Roughtrade

In the realm of 'no one else is doing it' I totally forgot to mention the Mission Architect; and I have three missions in it.

Is anyone else anywhere considering the ability to allow players in their MMO the freedom to make their own entire content?

How many of y'all ran mission created by Scott Kurtz? Or Mercedes Lackey?

Is there anything like it anywhere in gaming?

(And Kenny; don't mention Neverwinter Nights. Yes you can use that program to make your own servers and meddle but it really is not on the same level as what CoH did here, allowing any other player in the game to play a mission *I* made and not have to sign on to a special server or have a cracked copy of the game)

There will probably be other super hero MMOs. The Secret World has some interesting things. Shadowrun got a bunch of money from Kickstarter and is looking like it might happen.

But they are still much closer to the WoW clone we see everywhere than they are to the freedom of choices available in City of Heroes.

Your forum icon gives me vertigo

There's a billion 'goodbye' threads. This is another. Sue me.

I am going to miss the CoH community almost more than anything else. Over on Liberty I was once tagged 'the biggest rhymes with witch' on the server. I had a reputation for harsh reactions to randomly spammed invites. And still, y'all put up with me. This is the best gaming community I've played with in something like a decade and a half of MMO and MUSH playing. So with it being a given that the best thing about CoH was the players and the dedicated developers who let us have so much fun in their world....

City of Heroes is (and always will be) the best damn game ever. In a world that seems to only be able to issue WoW clones as games, City of Heroes was different.

City of Heroes decided early on that chasing 'just five more levels' was not the way to keep things interesting. They expanded the mid game and early game content as much or more than the end game content that every other MMO seems to hold as their only focus.

City of Heroes turned game expansion into events. Remember the first time Portal Corps went online? Eyeballs popping out of gates in Atlas Park and in Steel Canyon. Or the time that The Fifth Column had a civil war and fascists with guns were running around shooting at anything that moved all over the city. Or fires in Steel Canyon and other 'heroic but not beating someone up' type content. Other games may have similar things for expansions, but I think CoH did it better, and they did it first in my experience.

Side Kicks and Exemplars. City of Heroes is the ONLY one with this sort of game mechanic. The ONLY game that allows you to play alongside your friend, no matter if you bought the game five years ago and they bought it five minutes ago. This seems like a no-brainer. It boggles me that every game that came out after CoH did not automatically include a similar game mechanic. I am stunned that no other game I have seen has anything remotely like it.

There were some little things too. How many of you ever found the One Skull in King's Row who managed to get the purse? The 'comments' from the mobs as you passed were just awesome. I do not remember the list, but certain civilians with names starting with a particular letter gave you information. They could tell you what time it was, how long you had been playing that particular alt, or just say 'stop poking me'. Skull Girlfriends complaining about how long it takes their boyfriend to break into a car. The various bored 'guard mobs' inside door missions that tended to complain about their jobs. Nemisis Robot Flunkies asking for the TPS report. City of Heroes had a sense of humor about itself that few other games manage to maintain.

City of Heroes made 'game loot' pretty much a non-entity in their game. Drops happened, sure. But there was never the grind of finding just the one type of mob that dropped just the one part you needed to make the only gear that was of use in the game. Your character acquired 'loot' automatically without having to click on a dead body.

More importantly, your gear never defined your look. City of Heroes understood from the start that being a comic book hero meant having an iconic look. Something that stayed with you. Superman and Batman have gone through costume changes, but their iconic look has remained (with some exceptions that were universally reviled and dumped swiftly) steady throughout. CoH understood that and let us have our Iconic Costumes without worrying that I might need better gloves or a chest piece that is going to make my shoulders look like I'm wearing bowling balls with spikes. You could look like that if you wanted; but you did not have to.

And that may be the ultimate thing that the City of Heroes developers got right. They understood their genre. Batman doesn't go rooting through the pockets of the Joker to see if he has any cool stuff. You know what, the Joker wouldn't do it to Batman if he won. It just isn't the way the genre works.

And it bears repeating, because the developers of Comic Book Hero games that are still operational have missed that critical point. City of Heroes understood what the comic book genre was about.

