Samuel_Tow

Agreed. The article seems to be critical but fair, which I always respect. It really boils down to the core of the problem, which is a corporation cancelling a popular product against its customers' wishes in the name of corporate interests.

Well, those promo videos just make me even more pissed off at NCsoft's decision than before. You guys were working on some pretty cool stuff that would have made an already great game even better... And then this happens. Ugh...

Take it from me - I generally don't like cutscenes, but I liked those. That ought to say something.

I'm not going to delete my characters. The only ones who get deleted are the ideas that have failed (Insane Rick, say). The game may end, but my characters will live on, this their virtual representations will live on as long as the servers do, if not beyond.

For me, the biggest loss here is the loss of a creative outlet. I don't mean to disparage all the great people I've pissed off over the years, nor the great development decisions I've complained about - that's part of what made the game great, to be sure. But to me, what made it... Transcendent is how much City of Heroes stimulated my imagination and encouraged me to think in unorthodox ways. Turns out, I really needed this, because the last eight years have been the happiest of my life just because I've been able to exercise my brain in such unusual ways.

I don't know what the solution to this is. I'll need to find another game which lets me "play around" as much, or otherwise take up writing more seriously.

At the risk of sounding pretentious - all of them. Well, at least the ones I kept till the end. Let me explain.

I've made my fair share of "Oh, cool costume!" characters that I never played much and never gave much of a story (poor Insane Rick). The fact of the matter is that all of them have since been deleted, and those that aren't would have been as soon as I ran out of slots. However, all the ones I cared about and kept - the REAL ones - have come from a story I've either written or planned out, and all of them mean something important to me.

I have no "main," nor even a small selection of favourites over and above the others. Every character I've made is equal in my eyes, and if you ask Nuclear Toast, he'll tell you how long I've spent trying to balance some 50-odd characters such that they're all cool. I might have to drop a few of my newest I never got around to fleshing out much, but all of the others have something in them that's important and that harkens back to a story I've felt greatly for at one time or another.

Sorry to be so unspecific.

Tokyo. I can do without constant homophobic insults.

Dear Matt Miller,

While I've badmouthed you a lot over the years over the general course of the game, I will still miss you and the game you led to greatness. I'm probably one of the more "unpleasable" fans around here and even I have to say that I just didn't have much to complain about in recent times. Hell, the game was looking up - the best it's ever been, with the future bright and shiny. Then this happened... I know you say you read every post in a thread, and if you read all of mine, you deserve a medal. And if I ever said anything that was personally offensive, I apologise for it.

Others have said it, but it bears repeating - you and the others made what is easily the best MMO out there, and pretty much one of the best games in general. Sure, the graphics were old and combat was buggy and many of the new systems were grindy and the text was full of typos and the story kind of caved in on itself, but these are minor problems. They can be fixed, or at worst ignored. What really made your game shine was that this was a place where dreams were MADE. Let me elaborate on this for a moment.

I've played a lot of games and quite a few MMOs. Most of them tend to centre around catering to people with a specific dream. "I'm in a forest!" MMOs cater to people who dream of a fantasy setting of elves and dwarves and high magic. Sci-fi MMOs cater to people who dream of a technocratic future where science and technology make the impossible possible. Hell, even most "super hero" MMOs out there cater to people who dream of being heroes. Not City of Heroes, not really.

City of Heroes is a place where dreams are made, where none existed before.

When I came to City of Heroes, I had no real artistic aspirations, no real stories to tell, but your game inspired me. It inspired me to think, it inspired me to dream, and it inspired me to create. I've had many problems with your game and your setting, but I stuck around because despite those problems, you let let me create content of my own, such that I would never even have dreamed of before. All of my weird and wonderful creations, I owe to your game and your game alone, for giving me the tools with which to create them, play them and expand on them. You, your team and your game gave me my imagination. And for this, no price is too high.

We can talk about game systems and game lore and programming and maths and so on, but in my eyes, what set City of Heroes apart from all other MMOs is that this is a game which encourages its players to create. We aren't just picking a character and picking a role and grinding through levels. No, we're creating our own characters, writing our own stories and having our own adventures that take place in this open and welcoming world you've created. No other MMO - not a single one - has ever done that. No, those try to capitalise on what people already want out of a game.

For as much as you swore to give players what they want, the fact of the matter is your game - by the sheer strength of its presence - shaped what we wanted right back. And this is something you should be proud of.

So these forums will go dark? Damn, that's bad news. Is there any possibility of transferring the database to a user-hosted site if someone else will pay the hosting bills? Even just as a back-up?

"Paragon Studios is switching to a hybrid business model to give us more money. I wanna' fill my pockets with cash and that cash is yours!"

I love it! Please share more of those, I laughed my *** off, and genuinely

It was my first MMO, as well, and there's good reason for it. The MMO genre itself has been garbage for as far back as I can remember, with games doing what they could to waste my time, Skinner-box me into compulsion and yet fail to deliver a solid experience. City of Heroes was the first... And pretty much last MMO I've ever played that was actually exciting to play. It wasn't about collecting twigs in the woods or being paid 5 gold to clear out someone's basement from ROUS.

