Samuel_Tow

I'll take your word for it. I HAAATE the English dub actors for that show and how intentionally goofy they act. That, and I don't think an English dub exists for Dragon Ball Kai

Certainly, nothing wrong with that at all. I wouldn't even ascribe power a power-gamer or a min/maxer as somehow "dirty" or otherwise repugnant. It's a style of play, and if that's what gets someone to play his bill, then that's what that someone should get to do, by all means.

All I know is that it doesn't work for me. I tend to have the strongest emotional attachment to characters that have the most interesting, meaningful story to me. I've started a few with no story or bio, then put them on hiatus 20 levels later, then forgotten all about them. And when I get the crunch for slots and don't want to spend more cash, those are the characters that are the first to go.

I have and I haven't. Let me explain

I've made a lot of friends in-game at one time or another, but I've almost always had more patience than they did for City of Heroes, so my friends list these days is almost always dark. Most everyone simply left. I do have a few friends still with the game even now, and occasionally they'll run events that I try to join when I can, but this sort of need for organisation is a bit off-putting. Once upon a time, I was teaming with a friend of mine when I got a random idea. "Hey, you wanna do Mender Lazarus' TF?" "Sure." he said. And so we did. No preparation, no coordination, not setting up schedules with exact times days in advance and so on.

For most of the game, that's fine. Even when I don't feel like playing by myself, one or two other people are enough, and I do have one or two other friends often online But when you start doing something like Manticore's TF that takes seven people... Well, I don't have THAT many friends readily available. If we'll be doing that, it needs to be scheduled for a time and day when everyone can be available, it has to be organised and, by that point, I don't want to do it any more. It's not that good of a TF anyway. When you go into something like an iTrial that takes, what? 12-24 people? Yeah, I don't think I have this many friends PERIOD.

Large team events I either have to run with strangers and chance it, or I have to schedule long ahead of time, and neither option appeals to me. Solo and small-team content, on the other hand, is always available for no cost or effort. That's where the friends I have really help.

It's interesting how you give two almost opposite descriptions within the same post I don't mean to nit-pick, though, I just wanted to have the "old man" and the "snob" argument in the same post so I can address them at the same time.

I'm currently 26 years old, but I've been described as a "grumpy old man" pretty much since I was 19 when I first started posting here on the CoH forums (and holy crap has this game been around long). I really don't take offence at that prospect and I don't think I ever have. See, the "grumpy old men" you run across in your life, they aren't grumpy because they're old, they've been grumpy their entire lives, they're just more likely to tell you about it in their old age when they start caring about putting up with "the youngins" any more than when they're youngins themselves.

If I'm grumpy, it's because that's just how I am. It doesn't mean I'm unhappy, angry or evil. It just means I have a lot to say about the things I hate and relatively little about the things I like. You know what they say: Those who can do. Those who can't criticise. If I can play how I want, I play how I want and see little reason to come to the forums and state that I'm having fun and playing like I want to be playing. Honestly, my dubious reputation aside, who really cares? How many threads have you seen that state, essentially "I'm having fun with the game!" then get a couple of "So am I!" responses before the whole thread drops off the first page with seven replies total? But when I CAN'T play the game how I want to, I come here and talk about it, both in the hopes of at least getting my point across to the people in charge (whether they heed or ignore it is largely irrelevant), and so I can talk about it so it can stop pissing me off. Check out how many threads that start with "I hate <this> part of the game!" go on to stretch for five to fifteen pages and linger on the first page for weeks?

I hate things. It's what defines me as a person. For me, "not bad" is often the height of compliment, because it means I don't hate the thing in question, and that's quite an accomplishment. If that makes me a snob, then all I can really do is shrug my shoulders and accept it. The Cinema Snob does, so why can't I? I try not to ruin other people's fun when I can help it, of course. It seems obvious, but it's a hard lesson to learn that trying to "fix" how other people play and enjoy themselves is not a good plan, even if you feel they're doing it wrong.

