Until we meet again!

I don't play GW2 (as I have too many other current games atm) but anything they do *should* be much much better than CoH. Do we realize COH is almost 10 years old? For a time line perspective that is kind of like saying "Super Mario Brothers for the NES did world exploration much better than pong, which was released 10 years earlier."

The fact that a dated game with a dated engine (which was awesome) is being compared to newly released titles is pretty silly.

Just as an FYI, amazon has it on sale for $38, you could stick it to ncsoft and get it significantly below msrp!

(last bump I promise)

Good luck Posi. You and the City will be missed by thousands.

Damn the corporate overlords. Damn them to hell.

I posted this message elsewhere last night, but putting it up here seemed appropirate as well. This is a message I wanted to put together back in early September when I first read the message that City of Heroes was to be shutdown, but for a variety of reasons I was never quite able to get together. But I did not want to miss the chance to say farewell.

In many ways, the news of the impending shutdown of City of Heroes is the latest “ending” I have had to face with this game.

COH was not my first MMORPG, my first foray into the online gaming world being Ultima Online. For a number of reasons, I did not play too much UO, though the second time I gave it a go, I did play a bit more, and had a bit more fun.

Eventually, I found my way to Everquest, and was quickly hooked. I believe in the first year of playing, I logged 1 month of time online with my main character (representing a LOT of lost sleep). I had a tremendous amount of fun playing EQ (I joined a little before the Scars of Velious launch) and made a number of very good friends (some of who would eventually migrate over to COH on the Justice server). I have very fond memories of various adventures with my guild members, exploring the vast world of EQ, and slowly leveling my wood elf ranger. While I would not trade the time I played EQ, EQ also had its failings. For one, it often took a lot of time to get anything really going as far as grinding or raiding for that special drop (particularly at the higher levels). Another major drawback, was that there was a considerable amount of game content that was simply inaccessible unless you were part of one of the uber-raiding guilds, which I was not. When COH came out, I cancelled my EQ account, and have never looked back, though I cherish the memories of my time playing the game.

I also played Star Wars Galaxies for a short while, starting the day it launched. I managed to advance one character to being a bounty hunter (back when it required training two complete professions, marksman and scout to do so), but eventually got bored with the game, plus, COH was set to come out.

So that brings me to COH, a game I have had a connection with for just over eleven years. Yes, I know, the game has only been out a little over eight, but I first read a small, half page article in PC Gamer (or some other game magazine) that talked about this new MMORPG superhero game that was under development back in October, 2011. As many I am sure recall, the events of 9/11 were still very fresh in the psyche of the American public, and the idea of a superhero online game easily caught my attention (I have also long been a comic book/superhero fan as well). So, I went to check out the website the article mentioned that was associated with the development of the game (you can see what that old website looked like on the wayback machine (http://web.archive.org/web/200112022...yofheroes.com/))

Looking around the website only heightened my interest in the game, and eventually I stumbled across the forums, where I created an account under the name Thevshi. It was not long before I came across the roleplaying section of those forums, which had been set up for those interested in the game to tell stories about their characters. In addition to people already starting to write about their characters, there were already supergroups forming, the premiere supergroup of the time being the Knights of Paragon, though there were other great supergroups at the time, including Team 1 and Justice Force.

I happened upon an rp thread taking place in Paragon High School, started by two players for stories about their teenage characters, but was generally an open thread for others to join. For some reason, I took the chance and posted in that thread as well with my teen character, Thevshi, joining about the time as a number of other teenage superheroes joined in. Almost immediately I was swept along as a number of the team characters were recruited to join a teen supergroup called CAST, and the rest was history.

Though I did not recognize it at the time, the time I spent on those roleplaying boards (and especially the first year or so) was one of those particular moments in time that you always look back on fondly. There was an incredible amount of creativity on those board and for a long time the community was small enough that one could keep tabs on a number of different stories being told by different groups of people. The amount of interconnectivity between the stories was also amazing, events in one thread would be mentioned in another, and teamups and crossovers were not uncommon. We also had various party threads (Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s Day and Beach Parties, to name a few) that allowed even more interaction between groups of posters that might not necessarily interact. With Thevshi, and other characters, including Hollow (a member of the Knights of Paragon), I was part of several dozen threads for the more than two and a half years I was involved on those boards while we waited for the game (though in part, I was having so much fun I kind of did not care if the game was ever launched, just as long as we had those boards).

