So... how many hours of service have your characters given to Paragon City?

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday compiling this data, among some other, about my favorite characters.

First of all it is hard to say when the npc gives the right number or not. I tried it with one character that was purely PLd via an ae exploit, then I did like 3 task forces then abandoned it. NPC "M" told me I had 3772 hours when the answer is no more than 30.

Anyway, I did spend a bunch of time yesterday surveying some of my favorite 50s (54 of them, not all) from the 2 VIP accounts I maintain. Absent the notable exception above, the results "smelled" reasonable. What I found was frankly horrifying, over 20,000 hours played. That's twenty THOUSAND hours. And I'm not one of those "been here since beta" people either; I'm working on my 7th year.

So in some odd way, I'm viewing this shutdown as a blessing. I shall not be moving on to another MMO, I'm retiring from the genre to play the types of games I played before, something like Madden where you can play for 1/2 hour and be done.

Here are the characters I've play at least 500 hours, in order. I think I have about 2-3 others with 500+ hours, on a premium account I used to maintain, but I frankly don't even want to know how much more than 20,000 hours, all told, I've put in.

Name	             AT	Pri	Sec	M (hours)	N (logins)
Hedgefund	Tank	Inv	SS	1563	2317
Kat Killah	Scrapper	Katana	DA	1486	1341
Ettu?	             Brute	Elec	Elec	1176	1183
Macallan	             Scrapper	DM	SD	1034	923
Doomba	             MM	Bots	Traps	1010	658
Gaius Julius	MM	Thugs	FF	893	913
Deelish	             Scrapper	MA	SR	760	1174
Arbiter Keshik	Crab			721	1177
Senor En Fuego	Corr	Fire	Kin	652	591
AntimatterH8r	Defender	Sonic	Sonic	585	857
Lotus Petal	Scrapper	DB	WP	572	929
Scrappers Delight	Cont	Fire	Kin	555	853
Malta Falcon	Blaster	Elec	Elec	550	926
Sir Kelvin Newton	Defender	Kin	Sonic	534	1147
Null Space	Cont	Ill	Rad	513	796

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.

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.

There is (or was?) a bug that can cause very high time-played numbers; I think it had something to do with counting time logged out if you were in task force mode. So if you see numbers are WAY too high to be accurate, they probably aren't.

Anyway, today I finally took some time away from moping and getting ALL the screenshots to gather a time-played total. I only bothered to total up the hours from my 50s (of which I have... wow, seriously? 21 of them? Didn't seem like that many...), but this should still be the majority of my total time played. That doesn't mean I spent the bulk of my time *at* 50, but rather that most of my characters tend to either stall out early or make it all the way to 50. When an NPC told me a number that was obviously way too high (6436 hours on the character I barely got to 50 and then abandoned? Hm, no, probably not...), I replaced that with 200 hours (this seems to be a roughly median value for my other 50s). Man, why did they never get rid of that 30-second logout timer...

I broke 2000 hours before I even finished counting the ones I've retired and moved off my main server. The fewest hours on one character was 34 (that one got powerleveled, from the days before I noticed that I didn't actually enjoy jumping to 50...), the most (other than the erroneous ones) was 592. Hopeling, my namesake and the closest thing I have to a main, has 923 hours if I combine the hours from his original version (BS/Inv scrapper, created in 2004) and the rerolled version (TW/WP, created last year).

My grand total is 3830 hours. Not as impressive as some here, but still over 5 solid months. It really doesn't seem like an exaggeration to say this is losing a home ;_;

Yeah, mine can't possibly be accurate. I don't actually play that many hours per week. Plus I've made more than 700 characters.

To put it in perspective, a year's worth of 40-hour work weeks equals 2,080 hours. For me to have played Tommi Gunn 4,573 hours is the equivalent of working a regular job for two years and two weeks. Other than during the game's early days when I would literally fall asleep at the keyboard, I doubt I've averaged more than 8-10 hours a week of playtime. And due to being unsubbed for long periods of time, I've actually only played for about 5 years cumulatively.