You are incorrect on one particular point, however - I've never, ever, EVER complained about being alone in-game. I have, on occasion, complained about finding teams for tasks that explicitly require teams to complete, like the various simu-click missions or non-Ouro TFs, but NEEDING a team and WANTING a team are not the same thing. If given the choice, I'd sooner simply not do the tasks that require a team, or otherwise do them very rarely. As a rough example, ever since the ITF came out, I've run it no more than about 15-20 times. And it's been how long since then? I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that if you asked around, you'd be find a fair few people who've run the ITF more than that in a single week.

But that's kind of the point, though, and it's a point you seem to either deny or honestly just not understand (no harm, no foul, by the way) - I don't mind this. Don't like doing TFs? OK, so I won't. Don't like running Trials? Well... I don't, but I kind of don't really have an option if I want Incarnate progress. So I'm put in a situation where either I do something I honestly don't like and I quite honestly never will, or I DON'T and miss out. So far I've been missing out, and I haven't been all THAT heartbroken over it. I didn't play my 50s before and I'm not playing them now. Nothing lost, nothing gained. But in almost everything in the game, I always have the option to not team with other people if I don't feel like it right now, today, this week, etc.

And that's a good thing. Options are a good thing. To try and get people to understand that some of us simply like to be left alone for a certain portion of the day in the same way that people need to sleep during a certain portion of the day isn't necessary. So long as I have the option to keep to myself AND STILL PLAY THE GAME, then I don't really need anyone's permission or approval to do so. Some people don't like it, questioning my intelligence for playing an MMO and not wanting to team while others just don't get it, and that's OK. To each their own. So long as the game has a niche for me where I can hide away when the team game pisses me off or tires me out, that's more than enough for me.

Interestingly, learning to admit one's shortcomings and find ways to adapt to them is something I've found leads to a very stable psyche in the long run. Far more so, in my experience, than constantly trying to challenge yourself and change your preferences and stress yourself out. In fact, I've been close to quitting City of Heroes on a few occasions for the simple fact that I was playing the game "wrong," or at least in a way that's inappropriate to my personality. At one point I believed that this is an MMO and I havsta team! Only when that stressed me out, I started thinking the game was just bad, and it wasn't. I just needed to be by myself. At another point, I found myself swapping characters every day and never really developing any attachment to them. I though my characters just sucked or that the game was just boring, but the truth is I need a few days to "settle" into a character before I can truly start having fun.

I have a whole laundry list of such examples, but the moral of the story is always the same - figure out what the root of the problem is, figure out what you can change about your own approach, what you can add or subtract, and then just do it. The key here is accepting that we all have our faults, we all have our likes and all have our dislikes and, rather than constantly fighting them to no avail, simply learn to deal with them. So I don't like teaming with other people for long times. OK, then I won't team with people for long times. "Exposing" myself to what I don't like doesn't make me like it more, it just makes me hate it more, and that's no fun and not very healthy, either.

I'm not unhappy. Knowing what pisses me off is a good thing. That way I can avoid and anticipate it much better. As Maros would say, we learn nothing, but through revelation.

Eh... Not exactly. I mean, I've gone through the "Mom! Look! Look! You're not looking! Come on, look!" stage in my life. Who hasn't? But that's really not the point these days. Anyone who enjoys creating sooner or later develops the expectation that most people won't care. Well, you do if you're not very famous, anyway. In my spare time, I write stories, rather long ones, in fact. Some I post here, some for my friends, some I don't post at all, and being that they're tl;dr, I don't really expect much of any response or feedback. I mean, most of the posts in the thread for my Tale of Two Hearts are still mine And, to be fair, would YOU have the patience to go through what ended up 84 Word pages long spread something like I think 20 chapters? I would, but I made it, so that's a given.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't really ask for people's approval, praise or attention. I enjoy that when it's given, obviously, but I don't demand or expect it. We each care about different things, and it just so happens my tastes are weird, confusing and unpopular. It is what it is I don't even make it a point to ask that the game acknowledge my work, like I don't expect Xanta to face prejudice because she's a woman who's taller and more ripped than most men, with hands big enough to fit your entire head in a single fist. The story is made for a generic "hero" or "villain" or "grey" build, plot depending. The story can't explicitly include every possible bit of nonsense we can come up with, but I just want it to not be so specific that it EXCLUDES a large chunk of fairly obvious character concepts.

