A Long Story Of Fun And Thanks

Nobody on these forums knows me at all. I'm a terrible, terrible lurker. Why terrible? Well, I should really have been more involved and I kept telling myself I would be at some point, but I just never made the time. So it goes...

However, as an 8+ year veteran (I hadn't heard about the game until it was out of beta), I couldn't avoid the need to say thanks. Thanks for this game. Thanks for the passion with which the developers approached this game. Thanks for the escape and the creative and emotional outlet. Thanks for the fun.

I've been the leader of a very small SuperGroup of RL friends from an old gaming guild on Guardian and Infinity for years. I figure this is as good a place as any to tell its story.

Most of my friends and I met in Diablo II. A few of us played Star Wars: Galaxies for a number of years together as well. I've always been the salesman in our group. At yearly guild gatherings, I would always leave having convinced at least a half-dozen people to play whatever game I was obsessing over at the time. Well, that was usually City of Heroes. Before long, I had a large enough number of my friends playing that we could form a dedicated team. We were going to meet weekly with characters that wouldn't be played outside of that group.

Our first attempt fizzled. Some folks developed RL situations (one guy had a kid, another dude got pulled back into WoW) and we couldn't keep things going. The one big thing that stuck was the name. We had two Radiation characters (one Controller, one Defender) because we loved Accelerate Metabolism. However, "gather for AM" just took too darn long to type out (this was before we were using voice chat). We took a look at the icon for the buff and nicknamed the power "Socks". That was the beginning of "The Sulphurous Socks of Superior Servitude". The "Sulphurous" part game from my character, the group leader - Hell Witch.

When City of Villains released and most of us came back, we took another crack at it. We decided then that we would start a team designed from the ground up to be successful, rather than just a grouping of people's characters. I had read a post (long forgotten, sadly) which inspired the whole mess. The idea was to utilize a large "Corruptor Core" of Radiation characters and to leverage the debuffs in the blast sets. So we had Rad/Rad, Dark/Rad, Ice/Rad and Sonic/Rad. We added in a Dominator and two Brutes. We wanted a Fire/Rad but that guy wound up going back to WoW (different dude, same addiction).

This group was really great. We could "cloud up" and spam Radiant Aura enough that we could heal through just about anything. The Radiation toggles were groovy as long as whatever mook had them didn't die. All of the Corruptors also took a full helping of Leadership powers (take THAT, Night Widow stealth! :P). It was around this time that we decided to pay a bit of attention to a much-maligned power in Radiation Emission - Fallout. See, we could let the brutes die... errr... I mean, in the "unfortunate" event that one of our Brutes, surrounded by baddies just "happened" to take more damage than we could heal, something very extraordinary happened - KABOOM, KABOOM, KABOOM, KABOOM, Vengeance, Mutation, dead group and buffed Brute. We got to throw four nukes and get a team-wide buff with zero end crashes. We had a lot of fun with that group. For most of the group, that was their first villain to get to level 50 and also the first to complete the Recluse Strike Force. Now, as villains, we clearly couldn't be for "Servitude" so we tweaked the name a bit - The Scandalous Socks of Sinful Subversion.

During that time, we decided we wanted to try to abuse another mechanic - Containment. So we came up with an idea for a group with seven Controllers and one Tanker for some amusing heroside shenanigans. We decided to abandon the "All Rad" configuration to expand out a bit, largely because of all the pets. We wanted some Fulcrum Shift and we wanted to be able to throw our AoE holds as much as we could. So, we went with 3 Kins, 2 Sonics and 2 Rads along with a Stone/Stone Tanker. This group was nuts. The sheer amount of debuff, buff and heal was hilarious. Admittedly, we took a while to defeat things early on, but once we started getting more powers (and convincing folks to stop with the AoE immobs that were neutralizing the KD powers...) we just steamrolled things. When the melee pets showed up with Fulcrum Shift and then APP Fireballs started flying, we were melting things. This group managed (albeit with a lot of "okay... let's try...") to defeat the STF after hitting 50.

Well, we were having such a great time with both groups it was time to move on to something new. The Villain group added VEATs to the mix (one of each variant) and moved forward with the four VEATs, an Elec/Elec Brute, two Fire/Rad Corrs, and an Electric/Kin Corr. This group was just obnoxious. The sheer volume of AoE damage going everywhere, lightning and fire flying all over, the debuffs, the buffs, the fact that due to all the leadership toggles we couldn't miss and were nigh-unhittable, we loved it and became drunk on the power of our group and the tears of our enemies. It was an absolute blast. We wound up getting Shivans from Bloody Bay and then just rushing the Freedom Phalanx at the end of the RSF, none of that pulling nonsense for us! It was a slaughter!

The second Hero group was different. We did add one of each Kheldian but everyone else simply brought what they wanted. Admittedly, this was probably our weakest (and silliest... the Peacebringer LOVED slotting for KB...) group simply because there was no coherent strategy beyond "play". However, it was the group that proved no matter what happened, we'd keep playing this wonderful game. We had developed such a fondness for just hanging out by this time that we would oftentimes just sit around and chat rather than go beat bad guys up. We didn't wind up going after the STF on this one simply because the group wasn't as well-tuned and we wanted to move on.

