General_CoH

I'd have liked a time that's a little earlier at night, but I'll try to get Adventurer Like You to be there, and maybe others. I'll see how many concurrent copies of the game I can run.

Given that Paragon Studios was closed, I wonder if NCsoft will even care to keep the servers up until the 30th of November. It's a target date, but seems to me like if they got rid of the devs they'd get rid of all support personnel long before.

CO and DCUO are different, but they're free, so it's easy to try them. I only played them a little. I didn't like CO that much, but it seems to have a good community which has welcomed a lot of CoH players. I did like the little I played in DCUO. It has many fewer options in the character creator, but the character I created looked good and I felt like a superhero from the start, something that no other game gave me, even CoH.

I don't think there's another game that's really good for altoholics, though. Finding out an alternative to CoH would depend on what you liked about CoH. If you tell us, that might help.

I posted to quite a few threads, but I figured it would be nice to create a farewell thread and finally tell a little more about how I came to play CoH (and not just say that I don't play much any more).

I worked at a great company called AIseek (I was the first employee after the founders). What was great about it (one of the things anyway) was that it insisted that we play MMO's (and other games) and paid for it (and for a box of parentheses I use to this day). We were working on AI hardware acceleration, and it was obvious to us that MMO's could use this, so we played them to understand them better. We even talked to NCsoft at one point about trying to put this into its games, and learned how City of Heroes implemented path finding. Unfortunately we never managed to release the product and the recession of 2008 pretty much killed the company and any chance of it being bought (there were a few interested parties before that).

So AIseek introduced me to City of Heroes, and I liked it so much that even though I had a game account paid by the company I bought both CoH and CoV Collector's DVD Editions and paid for a second account for a while. That's this account. (I'm Minibromian on the ex-company account.)

I will not go into the story of the downward spiral that led me to not play the game much (though I blame it on the kids, those cute attention grabbing time wasters), but I still kept in touch with the game and played occasionally. I kept hoping that one day I'll have more time to play and would get back to it, but it looks like that won't happen.

Even though I'm not as dedicated as many of the posted on this forum, City of Heroes was still the game I played most and on which I spent the most money. It struck all the right chords for me when I started playing it, and it saw a large number of improvements over the years. Looking at Dr. Aeon's videos for Issue 24 I can see that it was set to improve even more, and it's a real pity that won't happen.

I want to thank the devs and every nice person I encountered in the game (which was the vast majority of them) for all the fun time I had playing it.

Thanks for collecting this information, Ashtur.

I played the first part of Who Will Die yesterday, and it struck me how technical issues prevented me from enjoying the story. It reminded me how often I've had to go look at the console to check out what characters said, and for a game that's story heavy (which is one thing I love about it) that's a problem. For one example, it looks like Synapse was there at the end and said something, because the text was there, but I never saw him. All I saw was a black screen.

I'm not saying that's what killed the game, but I would guess that such problems make it a harder sell for new players.

TonyV, you guys are incredible. Thanks for all your efforts to save what we have.

Will this only work for characters we can play? Most of my characters are locked due to not being VIP.

I've got a few on my "want to play but won't really because I don't have time" radar. Neverwinter definitely sounds interesting. SWOTR is going free to play, and I already signed up to the free infinite trial (to level 15), but that was just before I found out CoH was closing, so I will dedicate my limited gaming time to CoH for now. I put a bit of money on the Shadowrun Online Kickstarter, and will be looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Happened to my yesterday. Unfortunately I'm only a VIP on an account with one level 20 character, but I did play the first part of Who Will Die yesterday.

I wonder if the devs can issue VIP codes. That would be a good start.

I guess it was a momentary error. I'm back to white. Don't know how this happened. Pity I logged out to test other accounts. Would have been nice to post as General_CoH on VIP only forums instead of my current newish VIP account.

Considering my name turned gold, I'd guess the chance is good.

Looks like they're still not all used. I just grabbed 34RS-4QDZ-PK5P-YYWD-VQAS.

Thank you for posting this, Matt. I loved reading this kind of stuff especially when I can related to it. In this case, just the mention of Amber Diceless made me nostalgic. Never really got to play it, but I loved reading the books and Amberzine, and even corresponded a little with Erick Wujcik in those days when that still meant sending paper envelopes with stamps overseas. (Now that I remembered it, I'm still saddened by Erick's untimely death. Coupled with CoH's death, I'm becoming quite emotional. I might have to post to that thread about crying.)

I love that you made these great design decisions that made CoH the game I liked playing the most. I hope you'll find a place where you can make more of them, or, better yet, that you'll continue with CoH and its next generation because someone will save it.

I agree, this rumour made me happy. I hope that CoH will be able to live on.

As an Everquest 2 fan I certainly won't mind seeing CoH in the hands of SOE. IMO EQ2 has improved considerably since I played it in '06 and even improved a lot since it became free. More story based low levels, faster travel, even a system for creating user dungeons. In short, it added things I liked about CoH. I also hope that if SOE gets CoH they'd simplify the F2P system to something closer to their other games. The current system is awfully complex and IMO off-putting.

I had a 90 day code which unfortunately could only be used for a new account. Applied it to a free account and it's VIP now. But I think you can't buy new codes.

Turns out the 3 month code I had was only for new accounts. So all my best laid plans would never have worked, and in a way it's good that I found about it like this and not when I really felt like getting back to the game.

Good thing I have a free account with a level 19 character. No way he will get to 50, so I'll miss out on the incarnate stuff and other high level VIP content, but at least he'll be able to do the first missions of "who will die".

I guess I'll just have to post my goodbyes on the VIP forums as a new user.

If it's true that NCsoft needs to pay a license for the CoH engine, and if the license would need to be paid soon, then it would make sense for NCsoft to kill the game now, and not take that as a loss for next quarter.

I finally figured it out. The world is ending in December, and someone really really doesn't want any Paragon hero to have a chance to save it. So the plan was hatched to end the game by the end of November. Now if only we can discover who's behind this, maybe we can expose this dastardly plan for what it is and help save the world.

I like that it's story based. No killing bears so someone could make a rug.

I like that it's quick, with many missions that can be played in 15 minutes or less. This makes it a good game for people who don't have much time to play and still want to feel they achieve something.

I like the travel powers. I like that I can get quickly from place to place without worrying too much about it. Unless I teleport.

I like that at the high levels I can really feel like I'm a superhero who's saving the world.

I like the great variety in character creation, of course, and the number of characters a player could create.

It depends. I won't know until I find my 3 month subscription code and try to apply it. If it works, I will probably play the Who Will Die arc. If it doesn't, I will probably play Praetoria. If possible I'll play both.

Don't know how much I'd be willing to pay, but I'd love a way to download all my characters data and view it, and will probably be willing to pay something for this.