it unprepared, and then I waited...

... and waited...

... until, at last, a lone Dragon Enforcer came running down the street from the direction of the Green Line station and boldly threw himself into the attack.

And that was all.

I guess the other members of that ambush team left their T passes in their other pants.

"One-adam-12, one-adam-12, see the man, corner of 12th and Main, a 415 fight group with chains and knives. One-adam-12, handle code two."

I liked when ambushes were broken so that the baddies would spawn at whatever the lowest available level for their group was. That was always especially hilarious when your team was circa level 45 and the enemy group of the day was the Council.

Don't buy it, then. Nobody's holding a gun to your head.

That may or may not be a network problem; it also happens when the updater is very busy - for instance, when a large new patch has just gone live.