Eisregen_NA

Oh right, now I remember. I posted that to make a point to the guy I was quoting. It's thoroughly possible to speak your mind freely if you're willing to accept the consequences. When I was posting I got into a lot of arguments with players and mods cause I'd rather not shut up and accept whatever punishment they deemed necessary while the game was alive. (Funnily enough, I also got a lot of uplifting PMs from players who'd agree with me but weren't comfortable saying so in public.)

Settling scores as the world is about to end is as cowardly as it is pointless. Oops, there I go again.

Not only is this a sensible thought, it would also explain the rather clinical announcement. On the one hand it would suggest a lack of vision by NCSoft who didn't think the game would still be profitable five years after the making and thus look bad, on the other hand it would admit that they made themselves the one direct competitor's ******* by licensing from them. The latter seems like a really bad business move, but may not have been while Cryptic and NCSoft were still loosely related.

While I don't want to get my hopes up, it would also keep the door open for a CoH2. But with the current market climate I'd also worry that CoH2 would be WoW with superheroes. So maybe it's best it dies as it lived; the little MMO that dared and proved that you can have a successful game without copy-pasting the big dog's formula. A lesson many big publishers seem to overlook, seeing the long list of relative failures following the EQ/WoW formula.

In the spirit of reminiscing the days gone by, cracking this raid was one of the funnest Virtue community things I did in my time.

I just realized what touches me most. Seeing the names of posters in this thread (and others) and realizing how long I've known them for. Just like me, they're still here. I may never have been close to you guys, but in as far as the internet allows I knew and trusted you guys.

I know the faceless corporate Moloch doesn't care. But this is the kind of stuff you can't buy. Community. A good community can elevate the old and tired, and a toxic community can make the best thing not worth it.

This community didn't suck. Maybe it's the niche subject of the game. Maybe it's the fact that -more likely than anything due to the bumbling naivete of the game's original designers- it did not fall into the MMO blueprint. I don't know. I just know what cesspits the communities of other MMOs are.


This is not to discredit the Paragon team. I never warmed up to the new guard all that much but CoH has seen some of the most involved and dedicated staffers I've encountered in my time. Though I'm still mad at Castle for the Hurricane nerf. But I guess that doesn't matter anymore.

Nor is it to discredit the posters who left CoH in my time and who were just as awesome credits to their community as the ones I'm thinking of. To the point where I'm sad I never got their contact details away from the game.

But the people who are still here and have always been here that's what hit me. I'm probably raving at this point but I don't care. Thank you guys too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl8Y4IRGIJs

I will miss loathing the lot of you.

Away from this world, beyond and beside it, there once stood a place of nightmares. For ages it stood until someone happened to it. Attracted by the eerie qualities of the place, so much like his own greatest strength, Stranglehold had found the place. It was war at first sight. He'd left the place a blasted and desolate wasteland.

That was centuries ago.


Now, where once there was nothing and before that only nightmares, there grows a savage garden full of wild roses. In its center stand two apple trees, so close their trunks and branches have become intertwined with the years. In their shade rests a coffin made of glass and inside it the eternally beautiful form of a woman as if in deep sleep.

It is here that he comes to rest, every day. He never quite managed to save humanity from itself, but he also never stopped trying and still hasn't. A streak of silver has since found its way into his hair, and many more markings onto his body. But only one of them still stands as radiant as on the day he received it: A band inked into the skin on his ring finger, a thorny rose vine intertwined with a length of barbed wire.

A pattern one would find repeated across the entire garden if one were to look close enough. While their five-pointed bloom seems regular enough, the truth of the matter is that all of these roses spring from two vines, one of green and one of silver. Each vine wraps around the other in endless succession, different but the same.

He stands tall before her, tells her of the battles the day brought, the fire in his eyes brighter than ever, if flickering with something beyond sanity. He tells her of the fights won, and the friends lost in the unending war. And once in a while, he will have brought one of those now absent friends home as a mote of light, wrapped in a sphere of ghostly wrough iron. Brought them here and released them. Kept them from the suffering of hell, the boredom of heaven or the drudgery of the cycle, if such was their wish.

They flit through the wines and around one another in eternal dances much like the wisps by the lake where they used to sit. They bathe the garden in the colours of sunset and hearth fire. But they respectfully leave them be.


Every day he comes here, and every day it's the same ritual. He walks up to the coffin and only then removes his mask. Even as he smiles at her still shape, even as his eyes want to tell of the warmth that he still feels exists between them... he breaks, shatters into a thousand pieces inside and tears roll from his eyes. For a moment at least, because then the miracle happens.

He sees... something, a glimmer of hope, enough to make him whole again in that very same instant. And when he's told her all the news, he'll pluck an apple from the trees, and he'll sit down by her side and play their songs. Singing along at times, looking at pictures of a time that never should have been. And he'll smile.

Finally, he'll drift off into sweet sleep and sweeter dreams. Of a villa in Tuscany, and of hordes of tall raven-haired children with feet that will always be too big for their size. Of the wife that awaits him there with starlit eyes. That love to last until the end of time.

That thing that could not be and yet always will.


He is at peace.

Maybe define more closely where you're headed with the powers. Hard light constructs? Illusion is probably closest to that, yes. You could dumb it down to blasts and bubbles (FF or Sonic Corr or Def with Energy or Rad Blast) or find a middle ground at encasing people with your powers (Grav/Energy Dom, Grav/FF or Sonic Troller; hell, Ice or Earth might even be coloured to look like hard light). You really have a wide variety of options right down to an Energy Blaster or EM Brute. It's all in the interpretation.

****! I like **** in my RP. Sue me.

Actually RPed through most of it. I feel horrible.

I personally don't like huge spammy Globals, so I have no stake in this, but isn't that basically what Virtue United or whatever it was called (usually full at any rate, I get that) was for? Again, not my kinda thing usually. I think I was in Virtue United for all of a day a few years back, cause it was just silly amounts of texts at times.

Otherwise, have fun with your thing. Great thing about Globals is that they're free.

Another one for the 'Reside looks better' faction. All the old Blueside Zones are incredibly simply designed, which is to say boring. The Redside Zones tell stories just by the lay of the land, shake up the monotony and generally strike me as more soulful.

It's just a matter of evolution. Zone Designers get better and have more toys, comparisons and experiences to draw on when making new Zones.

Vaguely in-character speed dating? That sounds promising.

(( Don't you just love how half the wedding party is standing by the same tailor? ))

IMO it always helps to lay out a bit what kind of SGs you're looking for. RP SGs come in way too many shapes and sizes. Additional info would help. Or at least give a very rough idea of the concept that's in your mind.

Isn't that pretty much the textbook definition of a wedding?

What? Oh that. Just the way I say things. I'd rather people screw me than sue me, y'know?

Wait, we're friends? Awww...

Right. But everything else I can simply write off as ignorance of how it works. The Atlas statue bit is crashing so hard against the windshield of common sense that I can still feel the impact over here.