UberGuy

I'm still pondering. I never hung out in Atlas much. Every one of my characters was started in Galaxy, but logging them out for the last time in the Echo seems... too abstract somehow.

None of them have a home zone, per se - I didn't tie any of them to city locations like that.

For the 50s, I would like it to be somewhere relevant to their level of power, but DA is not right for them, and neither is the shard. I am thinking maybe the courtyard of Portal Corp for a lot of them. But that also might be kind of lonely. Atlas will be well-populated at the end, I think.

But I never hung out in Atlas much...

I don't know yet. I have to ponder some more.

Very, very well-said.

I am duly impressed with the folks who have 3,000 and 4,000+ hours on their characters. That's devotion.

I'm glad I split my attention. There's something I love in each if my characters, but I can see people pouring lots into single ones.

This is not an exhaustive list of my characters, but it covers the ones I have played the most and cared the most about.

Nightfall (Dark/Dark/Power Defender) 2699
Fortune's Shadow (Dark/Psi/Psy Defender, 2nd account, badger) 2526
Sable Slayer (Dark/Regen/Soul Scrapper, badger) 2182
Golden Ember (Stone/Fire/Soul Brute, 2nd account, badger) 2003
Abyssal Frost (Ice/Dark/Psy Corruptor, badger) 1993
American Steele (Broadsword/Inv Scrapper, 2nd character ever, favorite backstory) 1757
Shadowslip (Dark/Dark/Power Corruptor) 1508
Final Rest (Martial Arts/Regen/Soul Stalker, 2nd villain ever) 1273
Sanguine Strike (Dual Blades/Regen Scrapper, 2nd account) 1179
Archaeidae Noir (Night Widow - melee spec) 1059
Tachyonic Daze (Mind/Rad/Fire Controller, 2nd account, most recent 50) 570

These 11 characters are all my 50s. My next closest characters have play time in the sub-500 hour range. So that's 19,468 hours on my existing 50s. I top 20,000 as soon as you add my next-longest-played, a L43 Tanker with 460 hours.

That's around 2.3 years of my life spent with characters logged in to this game.

And I really don't regret it.

All the 50s have Tier 4 of something in every incarnate slot, with at least 2 Tier 4 Destiny and Hybrid powers built, though some have more. All are richly IO'd and lovingly tuned. They all have literally thousands of Reward Merits (each), hundreds of Astral Merits dozens of Emyprean Merits, and billions of inf. (Each has no less than 2B on hand and/or stored on the market.)

CoH is my hobby, and these characters are the "personification" of that hobby. Nothing was too good for them. Going to miss them a lot.

Thank you. For all the work on the stories, for putting up with our kvetching, for communicating with us on the forums.

I'm glad you had this opportunity, sad it's ending, and hopeful for your future. Godspeed.

Wow. Damn.

Thank you.

For everything you helped make come true for us. If we complained about it, it truly was because we have loved this game.

I think where you guys were going, what I know of it, was awesome. Losing CoH was always going to be painful, but losing it on its current high made it worse.

Best of luck. Please take what you did with this game wherever you go, even if it's not as a game designer.

I'm late to the party, somehow I missed all these parting dev posts in this section.

Zwillinger, I have never had the opportunity to meet you or any other Paragon Studio folks. But I have been here, in this game, since the very day it went live, and I was present on the forums not long after.

There have been many talented and fun people working on and facilitating CoH since those days, and I am grateful to all of them. But well before this sad news hit us, I had been thinking you were our best Community Manager yet.

I liked our past community folks. I really did, and I think all of them did good things for us. But you've just gone further than they did. You've really managed to straddle a line between being our buddy and being a sensible employee of a game company. You've explained things to us just a bit more often, in just a bit more down to earth way. You've engaged with us in more ways, what with the video streams and the coffee talks and so on. I don't know if your example helped lead Paragon Studios into greater openness overall, or if you were just one of many new faces who collectively were more communicative and interactive with our players. In the end, you were all awesome.

I thought some of the past community folks left some big shoes to fill, at least in some ways. None of those shoes are big enough for you. Not one.

If you go on to community management elsewhere, I have no doubt you will help bring fantastic energy to the community. They would be lucky to have you.

Thank you, and godspeed.