With both of those rounds exhausted, it was time to start again! Due to some outside circumstances, we switched to only one group at a time for a while. But what a couple groups that turned out to be! Our next foray - five Masterminds! Yep, one of each available at the time! Lasers, arrows, bullets, darkity-dark stuff and molotov cocktails were flying around with alarming frequency and effectiveness! We added in three buffers (the ever-present Radiation had to be represented, this was something on which we never wavered, it was our namesake, after all) and just went to town. The invasion events and Trick-Or-Treat silliness was my favorite part of this group. We had all we needed to be able to pull the largest spawns of whatever was attacking the city and we could just sit there, drop our buffs/debuffs, set our pets to aggressive and let the xp roll in! This group also didn't go after the top TF due to the fact that frankly, StatesLightning would have been launched and we would be had. Still, this group was all kinds of funny.

Our final Friday group (we met always on Tuesdays and Fridays) was an attempt to get some really serious team synnergy going on. We had four Shield characters - three Brutes and a Tanker. Add to that two Corruptors (one Rad, one Kin) and two Controllers (one Rad, one Thermal). With Leadership toggles and the group buffs from Shield Defense, we could move as one giant clump of unhittable craziness! End never ran out, Hasten was always permanent, we had some serious Equilibrium represented (both Corruptors were DP). This is our longest-running group and was our first group to explore Incarnate content (it came out as we were leveling this one). We're all 50+3 and most of us invested heavily in our character builds for this one. A few of us have those multi-billion, nigh-indestructible builds going. We have a few characters in that group with over 1,000 badges (child's play to the hardcore badgers, I know, but to me this is emblematic of how much we came to love these characters. We've 9-manned Lambda with this group (had another guildy join us just for fun). We've also done the RSF and STF in one night with this group - that was a riot! We still play this group on Fridays.

We also recently revived our Tuesday group. This one is, without question, our most-powerful group. The devs, without knowing it or even knowing us, sent us a present called Time Manipulation. As far as we're concerned, the flavor text for it could simply read "Dear Socks, We love you. Signed, The Devs". Unfortunately, our 8th long-term player has another commitment on Tuesdays so we have been running with 7. The group is made up of two tankers (Dark/Titan and Willpower/MA), two controllers (Elec/Dark and Elec/Kin), two Corruptors (Beam Rifle/Rad and Archery/Time) and one Controller (Time/Ice). We don't die anymore. At all. We ran Synapse, on-level, set to +4 without dying. We saw nothing but endless hordes of purple clockwork and we would have the Tankers pull entire large rooms to the aggro cap and just AoE stuff down. We thought to ourselves - this can't get any more absurd! Our present plan would have had everyone with defense to everything significantly beyond the Incarnate cap, hit chances well above anything needed to hit stuff that isn't using ValkMoG and over 200% global recharge. Then we saw the powers list for Nature Affinity and it was like the devs said to us "Dear Socks, We forgot some stuff. Here it is. Signed, The Devs". Currently, this group is in the mid 30s. Our plan was to do every Signature TF Heroside on our way to 50. Sadly, we'd not yet found someone to play a Fire/Nature Corruptor before the news of the game ending broke.

It was a body blow. I was at work when one of us sent a text with the news. I couldn't believe it. In so many ways, this was more than a game to all of us. Our membership has been through so much over the course of our playing this game. Both good and bad, we've been through it all together. Some of us have severe medical problems and when they were at their worst, playing this game with the Socks kept us in good spirits. Some of us moved halfway across the country and playing this game was part of keeping in touch. A number of us have been unemployed at some point or another and playing this game was the one expense we simply wouldn't let go of. One of us got married and outside of close family, the Socks were the first to know and be invited to the wedding. Sure, we've had spats from time to time. We have a few strong personalities in our little band of goofballs. We had a couple ragequits for the night happen. But there we were next week, ready to take on whatever Paragon City could dish out.

This was more than a game. It was the bar where we hung out. We couldn't all buy each other a round (we're located in California, Oregon, Texas and Pennsylvania) but we'll be darned if we couldn't hook each other up with character builds and the occasional rare IO recipe! CoH was our hangout, our themepark, our own private theatre, our home. I won't speak in detail for all of us, but I still don't really have a perfect set of words for just how much this game has meant to me. I feel a sense of attachment to the developers, though they've never met me, they gave me and my friends a home. I'm known for being the Star Wars nut among my friends and my total subscribed time to CoH (all but three months of the game's live history) far eclipses my total subscribed Star Wars MMO time (and I had two accounts in SWG). Though I would wander off and try other games, I would always come back here. This is my favorite MMO I have ever played. In my mind, it is the best one ever made.

In a world of WoW clones, this was a beacon of difference and wonder. In a day and age where everyone's characters were this homogenized look of identical height, four selectable faces and clad in the same top-level armor, this game allowed unrivaled expression. In a day where everyone gets the same skills (and pays for training...) for a character class and conforms to one of two or three "viable" allotments of skillpoints, this game laughs and says "No, build customization looks like THIS!" In a time when the themepark MMO tells you "Your story goes this way" this game says "Switch sides and play it all, start in another universe or even just tell your own story!" Some games will dip into that wonderful well of ideas CoH had and try one or two, but I've never found another game that did it all and did it this well. Though I hardly ever posted, I love this community. Though I never had the great privilege of meeting them, I love this development team (one of my career goals was to someday, somehow, work at Paragon, you all inspire me). Put simply - I love this game.

To anyone who got this far in a long-winded eulogy of sorts - thanks for reading.

To everyone here, Redname or not, thanks for making this game what it is.

In short - Thanks.