When it comes to other people, I can't expect them to care. Not only do we all like different things, but we can't honestly team with ten thousand other heroes over the span of a few years and approach them all with verve and enthusiasm, of course not. To expect otherwise would be unrealistic. But as before, I kind of wish the team game wasn't such a clusterhug a lot of the time, where just tossing more bodies on the fire is more important than what these characters are called, what their powers are and what they wanted to be when they grew up. Gameplay which reduces my unique snowflakes into a mere AT and powerset combo just irks me. I can do it for a while - every character has been in a giant monolithic melee at one point or another. I don't "hate" people for it. I just need my time off when it's done, and I kind of want to be able to actually DO something in that time off. Relaxing and playing the game are not mutually exclusive.

I'm not sure if anyone is still around from back when I first said it, but "All I want out of this game is more 5th Column to fight." I stand by this statement even to this day. I got into City of Heroes for the game it was back in 2004. I never asked for it to be more complicated, I never asked for it to be "wider" and even now I'm perfectly happy with arcs like Crimson's World Wide Red, Angus McQueen's Division: Line, the "Corporate Culture" arc that's given by about three different contacts, the "Path of the Dark" arc. I really don't need complex mechanics, I don't need achievements or badges or loot or collectables or anything of the sort. I'm perfectly fine to be sent into a mission, told to look for one specific person to defeat and given free reign to stomp the teeth out of the mouth of anything I come across along the way that I can target.

Yes, this makes me the odd man out - big surprise there - in that in all of this diatribe I laid out just now, I never mentioned "efficiency," "power" or "rewards." What people want to do these days, if we discount farming the Architect, seems to be to grind Alignment Merits. And, to be honest... These aren't grindable missions. They have story, they have complex mechanics, they take a certain amount of attention and they're time-gated to five per day. And there are a grand total of, like, 10 of them per level range per side. Hardly something I want to run through 50 times for all of four Merits. Before that it was endless paper missions, and before that it was Barakuda farms or egg farms, and before that it was Dreck and Wolf farms, and before that it was endless street sweeping for Hydra in Perez Park, and before that was CoH Beta which I wasn't in.

My point is that I just want to play the game, not necessarily earn the rewards it offers. I see rewards as just a natural step of the process, exactly as important as the gameplay leading up to them. To me, trying to shorten gameplay so you can get rewards just makes me feel like I'm cheating myself out of a game. Not many see it that way, so whenever we team, I always feel like I'm being rushed while simultaneously not at all engaged in the game while other people feel like I'm slowing them down and making them bored. It kind of works, but only for a while, before I simply have to unleash the hounds to charge off in pursuit of prizes while I sit down on a park bench and contemplate my navel.

For starters, I like doing this. This right here - composing these tl;dr posts and discussing interesting topics with people who actually care to construct a meaningful, substantial argument. These are what I come to the forums for, believe it or not. And even if it seems I'm snarking at you, or if you feel you're offending me, I still enjoy this. Gaming aside, there are few things I enjoy more than those which make me think, and think hard. Even if they make me think about stupid things, such as what texture would best represent the slime on a girl made out of slime or what I will miss from a zone that's being taken away. It's just simply interesting stuff.

What else do I enjoy? How about this? I enjoy the artistic side of the game, I enjoy the freedom it gives us to create any weird esoteric character and still have that make sense and I enjoy just creating things then getting to watch them come to life on the screen in front of me, evolving organically and taking on an identity of their own. It's not just the act of MAKING these characters that's fun, actually playing them is, as well. The game - to me - is the most fun when there's nothing standing between me and seeing my action figure in action, kicking *** and taking names. If that's wrapped up in a cool, moving story that manages to balance delivering its narrative with letting me flip out and kill stuff, then all the better, but story-writers of recent times seem to have made it a point to hard-pause the action with too much scripted stuff. That's not important now, though.

