Dear devs: I'll follow you anywhere

Here are the things I loved about CoX. This has nothing to do with powersets, combat mechanics, graphics, or any of the technical stuff. This is largely about creative content.

1) My character could have any colour of skin, rather than just white-that-can-pass-for-Asian (or Asian-that-can-pass-for-white, depending on where the game was made). On a far less important note, I loved that there were enough costume elements to make unique characters, rather than having all the players of level X running around wearing the same Battered Leather Armor and wielding the same Wooden Training Sword.

2) My female characters could wear clothes that did not make them look like strippers! Thank you for a game that I could play as a woman without feeling like I was just there to provide eye candy for the straight male players. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

3) The NPCs were interesting characters in their own right, and I cared about helping them. Okay, as a villain I cared about advancing my own cause by aligning it with theirs. No, even that isn't true -- the story of Wretch, Seer Marino, and Ghost Widow was one of the most heartwrenching things I've ever encountered in a game.

4) I played because I wanted to know what happened next. This is seriously big in an MMO. All of my favourite games have that element in them. Most of them are Roguelikes. CoX is the only MMO on the list. I said in game once (as my villain, Prince of Ruin) and I'll say it here again: the Baron Zukor arc makes me really feel like I'm there. I'm not just killing X number of Y and bringing back their Zs, I'm accomplishing something. It's not the only arc like that (okay, so far it's the only one where I get to lead an entire army of villains) but it's the one that sticks out in my mind.

Anyhoo. What I'm trying to say is, if all you Paragon devs got on Kickstarter and got funding to start a new company and make new games, I would be right there in line for a subscription. I was a free/premium player in CoX, but now that I realize just how rare these features are in MMOs, I'd be very happy to subscribe to and support another game that was like that.

It doesn't have to be about superheroes. I was barely interested in superheroes before I started playing CoX, and now I'm all over the genre. You could make it a superhero game, a sci fi, a magical thud-and-blunder fantasy, or a furry game, and I'd play it.

Again, thanks for showing me that MMOs can hold my interest for more than a month and can be as engaging as any comic book or movie. I hope that you can do it again, and if you really want to, crowdsource funding will be the way to go, because big companies are quite happy to maximize profit with Skinner-box press-button-to-get-cheese-and-exp games at the expense of real content. Best of luck. Just shine that bat signal and I'll come buy your games.