MMOs try to be "big" in every aspect, but all that ends up doing is filling my playtime with pointless busywork that I don't want. City of Heroes was and is the only MMO out there that actually felt like a sandbox, i.e. a "make my own" fun game that's actually fun, rather than simply addictive. I loved making my own costumes, I loved writing my own stories, and I loved trying to figure out how these characters would interact with the vivid in-game world.

Now what do I have to look forward to? "I'm in a forest!" MMOs with lots of crafting and gear grind. Ugh... Even Star Wars and Champions take place in forests, for crap's sake.

I disagree, as I have in previous years. To me, the game shouldn't end feeling like we ultimately lost. That would be just adding insult to injury, I think. If anything I want to end the game as I lived it - being a badass, saving the day and seeing a world that will live on another day. Or, alternately, being a badass and pulling off an amazing villainous plot that takes me one step closer to my ultimate goal without actually reaching it.

I'd sooner have something half-finished sitting around as a monument to all we've achieved than to take a hammer to what we've worked on so hard for so long just because we'll never finish it.

To me, the game shutting down is no different from my characters hitting level 50. I've done all I could, I've saved the world a bunch of times, and the story goes on without me, while I go make another character to experience it all again. To me, having played the game is finality enough. I don't want to leave on a "downer" ending. I'd rather let the game go and let it sit as it was when I left it, rather than ride it until it breaks.

I'll be taking screenshots of all my characters. Not mugshots, though. An action shot of some kind. I'll figure it out when I get down to it. There's a lot of work to do, basically.

I will miss City of Heroes, but I am NOT going away empty-handed. This game has been the primary vessel for my creativity for eight years and counting, and the characters, ideas and skills in creation I picked up will not go to waste. I'll ensure my characters live on.

But I won't try to preserve the actual game itself. Maybe as costume files, we'll see, but I don't intend to make videos out of it. Sooner or later I'll reinstall my PC and lose the client, and I doubt NCsoft will offer a download option.

I'm just glad to see you're still here, and on a Sunday no less. As I said in a previous thread that got buried, I'd like to see the forums stay behind after the game. I don't know who'll host them and who'll moderate them, but I'd like to see them survive with their current database. It would both retain my home away from home, and it would also, I think, serve as a statement. I said it before that I'll be here until the servers shut down, and I'm not going anywhere. I might not play the actual game much beyond "saving" my characters, but I'll keep visiting the forums.

And if these forums live on even after the game dies, then I'll keep coming back here, and I'll keep trying to behave in a way I would be proud to demonstrate. I know we've all had our ups and downs, and I have more than my fair share of mod warnings cluttering up my inbox. But now is the time for us to moderate ourselves, I think. We've always prided ourselves as a positive community that doesn't condone bad behaviour. This is probably the time to prove it.

I guess what I'm saying is I'd like to preserve user names and posting histories, and keep a forum that's "about" City of Heroes. Sure, Unleashed exists, but that's more a community of people that City of Heroes is just one aspect of. I'd like to keep one that's primarily about the game and see if that lasts.

Why are we fixating on sales figures? Guild Wars is a game entirely funded by sales, yes, but City of Heroes is not. At one point it was entirely funded by subscription money, and was funded in large part by it right up until it shut down. Doesn't it make sense that sales numbers would be low?

Sadly, while I can appreciate the theme, mood and setting of Secret World, I HAAATE pretty much everything else about it. The graphics, the art design, character creation, the combat system and the fact that almost literally everyone I know has, at one point or another, suggested that I go play that.

Moreover, the Secret World simply lacks what I loved the most about City of Heroes, which is the ability to make a visually and practically non-human character and write my own absurd and exciting backstory. Having my origin me "swallowed magic bug" time and again is simply never going to work for me.

The funny thing is that I was working on what is probably one of my most bizarre characters when the announcement came down. Stardiver and her nemesis - Lighteater - are both ancient automatons from the beginning of time, made by one of reality's original creators as objective experiments to prove that "life" is not aberrant to reality, but is simply a very complex function of it. These two "robots" whose design more resembles animate statues, feed off the eldritch cosmic energy at the hearts of stars and black holes, respectively, and exists for reasons they can't fully comprehend. Neither of the two can talk, or has any desire to do so, and both of them are defined by their quest for purpose, Stardiver defined by becoming attached to the company of others and Lighteater defined by his disdain for the "lesser" beings of the universe.

Really, the only worthwhile substitute for City of Heroes there can be would have to be one where all of the above nonsense makes perfect sense. And the Perfect World's story is too strict, too specific and too preoccupied with wrapping "my" story into its own world.

I've been thinking of ways to show our support for the game that people might actually believe in the long run, and it occurs to me to ask - if these boards stayed behind exactly as they are, possibly community-moderated, would you stick around? Would you keep talking about the game even after it's gone? Because if enough of us might, I feel that might, at the very least, make a statement.

Yes, I realise the NCsoft decision is irreversible. That comes with the territory. And frankly, at this point I don't much care for impressing anyone out there. Personally, I just like our boards and our community and I'd really like to keep that, at least. If at all possible.

What do you say?

Thanks, Zwill. I'll miss all of you, and I'll miss City of Heroes. And yeah, I thought Freedom wasn't a failure. Glad to know you guys were successful, even if I guess that wasn't enough in a corporate culture. Just know that we appreciate it.