What else do I enjoy? Interacting with friends, even if that's just over Global chat across servers. I've discussed topics as esoteric as Middle-Eastern politics, the appeal of "furry" artwork, the border between machine intelligence and sentient life, the recension I was asked to write for a student preparing a diploma graduation and the quality of her workmanship, that local Soviet monument in our capital where the Russian soldiers were painted like DC heroes and all manner of things like this. I don't have to team with people in order to interact with people. Even if we're not joined by gameplay right now in this very instance, my friends and I are joined by shared interests and a share fondness for just discussing things of all natures.

And, occasionally, I like to go out and run TFs and team with large groups of people. Just as a change of pace. A collection of global channels means I can usually just pick up whatever is being advertised and join that, and my experiences of the last couple of months have been overwhelmingly positive. when I don't feel like I HAVE to run TFs, but instead opt to run them by choice, the experience is much more pleasant, and they're rare enough to where I forget anything that ticked me off and just remember the fun parts. That, in my eyes, is how it should be.

You're not crazy, just... A bit presumptuous. This is a question you can ask me, since I started the thread with no real reason to do so. Other people who respond, however, do so because I both posed some implied questions and because a discussion is already going, so everyone is naturally more inclined to pitch in than to start it.

On the other side of the question, I don't think anyone is asking for the post to be left alone. It's merely a statement of fact and preference. I think it was the Vulpish One who said that extroverts are see introverts as simply extroverts that need to be brought out of their shells. In addition to being one of my favourite quotes in general, it also highlights a profound misunderstanding between people who LOOOVE to team and those who don't really like to - the belief that if you don't team, you don't like other people, you don't actively look to make friends with everyone you meet, then there's something wrong with you and you need help. Not only is this untrue, it's actually very damaging, to say nothing of unpleasant for the person in question.

I don't think the idea is for the post to be left alone, so much as for the post to be taken at face value as an honest admission and gesture of mutual understanding. Some people need their alone time. This is not a challenge for those who don't, it is not a criticism of them, it is not some kind of statement of superiority. It is merely an admission of personal position, specifically intended to inform. I see nothing more in the post you quoted.

Nope. I thought it was, but it wasn't. In fact, Steam recently informed me of this in plain text. If your Steam account does not have any PAID titles attached to it, you are not allowed to send friend invitations and you cannot accept friend invitations sent to you. A have a friend of mine whom I recruited to play a free game, and he literally had that alone on his account. He was never able to add me as a friend because Steam kept insisting that "certain features" are disabled on accounts until they make their first purchase. He recently asked me to buy a game and gift it to him, and I had a couple of extra copies of other games I'd gotten out of bundles, so his account is "paid" now, and he can have friends. He couldn't before, and as a result he never used his Steam account.

Venture raises a good point. When game storytelling makes you ask for a third option or a way out, there's something wrong with the storytelling at its core. Putting players in a situation where it feels they should have a choice and where they really want to have a choice but the game doesn't give one is rarely a good situation, and even more rarely something you want to write intentionally without VERY good reason.

Personally, I've stopped trying to care for the Well of the Furies story arc by now. I stopped trying to care when I realised it ties into the Origin of Powers arc. That's like reading a mediocre comic book, only to realise at some point it's a tie-in book to Countodwn. Ugh! That's the kind of GM god-modding storytelling that really shouldn't happen in a game that's otherwise so very open to interpretation.

I'm not sure how useful my input will be to you, but to start off with: I don't. I've never been in a position when I wanted to make "a character" with no concept or idea in mind, just for the sake of making a character. That's not to say I don't make lots of alts, of course. Even if I may not have as many as some, I still have far more than I can play. Furthermore, I've tried making a character first - costume, powersets, name, etc. - and adding a concept to said character later, and that never works. Either I end up deleting said character to make room (like I did with my caped werewolf), or otherwise "restart" him once I find a concept that fits the shell.

But suppose all the conditions are there to make me want a new character. How does that go? Well, I have two sets of ideas - concepts and builds that have to exist at the same time for a character to happen. A concept is a loose character story, like "female, really tall and strong, has large weapon, is grumpy and tough, power fighter, hard to kill, jerk with a heart of gold." A build is a very basic character design, such as "Sword/Inv Scrapper, probably with Super Jump." I have many, many of these floating around in my head like snooker balls bouncing around a table. When they collide with each other, I end up with a very basic character. So, for instance, when the above concept collided with the above build, my head went "Yeah... Yeah, this is good. I can make something with this. Quick! Start thinking!"

