Mister Rik

Just curious about this

I came to CoH in September 2011 after burning out on WoW (specifically, the Cataclysm expansion, which I hated). But I have an older friend in WoW who is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's, and I promised him I'd be back for the Mists of Pandaria expansion. And MoP launched about the same time as the CoH shutdown announcement. So, I'm back over there.

Sadly, I've been too depressed about the CoH situation to log in here much lately, so I've been spending my time on WoW. Thankfully, MoP is everything Cataclysm wasn't, and I'm having a good time over there. I'm not an "end-game" player (which is one reason I like CoH so much), and MoP has a lot to offer to non-raiders like myself.

So I thought I'd toss a hello to any other CoH people who might be adventuring in WoW these days. Give me a holler if you have toons on my servers:

Wyrmrest Accord (my Alliance RP server): My main character on WrA is a human rogue named Thelois. I've made her my "main" this expansion, instead of my human paladin on Lightbringer, who has been my main since 2008. Thelois is my only level 90 character so far. She doesn't belong to any guild. She's been a member of four different guilds, but left them all for various reasons.

Cairne, my main Horde server: My main character here is Donoma, a tauren paladin, level 89. She's a member of the <Burning Dog Legion>, a guild made up of members of the Straight Dope Message Board. Donoma started life as a blood elf named Keliraeda, but I race-changed her to tauren some time last year. Tauren paladins don't call themselves "paladins", they call themselves "Sunwalkers". Since the tauren culture is loosely based on that of Native American plains tribes, I wanted a suitable name for her. I found "Donoma", which is an Omaha name that means "sight of the sun". I thought it was perfect.

Alexstrasza: My main character here is Nouveus, a night elf hunter, currently level 88. He's a member of the <Knights Who Say Ja> guild. This is a very small guild (only 9 members). The guild master is my Alzheimer's-suffering friend, who I also know from the Straight Dope Message Board. Everybody in the guild is also a SDMB friend, and we're all there to help him out when we can.

Lightbringer: My main here is Eilyssana, a human paladin. She was the very first WoW character I rolled back in December 2008, and was my main through Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, and is the guild master of my own personal "vanity" guild, <Order of The Rik>.

Side note: There appear to be 60 guilds (on different servers) called <Ouroboros>! I never understood that name until I started playing CoH. I suspect those guilds were founded by former CoH players

Anyway, if you play WoW and have a character on any of my listed servers, give me a holler - I'll be happy to hear from you

Well, I'm back to WoW. Which I came here to escape. Like some others, I'm a Mac user, and while bemoaning the lack of MMO options for the Mac in September 2011, somebody mentioned that CoH would run on my Mac.

I started playing WoW in December, 2008, when I acquired a Mac that was actually capable of running it. I didn't know there were other MMO options for Mac (actually, somebody in another thread told me the Mac version of CoH came out in Jan. 2009, but I never heard about it. Damn you NCSoft marketing!) and since I was already a fan of the WarCraft universe from the RTS games, and being pleased with Blizzard's commitment to Mac users, I was happy to sign up for WoW.

But, since I'm not a raider (and I suck at PvP too) — aside from the fact that I found raiding completely unfun, my erratic work schedule doesn't allow me to commit to a raiding guild schedule — once I got to max-level on six WoW characters, I found myself with nothing at all to do aside from running the same circuit of daily quests every day, and an inability to advance/improve my characters. On six characters. See, that's the problem with endgame-focused games: the devs forget about the players who aren't into that. Mind-numbing boredom set in, and I was ready for something new.

So somebody pointed me toward CoH, and I fell in love with the game. I especially liked the fact that end-game raiding was not the be-all, end-all objective. I'm truly one who prefers the journey to the destination, and I never got tired of rolling new characters and doing those same low-level missions over and over. Good grief, I've only played for a little over a year and still managed to create 93+ characters! My total is actually over 100, but there are several I've deleted simply because they didn't work, or I only created them as "joke" characters. I've got a character lurking somewhere named "The Grammar Fifth Columnist" (closest I could get to "Grammar Nazi") whose entire purpose was to sit in Help chat and correct everybody's grammar