Lost count :/ I'll have to find out an exact number tomorrow. It was a lot though

3849 hours.... but I was always a casual player. >.>

See, this is how I know I have way too many alts... and that, when you get right down to it, badger, raider and iTrialer or not, I really never have been more than a "casual" player.

My five favorites... which include both Palrah and Grey Kestrel, my Hero- and Villain-side mains, as well as Shade in Shadow, The Nemissary and Ashirion...*all* clock in at less than 600 hours each.

Ash is actually (just barely-) in the lead, at 566.
Nem is still relatively new among the favorites, so he's only gotten 130.

My two-dozen or so other 50s all fall somewhere between 90 and 300.

I think anything that logs out during a TF/SF keeps the clock running (the only way I can explain some of mine)

Shock & Flaw 395 hours
Light Petting 1060 hours
Ice Blight 521 hours (damn kinetics always chosen in preference to my brutes)

Dark Petting 9830 (no chance)
CEBR Tooth 12 hours (my favourite 50, the clue's in the name)

even so, I'm guessing some 2k-3k hours total. Wow.

I some how expected more

Dam Alts

Made this up on Friday evening, I think, but just getting around to posting it here.

Code:

		 	        Hours Days
Miss Megajoule		1218	50.75
V-Max			 492	20.50
Sky Raider X		 526	21.92
Watchmaker 		 362	15.08
Taxibot Gamma		 359	14.96
VERB		         753	31.38
Spirit of the Row        	 443	18.46
Star of Justice		 611	25.46
Abomination		 553	23.04
Dr. Forsythe		 585	24.38
Max Thunder		 414	17.25
Foxtrot Maiko		 309	12.88
Star Champion		 210	 8.75
Officer Martinez	         197	 8.21
Operative Kowalski      144	 6.00
Papa Lobo	        	 144	 6.00
Shockwave Ryder	 108	 4.50
Rajaan			   25	 1.04

TOTAL			7453   310.54

... or about 10 months, almost a year of my life. -_-;

310.54 / 2920 (8 x 365) comes to roughly .106, slightly over 1 hour out of every 10.

So in a theoretical, purely average 24-hour day, I'd play for 2.5 hours. Sounds about right. Not so evenly distributed in reality, of course. Much more on weekends, etc. Not bad entertainment, for $15 a month.

($1,440 is a scarier number, but that's spread over most of a decade. And by God, it was worth it. Still over five hours of fun for every dollar, and that's not counting the forums etc.)

It looks like, at least toward the end, level 50 took somewhere between 100 and 140 hours**... depending, perhaps, on the high-XP teams available. The early ones have much more than that, between my inexperience, the early leveling curve, and just plain continuing to play them.

(** or 40-56 "average days")

Hmmmm...

I'm almost afraid to check...

I know my main has around 1700 hrs on him, and I know I have several other
toons that probably put in as much time as he has...

All totalled up it's probaby in excess of several man-years... It never felt like work


Yikes,
4

Don't forget, for some of us, time spent in game is only a loose idea of how much time we've actually invested. Folks who spent a lot of time on the forums, in Mids, etc., may have spent a lot more of their life on the game than our characters indicate. (In my case, I spent a ton of time on both the forums and Mids, but more on the forums.)

I know the OP isn't about that, but I wanted to throw that out there given the mention of how much of our lives we've spent on the game in relation to character on-line time.

My hardly ever played my alts. They probally hate me

From my main character and badger, been playing her ever since the EU release of CoH, still one of my favorite characters ever

Guess it's as good place as any to throw this in too, at least it ends on a funny number :P

As of September, 2012:

Comrade Hero spent 1741 hours on patrol and went on patrol 1935 times.

Account was created on May 11, 2004 with total paid time of 7 years, 10 months.

I'm a little slow...