The name usually comes next. If my concept is developed into a story of its own, the name will already have been decided, so all that's left is finding a variant of it that's not taken. Rarely difficult. If it's just a loose concept, then I start trying to think of one. I rarely go for names with obvious meanings or descriptive ones since I find them to be corny. Instead, I'll look for one that has the right sound and possible a hidden meaning. I tend to go for personal names most often, so I'm usually looking for a personal name that evokes the right emotion. A female name ending on a consonant, for instance, sounds odd and out of place, which fits odd and out of place characters. The one in my example, however, is more of a transposed Fantasy concept adapted to a modern setting, so she gets only a single name with rarer spelling - "Xanta."

Then comes the costume. The concept and powers sometimes give me a rough idea, but I'm not a visual person. I don't imagine in colour. So when it gets to the costume, I have a guideline for what kind of theme it should fit and what emotion I want it to evoke, but never a strong idea for what the actual costume should be. Having an cyclopaedic knowledge of the editor helps here, since I know all the items and can anticipate which might work best. It also hurts, however, since I never even try a lot of pieces because I don't think they would work, never realising that they may actually be PERFECT. This is where the Costume (Re)Design thread really shines, since you can drop a basic idea and see five different interpretations of it that you would never have dreamed of if you ate ten cheese pizzas before bed.

Costume design usually takes me the longest. Finding the right colours is important, for instance. For Xanta, I decided to go with the orc/troll shade of green skin and "painted-on" Tights With Skin, but tights of what colour? Green ones obviously don't work, yellow and cyan ones are too close to green and so meld in a really unpleasant way, reds and magenta would clash with her violent orange hair, which really left blue or shades of it. The most vibrant blue made her look like a cartoon character, so a darker, more subdued blue gave her a solid contrast.

As well as colour, what really counts is "shape." This is harder to describe, but a lot of the time I pick items based on what they do to the character's silhouette, rather than what they really look like. A big, strong, heavy character usually benefits from large feet, manhands and heavy shoulders. It's important to remember that characters with large chests and shoulders but tiny little arms and legs look fat, whereas characters with larger hands and feet but average-sized torsos tend to look stronger and tougher without looking like Secret Defenders Issue 9.

Then, finally, I clean up all the little niggling bugs and problems inherent in the costume editor. Say female breasts clip through the Clockwork piece, and I need to rescale them to fit, or those particular shoulders clip badly with that particular cape collar, or the colour on your shiny gloves differs from the colour on your matte chest. These I can usually fix and account for with little change to the overall design. Swap items, tweak scales, adjust colours until everything is perfect. Then finalise the face once you have the whole look complete and the costume is ready.

So, for Xanta, what we have is green skin with blue Tights with Skin for the chest and legs, Large Medieval boots, gloves and shoulders, a beefy belt, very long, very vibrant hair (to differentiate her from the She-Hulk) and the biggest, simplest sword I could find. And a headband, just because. Also, max height and most sliders at maximum to give her a sturdier frame, but with hips slider towards minimum because the female "muscle" slider tends to give the characters big butts and I cannot lie.

After this, we customize powers. That's important. If your character is a Weapon/Weapon combo, you won't get much use out of this, but other than Weapon/Shield ones, that's rarely the case. This is rarely very difficult, since powers are usually matched to the costume in terms of colour and defined by the concept in terms of nature. An Energy/Will character may have been written as Willpower being just energy offering protection, so the Willpower powers will have bright auras colour-matched to the Energy Melee powers. In the case of Xanta, her sword has no custom power options, but her Invulnerability does. Since her concept describes it as her just being naturally physically strong and tough, as opposed to the visual manifestation of metaphysical energy, she gets the "FX in PVP Only" option for everything.