On Virtue, I created 13 characters who all followed a theme: A middle-aged biophysicist developed a method of imbuing ordinary humans with superpowers. She took the name "Mother Sun", and granted superpowers to a group of volunteers from around the world. Each of them took a name that represented a planet or other major feature of our solar system: Girl Mercury (from the UK), Venus Lass (USA), Erdmädchen (Germany), Ms. Mars (an actual Martian), Fille de Jupiter (France), Saturn Signal (USA), Princesa Urana (Mexico), Neptune's Niece (Canada), Notta Planet (USA) Lunagetic (USA), Haylee Comet (USA), and Solar Sail (Brazil). All of them have the Science origin, except for Ms. Mars, who is Natural — Mother Sun's procedure didn't work on her non-human physiology, but she was already a trained warrior.

On Triumph, I created another themed team. In Galaxy City, there was a school called "Dahlia Danger's International School for Superpowered Girls". On the day the Shivan meteors destroyed Galaxy, Dahlia Danger revealed herself as an Arachnos agent, and her plan to ultimately indoctrinate her students into Arachnos. The girls were having none of that. They formed their own team and sent Dahlia scampering back to the Rogue Isles. These characters have various origins.

On Defiant, I created a team, all with Natural origins, based on characters I've created over the years in my creative writing. They weren't superheroes in their original incarnations; my original intent was to simply create them in-game to give them "physical form". But several of them ended up being a lot of fun to play.

*sigh* All for nothing. I only got a bit more than a year in this game. I'm never going to get the chance to continue the stories of my characters and their teams, unless I write them in plain text, offline

So, I'm back to WoW. Fortunately, with the new Mists of Pandaria expansion, Blizzard seems to have figured out that we "casuals", we non-raiders, need stuff to do, and so far I'm enjoying the expansion. I've only taken three of my (now) seven (and soon to be eight) eligible characters into the new zones so far. I'm taking it very slowly; I'm in no hurry to get to max-level. The journey. I'm especially enjoying the way the panda NPCs keep telling me to "Slow down! Life should be savored!"

I have a Champions Online account, which I can play on my Windows laptop, along with DnD Online. I also have an Aion account, but I refuse to play that game any more (though I decided that game sucks long before NCSoft decided to cancel CoH). But I really don't enjoy playing on the laptop. I'm too accustomed to playing on my Mac, with its much larger screen. I feel cramped on the laptop.

I may look into Elder Scrolls Online, which will have a Mac version. I've never played any of the Elder Scrolls games, but I've heard they're good. And I don't think NCSoft has anything to do with them.

But as far as finding a new game ... I don't really care about genre. I care about gameplay, and philosophy. Do any of my fellow Mac users remember a Mac shareware game called "Escape Velocity"? My god, that game was, in my opinion, the spiritual ancestor of the modern MMOs and "sandbox" games. It was an outer-space "trading" game. You started out as a space pilot with a tiny shuttle with a puny laser cannon. From there, you could do any damn thing you wanted. Make a fortune simply by shuttling cargo between planets, upgrading to better ships as you could afford it. Become a space pirate by attacking "NPC" cargo ships. Do work for the "Galactic Federation" and become aligned with them, or work for the Rebels. The two sequels added even more options. There was constant begging by players for the game to be converted to online, multiplayer, though that never happened. And this was a few years before Everquest. I haven't played EVE Online, but from what I've heard it's the spiritual successor to Escape Velocity. I suspect its creators were inspired by Escape Velocity (called "EV" by the players - c'mon, EV -> EVE?) Man, I got almost 10 years of entertainment and great gameplay out of EV and its sequels!

In CoH, for me, it wasn't really about being a superhero (though I love superheroes - I've been a comic collector for 25 years). It was about the gameplay. The philosophy behind the game. The customization that let me make my characters look exactly how I wanted them to look. The wonderful community this game has — unless you also came here after a few years in WoW, you won't understand what a breath of fresh air you guys were. I know WoW has a lot of adult players, but you'd never know it from watching the chat channels there. I suspect the "grownups" just keep silent over there. But here in CoH, I've found a community of grownups. I sincerely regret that I never really took the opportunity to get to know more of you. You guys are awesome, and even though I don't really know you, I'm gonna miss you all.