With several of my friends in this game, I am planning to be here when the lights go out, if we can indeed know when that's about to happen.

I don't have a "main". There's no UberGuy character. There are just a dozen or so level 50s who get most of my playtime attention. But we can't log in more than one character per account, so I had to decide which one I would be logged in on. My badger? My favorite concept?

Ultimately, I decided it must be the one with the most play time. The one with whom I did the most things. My Issue zero Dark/Dark Defender, who has 2699 hours on patrol, who I still played very actively.

Damn, am I going to miss playing her.

It seems I sold these just in time. Otherwise, the game may well have ended with them in my inventory.

This makes me pleased and sad all at the same time.

I have been planning to inventory a parting tally anyway, but I'm not done yet. Hopefully I'll post that in the next day or two.

For me, I've treated wealth on-hand as a bit of a proxy for XP on level-capped characters, so I hoard stuff some. But for all that I watched and used the market, I really never qualified as what I think most people mean when they say "marketer". I played the game a ton, produced stuff, sold it for profit, and bought back what I needed/wanted.

I just did that more than I think was typical, outside of professional farmers. So my wealth "score" was, to me, a bit more meaningful than if I had pumped it purely through heavy market use. I'm not one of those folks who feels that money earned on the market isn't "right" - it just wouldn't be representative of the way I was using it as a "score" for how much I was playing.

As a touch of goodby post, even though I mean to post again...

I will miss the market mini-game. For me, it was always a means to an end, but it was one which I enjoyed. This forum was one of two that challenged and stimulated me intellectually, the other being the Scrapper forum. I already missed the old discussions - it's been quiet in here. But I will miss that there won't even be the chance of future ones.

Most of you would probably be staggered at the sheer volume of screenshots I have. I snap them the way someone with a pro camera would an action scene. I literally have 10s of thousands of them.

On the one hand, it means I will almost certainly never fully organize them. Some memories will be buried in the mass of data. But I plan to go through them as best I can anyway, probably after things shut down. And I've saved special memory ones along the way - I don't just leave all of them in the big piles of files I have socked away on redundant drives. (I lost a lot of screenshots from my first couple of years of play, and I learned my lesson.)

I don't really have a formal main - there is no "UberGuy" character. Still, I have long focused on a handful of characters, only getting my 12th 50 this year. All of these characters are tweaked and outfitted to the gills - nothing was too good for them. I will spend a good chunk of time getting FRAPS recordings, in-game demorecordings, and some less visual records (such as badges, hoarded loot counts, etc.)

I will miss playing them. A lot. Some that I still play are from the first few weeks after release.

I'm sad to say my very first character never made it to 50. But I still have him. I think I'll finally get him a new costume as a send-off.

I have been here since day -3, aka the 1st day of the head start. I had a whole bunch of friends in beta, but I did not join until pre-release.

I have never unsubscribed. My subscription has never lapsed as much as 24 hours that I know of. I have two accounts, once created after CoV, so I could have more characters on my home server.

Before I came here, I was an on-line FPS player. This is the first MMO I ever played, despite having numerous friends who played, well, all of them. Before CoH, no MMO even remotely interested me, and some actively repulsed me. After CoH, I tried a couple of others, and never made it past a couple of months of play.

I literally cannot think of all the things I will miss. The next few days will be spent making sure I have all the memories, recordings, screenshots and logs I can manage to gather. (I have a very large chat log history saved .)

I am sad all our time here is ending, but regret my own time here not one little bit. It has been a truly amazing ride. I truly thing that those who worked on this game, past and present (until today, I suppose) to have made something that was such a big part of the lives of so many people for such a long time.

Holy crap, I didn't know. (Duh, right?) Congrats and condolences all rolled into one. Here's hoping you have no regrets, and best wishes for the future.

I would contribute to this.

Thank you for posting this thread. I was coming here to post it.

I haven't spent a lot of time here lately, for a variety of reasons, but if there was anywhere on the CoH forums that was my "home", it was this AT forum. The Scrapper AT has always been my favorite, the shenanigans that Scrapper players seemed to be particularly prone to resonate with my personality, and I am sure I learned more about this game from the regulars who post here than from any other identifiable sub-section of the game's forums.

Thank you all for being awesome.