But eventually, COH went to beta, and my registration date (and possibly along with my activity on the forums) got me among the first 500 to be allowed into the closed beta. By that time, the boards were not quite what they had been. I was still involved with them, but many of other players I had know in the early days were gone, and the boards had become so crowded with new players, it was hard to follow everything going on. But the early closed beta was in many ways like the rping boards of old, running around were many of the characters that had been part of those early stories, and so along with the fun of trying out the game, there was a sense of nostalgia.

Of course, in early 2004, COH launched (and I was there that very first day, along with other members of the Knights of Paragon on Virtue). When COH launched, those old roleplaying boards (along with all the other old forums) were whipped, and all those wonderful stories that I and so many others had worked on for more than two and a half years were gone. While I saved nearly every post I ever made, I only saved a small handful of complete threads from those old boards. I greatly regret that I did not save more of those old threads before they were erased. (If anyone knows places where some of those old threads might be saved on the internet, I would love to know!)

So the launch of COH represented the first end of sorts for me, the final end of that wonderful roleplaying community I had happened upon in the dark days of the end of 2001. But of course, we now had COH to play, and it was certainly a game that had been worth waiting for. That first year was quite exciting, as I leveled up Hollow to 50 and helped run the Knights of Paragon and made numerous other friends along the way. But, after a little over a year, real life interceded, as I decided to return to law school, and the amount of free time I had for COH greatly decreased. But through it all, I continued to maintain my account, logging on when I could, though eventually my computer stared have a harder and harder time handling COH.

During law school, I got back into some of the roleplaying on the COH forums, joining in the Paragon University thread (and a couple of others), though I was generally on and off due to my often hectic schedule in law school. It was a bit like returning to those old days on the pre-launch COH forums for me, and I got to revisit several of my earlier characters and where they were in their lives now. It helped keep me in touch with the game some when I was not able to actually be logged in very much.

When I finished law school, I managed to upgrade my computer, and start playing COH once more (even during the summer when I was supposed to be studying for the bar exam, though I still passed ). While I was happy to be back in game, and was enjoying making new characters with new power sets that had been released and exploring new content, I was also saddened to discover that many of my old friends and teammates had moved on and were no longer playing, marking in a way the second ending I experienced with COH.

That was four years ago. Since then, real life has continued to keep me busy, but I have logged on to COH when I could, leveling various alts as well as exploring new content in the game. COH has been everything the EQ was not, a game that I could log on, and play for a 30 minute span and feel that I had actually accomplished something for a character. If there were things in COH I have never done, it is because I just had not quite gotten around to them, not because accessing those things required being part of an uber-guild as in EQ. Rare has been the pickup group that I have not enjoyed crime fighting alongside (or causing crimes when playing some of my villains). And of course, soloing was always available as well, if not involved with trials or task forces and the like.

Though I was not always able to be on COH as much as I might like, it always seemed as if it would be there waiting for when I could. And now that is coming to an end as well.

While I have not been as invested in COH of late as many playing the game, I am still deeply saddened by the end of this wonderful game. Not only is it the end of a game that I have long enjoyed playing whenever I had some time, it also marks the final end of the community I joined in the last months of 2001. While it is easy to be angry about how this has come about, it is also important to remember, nothing lasts forever.

To all the developers involved with COH, both from Cyptic and Paragon Studios, thank you for all your hard work and dedication to making one of the most amazing online games ever. Your incredible work and imagination helped me reinvigorate my own imagination, which had become rather stagnant for some time until I happened upon that article in that gaming magazine.

To all those who spend so many long hours posting on those old rolepaying boards and chatting with me on AIM as we did so, I was privileged to be able to tell such wonderful and entertaining stories alongside you. I could list names, but I know I would forget to mention someone, and I would hate to do that. We were part of something incredibly special, and I often look back to those times with a since of longing for them. As I mentioned, I went by Thevshi on those old boards, and if you ever need to try to reach me, I can be reached at velve@comcast.net.

To all the other players involved in posting in Paragon University and the few other threads I was involved in on the current roleplaying threads, thank you so much for the great times. I wish I had stayed more involved, but greatly enjoyed the time I was part of the adventures and stories of those threads.

To all my teammates in the Knights of Paragon (Virtue), as Hollow and Thevshi, as well as to other friends and pickup teammates for those characters and far too many alts to list, throughout the years, it has been my distinct honor to fight alongside each and everyone of you in the streets of Paragon City and the Rogue Islands. It was those experiences which has made this game one that can likely never be matched.

Farewell Paragon City, I will never forget you.

I'm not able to make long english text like above, but I just want to thank you a last time before the end.

Thank you, for the whole universe of CoH. It was my only and my best experience in a MMO. Be proud of all this work around the community.

Merci encore, à toute l'équipe des devs. C'était génial de jouer grâce à vous !