With that done, the rest is a formality. The name has already been decided, so that's filled in. The Battlecry field is useless, has always been useless and will always be useless until they remove the damn thing from the UI, so that I simply skip. If I want a battlecry, I can bind one by myself and it won't be limited to, like, 10 symbols. Bio filed is intentionally left empty at creation. This is filled in once I get a feel for how the character "wants to be played," as this may impact on how I view the character's concept and may inspire a re-write. By about level 20, I should have a decent idea of who and what the character in-game actually is, at which point the bio gets written all at once. I usually know what I'm going to put in there since before creation, but it takes time for me to figure out how to phrase it, as well as to be arsed to actually put in the work of writing it down.

And with this, a single character is pretty much done. Xanta is done. Or was, until they announced Titanic Weapons. Now I have to delete her - and she's level 50 - and reroll her as a Titanic/Inv Brute back down to level one. Curse my love for my characters!

I'm really bad at managing and keeping track of my time, speaking completely seriously. I'm almost always aware of what time it is right now, I remember what time it was when I started (sometimes), but unless I sit and calculate, I never actually "know" how long I spent doing something. Even when I quote that a mission took me "an hour and a half," that mission could have taken anywhere from 45 minutes to three hours, depending on how many times I got up to eat, walk around, watch TV or succumb to any other distraction. It's physically hard for me to know how long I play.

I should probably track that, now that you mention it.

Have it your way. I do actually enjoy discussions like this when we're not trying to change each other, but if you don't feel like it then I can respect that. No harm, no foul

I've suggested this many times and I continue to agree. We don't really need to invent new props. Just picking from the larger and less weird Propel items would be fine. I dare say such a thing would look much better than the little dinky slab of pavement and would look no weirder. How can it not look weirder when you're pulling junk cars and forklifts out of your pocket? Well, consider what we have now. When using Hurl, you can pull a slab of concrete out of any surface, including catwalks, the top of a steel shipping container, the deck of a ship, the hood of a car, out of a wooden bridge... Hell, you can pull a slab of concrete while standing on above-ground power lines, and I'm pretty sure power cables aren't made of slab concrete.

Super Strength is cool, but Hurl just sinks the thing. Even Hurl Boulder isn't this bad, since the boulder is much, much bigger.

Considering Son Goku's Genki Dama (no idea what it's called in the dub) manifests as a ball of blue energy in the sky that he tends to just pull down like a colony drop, I'd say such a thing would work for him... Kind of. It might work for a more abstract energy user, specifically one defined by controlling some kind of energy inherent in everything, as opposed to generating said energy.

That's not to say this should be appropriate for everyone, of course, and I definitely see what you mean. Something more like a Mega Optic Blast, a larger-scale nova or the Egg Beam Cannonball from SonicX would be very much appreciated, as well. The thing, though, is that right now, a pure energy user doesn't really have an exactly applicable option. Ionic Judgement deals energy damage, but it's electricity, whereas generic energy in City of Heroes is more like... Light without much of a form.

Doh! B before C, so Bastion was before Citadel. I remember, honest.

You keep track?

Sorry to threadjack, but after poopooing the fish lips Sister Psyche and double jaw BABs pic, I feel there's some Karma I need to make up.

I LOVE this pic purely on its artwork. I'd like to see a higher-resolution version of it, but even from what I can see here, everyone looks like a human being, no-one is exceptionally goofy and I admire expert hand that made this a reality. The Freedom Phalanx - let's face it - all have pretty goofy costumes, but this artwork makes them all look badass and cool. Even the Statesman, and that's saying something for THAT costume. Job well done!

"Confrontational" is probably not the right word. However, you seem to come off from the position that I don't know what I'm talking about and if I have any problems - even if you can't quite grasp what they are - these are surely my fault and no-one else's. I may be jaded because, at least for a while, I had sort of a fan club of people who would follow me around the forums to tell me I was anti-social, in case I forgot, but believe me when I say this - I've given the subject more thought than you know.

And in so doing, you've discovered why I solo. I prefer to do my things, my way, at my pace and at my convenience. Being alone gives me the complete freedom to do so. When I team with others, I do this with the full understanding that this is where my "free reign" ends and "social adjustment" begins. I've lived life as the odd man out pretty much entirely, so I'm well aware that you can't just stand before ten people all wanting to do one thing and request they all do another with you. It doesn't work. My options, at that point, are to either do something I may not feel like doing right now but stick with other people, or otherwise go away and do something on my own. I don't care if I'm the "leader" of the team or just a member, people will do what people want to do and there's nothing I can do to twist their arms. Nor would I, if there were.