I've pretty much lived on the Internet since 1996, but I don't remember seeing any advertising for this game. I'm also a comic book collector who purchased the first several issues of the CoH comic, and somehow I never made the connection that the comic was tied into a game. Meanwhile, I'd heard of Everquest, I'd heard of Ultima Online, and of course I heard about WoW.

Not to mention that, as far as I know, they never put any emphasis on the fact that you could play the game on a Mac. That kind of news gets around the Mac community, where we're accustomed to every new non-Blizzard PC game being "Windows-only". But I don't remember hearing anything. At least nothing that I still remembered by 2008 when I finally got a Mac capable of playing games like this.

ETA: I guess I should ask - was this game Mac-compatible from Day One? Or was the Cider wrapper thing added later?

So I would like to be able to leave a character holding a torch overnight in Atlas Park 33. Problem is the AFK "timeout" issue.

Is there any way, via console command or whatever, to allow my character to remain "permanently" logged in without having to click that darn button every 10 minutes (or however long it is)?

Just found this one in my screenshots folder - my incarnate fire/fire blaster, Flaminatrix, in Dark Astoria:

As a Mac user, my only experience with CO was trying it out on my Windows laptop. And since I find trying to game on a laptop very awkward (much smaller screen than my iMac, having to look down at the screen instead of straight ahead as I do on my iMac), not to mention that laptop is kind of underpowered, I wasn't really able to give it a fair shake.

I may give it another try, if I manage to get a gaming-quality desktop PC, or get one of the various PC-emulation solutions running on my Mac.

That said, I've come to realize in the year I've played CoH that the superhero aspect isn't the main thing that makes me love this game. If the game was a fantasy or scifi game, but the other aspects (mechanics, philosophy, gameplay, customization, and community) of the game were as they are now, I'd still love it just as much. Now, I do love superheroes — I've been a comic book fan/collector for 25 years. But I don't feel compelled to specifically seek out a superhero game.

Logged in this morning, and found I'd received my 33rd vet reward token. Assuming I also get tokens in October and November, the November token will be my first into Tier 9.

Yeah, I only started playing this game last September, but I spent enough money in the Market to earn that many vet rewards

Is there at least a list of all the Cybertech parts that I can look at? Just looking at the female options in the costume creator, all I'm finding are 3 tops with skin options, 2 boots options, and 2 back pieces. I'm obviously missing something. Those boots looks like they should match up with something, but I don't see any matching gloves, or leg pieces, or ... anything other than what I listed.

So yesterday I was fooling around in the costume creator, and in the female "Tops with Skin" section I discovered three new Cybertech pieces. They looked cool.

Of course, they were locked behind the Store, which basically means, "Here, you can look at these, but you can't have them".

Were these costume pieces simply on some sort of timer to automatically appear on a certain date? Or was this just a glitch? I can't imagine they would deliberately be manually added to the costume creator after the shutdown announcement. That would just be cruel taunting

I would like to create a quick & dirty "mission" purely for the purpose of creating group pictures of my own characters, and I'm looking for suggestions on how best to do this.

I would prefer a small map, but one that is well-lit or at least provides a few locations with decent lighting.

Also, are there any other maps like the Vanguard Base map where I can simply place some custom characters without also putting in enemies? If at all possible I'd like to avoid having to fight through a ton of enemies just to get screenshots of my characters. OTOH, the only way I can see to get my characters to follow me is to set them up in "rescue ally" scenarios, in which case combat is unavoidable. The one problem I see with the Vanguard Base map (that is, the one that's used in that crafting table mission) is that any custom NPCs are just wandering around wherever they please. I need to be able to "collect" them and keep them with me.

Another question: just how many individual custom allies can I place on a map? Is it even possible for me to place 12 unique characters? I ask because all 13 of my characters on Virtue are designed around a unifying theme. I'd like to place 12 of them on the map and then have the 13th gather them all up for the group photo.

Any help would be appreciated!

*sigh* Some missions just require too much travel ...



In case you can't read it, the waypoint says my objective is 43,260.81 miles away.

I guess the upside to this method is that I can play my demos without needing to log into the game servers. I'll be able to watch them when/if the game ends, at least.