In seven years of playing, I have gone out and fiddled around with other games. Played WoW for about two years straight. But I never dropped my CoH subscription and I always came back once or twice a month to do a Hami Raid or run a new character around through Atlas Park and into King's Row.

Seven plus years in a game and only a handful of 50s. Because playing all parts of the game was just too much damn fun. From having a unique costume, to having an in-game 'ID Card' that let you put a little bio for everyone to read about your character, to allowing your developers to make a dance club in their spare time (anyone remember the Paragon Dance Party before there was Pocket D?) and implement it in the game and then turn it into a major portion of the game.... The examples of what City of Heroes got right far out number and out class the things you can say they got wrong.

But the thing I will miss most about the game mechanics are travel powers.

City of Heroes is the only game that I have had fun just traveling around. From the day back at the beginning where a crowd of us gathered around Miss Liberty to watch the first person to reach Level Six take 'hover' and begin to fly.... Maybe not the first in the game, but obviously the first that morning... I think there were something like fifty of us gathered on the steps in the shade of Atlas holding the Globe... If our characters could have pointed at the guy, we all would have. And an hour later when I had finished the level chase and got to buy hover for myself; there was a similar crowd to enjoy the moment. Hell, I spent over an hour chasing the zeppelin in Atlas Park, just because I could.

Super Jumping across King's Row and playing "Don't touch the ground it's made of lava" with my friends. Flying 'nap of the earth' in BoomTown or Faultline. Super Running almost anywhere. And for real fun, combine Super Running with Super Jumping and streak across the map like a comet. Other hero games give you only one 'travel' power. In CoH, I can have a hovering teleporter with combat jumping and a jet pack. My kyrptonian homage character has flight, super running and super jumping in their third build, just to show off and do the tornado.

City of Heroes is unique in the MMO community. Nobody is doing anything even close to some of the things they did here.

I am going to be here until they shut the lights out. And then I am going to be sad, because it does not look like anyone is ever going to come close. I'll get over it. It's just a game after all. But it was nice to be part of catching Lightning in a Bottle. Because it looks like it may never happen again.

...I say hello.

Beatles make everything better. Almost.

I made the mistake of letting my membership lapse this summer. Was spending the months of May through September in traveling and knew I would not get much time to play. Silly me, first time in seven years I had turned off CoH and it almost bit me in the tuchass. Fortunately I was able to jump on the 'Going Rogue' loop hole before they closed it. Abrahms was unable to get his hands on a copy before they shut that avenue down. He sends his regards to anyone who recalls us.

Halo Jones, Kara (Later renamed Liberty Force), Psychic, Witchcraft, Gunpowder Angel and my two characters that actually got into the CoH Comic books, Scorpio Rose &, Zot.

You all probably don't remember me much. I avoided pick up groups. In fact back in the early months I was tagged as the 'Biggest 'rhymes with witch' on Liberty" by someone who did not use the 'rhymes with' phrase. If I was famous for anything, it was for being harsh to people who randomly spammed out group invites. I like to think my years of sending a complaint to NCSoft every time I received a random invite with the suggestion of being able to be invisible to strangers but visible to your friends is why they changed to code on things. But perhaps that is vanity.

On the Gripping Hand, I hope some out there might remember that I was always there when it came to hunting the Giant Monsters when they spawned. Heroics might have been one of the smallest SGs on the game, but if any of us were online when the call came for someone to come drag Lusca off the docks, we all came to help. Especially if anyone needed help in getting the badge. And I still have 50s with the 'Crey Protector' mission for the pistol.

Anyways; American Valor. Steele Magnolia. Tormax. Budo, GEL, Pickles, so many others out there that were good people. People who were willing to take a prickly player along for tackling Arch Villains for the badges. People who had the patience to organize Mother Ship Raids and ride herd on Hamidon Assaults.

There are a lot of things I am going to miss about this game. Will probably post something about it in a more open access forum. But Liberty was my first home in City of Heroes. I am going to miss you guys probably as much or more than I am going to miss this game.

I've been avoiding the boards entirely since the bomb dropped.

But like a lot of others here, you were always one of the good guys on the game. (good guys being a non-gender-specific term here everyone)

One of the people that you heard about in the game and in the forums. Helpful, open, active, and always ready to lend a hand. You have a lot more patience with newcomers than me, and a lot of people I know.