I play on teams when I feel I've done enough of "my stuff" to last me for a good, long while, so I can stand things not going my way for the duration of a long team task. I've done Shard TFs, and quite few times. I don't regret doing any of them, and I recall most of those taking upwards of four hours. However, every time I have to deal with people, I'm running on batteries. I can't just go AFK for half an hour to watch Ice Road Truckers: Alaska, I can't decide I want to swap my level 35 SOs with level 40 Commons all at once RIGHT NOW, I can't stop and chat with Nuclear Toast or the Vulpish One because they just came online... I've never complained about these things to my teams, I simply don't do that. But whenever I'm done with a team, I usually log out of the game and go do something else to recharge.

I don't expect people to magically know what I want to do, obviously. I rarely even ask people to just drop what they're doing and come join me on MY team running MY missions to MY timetable. I do have a friend or two who are willing to do this, for which I am eternally grateful, but friends aren't strangers. And my entire point was just this - when my gameplay depends on other people, I can't stick with this gameplay indefinitely, or indeed very long at all. Games which offer me no alternative are games I don't stick with for very long. All it takes is other people pissing me off a few times and I'm gone, and once I'm gone in anger, I usually don't come back.

In City of Heroes, by contrast, none of that matters. Doesn't matter how much someone else pisses me off. I can always duck into an instance and beat the everloving snot out a bunch of NPCs, and by the end of that, everything is once more right with the world. I've listed many reasons why I'm still here, but I have to be honest here - if City of Heroes did not offer me to option to keep to myself whenever I chose, I would not be here talking about this. There are a great many things that tick me off in this game, both from other people and from the game itself, and even sometimes from the developers. But there ain't no problem in this game that curb-stomping an instance full of faceless thugs with no rights won't solve.

And that's the bottom line - I'm not interested in bending. At all. That's not why I pay a subscription. I'm not looking for my game to make me get out more, I'm not interested in my game making me a different person, I'm not interested in shaping myself to fit the game. I pay for a service, therefore the service fits me. Where the service doesn't fit me, I don't use it and stick to the points where it does. I don't pay for cable TV to watch about how aliens killed JFK on behalf of a Templar conspiracy, but just because the History channel likes to air crackpot nonsense like that doesn't mean I won't watch Ice Road Truckers or How the Earth Was Made on the same channel, nor does it mean that I get to pay less because I hate about half the shows.

I have no interest in my games pushing me out of my comfort zone. My real life does that enough as it is. I play games because in games, everything always goes my way. That's why they exist.

I have considered it, but I have some concerns regarding ping and packet loss. I hear all the servers are in the same place now so there are no more EU servers, no more East coast servers and no more West Coast servers. However, some servers still lag more for me than others. Virtue, for instance, is horrible, giving me 350+ ping at least, often much more. Victory, by comparison, gives me around 250 most of the time, which is what I'm used to. I'm close to running out of server slots on Victory and Pinnacle, and when I expand, that may well be on Union or the other English-speaking EU server.

I don't really mind small populations. I've never felt the need to be tripping over real people in an MMO.

See, this is where I think I don't see eye to eye with a lot of people. New content is great, I admit, but what gives me, personally, the most quote-unquote "content" is actually new characters to make. Sure, a lot of the time I end up running them through the same old missions I've done enough times to remember their briefing texts word for word, but I play the game primarily for the characters I create. I like to see them in action, I like to develop their stories, I like to make new costumes for them... These are my action figures, the kind of impossibly awesome toys I always wanted to have as a kid but never did.

Have you ever imagined a character or written a story and then though to yourself "Self, wouldn't it be great if a big-shot Hollywood producer asked to make a movie out of my work?" City of Heroes is - and I say this in all seriousness - the next best thing to that. Even before I got into this game, I'd spent years and years imagining characters and putting stories together in my head, but they never had a concrete, visual form. And now they do. The content may be old, repetitive and somewhat boring. What I care about is what I make. A new character in itself is enough content to get me from 1 to 50 one more time.