Not gaming alongside people like you is something I will miss most about this entire process.



Fair Wind and Following Seas

and

Luck in the Shadows

YES!

Just got the Going Rogue in the mail from Amazon. (Try doing this while traveling up and down the Eastern Seaboard and see how fast you can do it) and it works. VIP Again!

Now I just need to get Nvdia to get my driver issue fixed or find my mom's Win7 disc so I can reload before I get back to CA at the end of the month.

But Going Rogue codes work!

Sure. Not that I think this thread will save the game, but there's always hope. It really seems like no one from the company is reading the threads here at all.

I just feel frustrated by the timing. I let the account lapse at the beginning of June because I knew I was spending the summer traveling around the East Coast, visiting family. I love the game and all but Grandbabies are more important.

I will be back in California in the middle of the month, so I checked in on the 1st to activate, keeping the billing cycle on the beginning of the month. If I had checked in just one day earlier, I would be fine for this month at least.

Just sorta bumming me out that there is no response from anyone official on any of this. I wasn't expecting anything over the weekend, but you'd think they would be okay with accepting money until the game shuts down.

*shrug*

Someone needs to make a sticky for updating the status of game accounts.

Are they going to allow people to 'buy back' VIP for the last months of the game?

Are they going to allow Time Cards to be used?

Can I use a credit card to buy 60 days of time?

Is there anyone in the NC Soft offices even reading the forums any longer?

It would be nice if this section of the forums had some answers for those of us unlucky enough to be caught by surprise.

Champions Online and DC Online both suffer from the same fault. Gear drops.

It's the MMO mentality that outfitting your character from looting enemies is the only way to go. As if Spiderman picked the webbing on his costume by stealing someone's clothes.

DC allows for (in my opinion) better customization options in color coordination of pieces but the reality is that none of them come close to City of Heroes.

As long as you're playing a game where you are trying to loot your enemies for weapon and ability upgrades, and those options are reflected in changes to your avatar in the game, then you are not going to come close to CoH.

http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/media_...ic_archive.php

Just in case anyone wants to save them to their own computer before NCSoft sends them to the black hole.

...and you could specifically download 09 & 10 for my story 'Zot Arrival'
and 17 & 18 for 'Rose in Bloom'

But anyways, I don't expect the forums to be around much longer.

Will they be taking game cards?

This totally sucks *** btw. I'm on vacation and let my account lapse for the three months I'm traveling. Was supposed to be back mid september, logged in today to try and reup my subscription and find out it's all going away.

Mother Puss Bucket!

Use whatever Origin you wanna.

All of the decorations in the 'Easter Egg Room' in Faultline.

Pool Table. Posters from the 'movie' walls instead of just the CoH comic covers. Things like that.

They obviously exist already.

I cheat on this one all the time. You can come up with a rationalization for just about anything and I like having the dagger mini-power that comes with being a natural so I use it all the time.

Sword Wielding, Energy Shielded, Superjumping Scrapper : The sword is high tech monofilament, the energy shields are from a unit on my belt and the super jumping comes from an additional unit on the belt that nullifies my mass. But the skill is all me and someone else fixes the things when they break. I'm a natural.

Super Strength, Invulnerable, Flying Tank : Everyone on my planet can do this. It's natural.

Darkness Fisted, Regenerating, Teleporting Stalker : Killed by a Crey experiment gone wrong, crawled from the grave on a mission of vengeance. I'm really a science gone wrong sort of background but I'm taking natural anyways because I refuse to let anyone label me and I really don't like the tranq gun dart because I think it looks silly so I'm keeping the throwing knives.

Honestly, take what ever Origin you wanna. If anyone really gives you any grief about it, they have issues and they probably would have found something else 'wrong' with your character anyways.

Not sure if this is a bug. And if it is, I'm uncertain if I want it fixed but....

There is a building near the PI ferry that when I click on the door (I was ToTing) I get the option to Long Range Teleport.

I do not have any Teleport powers on this character.

Kind of useful to have as an exit. A lot faster to get to just about anywhere since PI is only accessible via the ferry.

So is this a bug or just a very little known feature?