The Book of UberGuy Eight Years of CoH

Hi, my name is Paul. I want to give other forum readers here some insight into how I came to play CoH, what my experiences were like here over the years, and how those experiences had significant influence on who I am today.

Writing this is as much for me as it is for readers. Learning that CoH is going away had an emotional impact on me that I never in a million years expected. In posting here and on Facebook the last few days, I have discovered that writing about my experiences and feelings is cathartic. It helps me get to what it really is about CoH that’s so important to me that the idea of losing it could make me cry despite being a grown man – something that boggles my mind even now. So this is a pretty serious brain dump, sharing a lot of info about my time here, what it’s meant to me, and why that then means the sunset announcement is such a big deal to me.

While it’s almost certain that I’ve spent more time playing CoH than I should have by some ways of looking at it, I feel it’s been a net positive influence on my life, by bringing me new friends, giving me a new way to spend time with old friends, expanding my understanding and acceptance of other people’s viewpoints, helping my critical thinking skills, and so on.

In order to give contexts, these posts will be long. I apologize in advance for that – I’m trying to keep them toned down, but I’m the only one editing them, and I’m sure I’m not always the best judge of what background I could leave out and still get the point across.

Each major topic will be its own post in this thread, maybe more if it’s really huge. I know the CoH forums may not be around for a lot longer, so I have written these posts off-line. If I can, I’ll get them hosted somewhere else after these forums are gone, as a long-lasting record of the legacy a video game can have on a people’s lives.

How I Got Where I am Today (Part 1)

I used to play FPS games.

The first game I really got into an on-line community for was Tribes. There used to be a game studio named Dynamix, and if you’ve been playing PC games long enough, you might remember their Earthsiege games, which were essentially Mechwarrior crossed with Terminator – mankind had made giant, cybernetic war machines to fight their wars for them, and (naturally) these machines attained sentience and tried to wipe out humanity.

Tribes came out in late 1999 or early 2000. It was actually a throw-away side project – the makers just trying to make a buck off of something they threw together to test or showcase their Earthsiege physics engine. It was a team combat game with fanciful, futuristic weapons and armor, and several mission types. It had Death Match and Capture the Flag, but also others, which would be important to me later. Of particular note was that all the armor types (light, medium and heavy) had jet packs. You could sort of fly – the lighter your armor, the faster you could get aloft and the longer you could stay there. You had health and energy bars, not too unlike CoH’s health and endurance, but weapons actually had ammo, rather than drawing on your energy reserve to fire. Only firing the jetpack and some of the optional backpacks used energy.

I really had no idea what to expect with Tribes. My initial exposure to it was via a pirated copy. (I later learned that this was how most people found out about the game. Most who became regular players went on to buy at least one copy, myself included.) When I fired it up, it asked me to choose a player name. I pondered for a few moments. I had a friend who had recently gotten in the habit of prefixing “uber” to stuff a lot. A really big hot dog was an “uber hot dog”. A bad car accident was “this uber pileup”, and so on. For some reason, that popped into my head, and I figured it would be amusing to be “UberGuy”. That’s been my online handle since 2000…

So, there was a glitch in the Tribes physics engine. As in CoH, there was a jump key, which most people bound to the default of the space bar. If you jumped repeatedly while moving forward on a downgrade, no (or greatly reduced) friction applied to you. Because of gravity, you could accelerate down slopes and hills. You could attain incredible speeds in the game by doing this, and it handled that very well. Environments in Tribes were vast, if mostly barren, so you could put this speed to good use. By combining this with the lift of a jetpcack, accelerating down a hill, “skiing” up a facing hill, and then using the jepack as you flung off the peak, you could fly for immense distances, crossing the space between enemy bases in very short times – sometimes seconds, depending on the map.

This one bug transformed Tribes from its intended design as a sort of plodding strategic game into a frenetic tactical one, where mad twitch skill was the rule of the day. It grew a fairly stable community of devoted players. Because it had a steep learning curve, due to the need to master 3-dimensional combat and fast reaction time, it never became really big. The devs at Dynamix never fixed the skiing bug. They embraced it as a core element of the game.

Though I had many friends who played video games, and I think some who played Tribes at the time, we didn’t formally play together, and certainly didn’t team regularly. One day, though, I caught the attention of some players I didn’t know due to my refusal to surrender without giving them hell, even though my side had definitely lost. (They blew up our inventory supply point on a map and we didn’t have anyone left who could repair it.) They admired my tenacity, and invited me to a “tribe” they were forming. (This would be a “clan” in other games.) The tribe was named “Fireteam” – FT for short – homage to a game of that name they had played before Tribes. Eventually, I recommended several of my real-life friends to join FT, and even got my on-and-off girlfriend of the time into the game, where she became one of the core members of the tribe. We eventually joined ladders and leagues to play competitively, and in our chosen map type, we were never defeated in about a year of competitive play.

In 2001, a sequel, Tribes 2 was produced. The lead designer of this was Dave Georgeson, who went on to work on the original Planetside. Tribes 2 reflected the vision Georgeson eventually realized with Planetside – he was more interested in making it about large-scale battles (teams could be up to 64 players, and you could have more than just 2 teams) with a slower pace. The pacing issue was a huge problem for loyal fans of the original, as the speed was part of their addiction to Tribes. Tribes 2 did have some merits, though, especially once the community produced a server-side mod that made it feel more like the original Tribes. But the result was to fragment the community. Worse, the gameplay type that FT focused on was not present at all in Tribes 2. As a result, many of my friends from Tribes did not carry over to Tribes 2. I found a new tribe and played CTF competitively with them, but we never meshed the way FT did. Our competitive record was pretty mediocre, despite having some very skilled players. We just lacked the magic, which was very depressing, having come from the unstoppable juggernaut that was Fireteam.

I became much more active in the community for Tribes 2, a frequent poster on third-party forums for leagues and ladders, but mostly the Tribalwar fan site, which still exists today (which is incredibly impressive). I gained minor notoriety as a client-side modder – Tribes and Tribes 2 both had a very flexible scripting interface into the client, and while I knew my way around it in Tribes, I never published my scripts except to other Fireteam members. I actually had hosted scripting sites for Tribes 2 scripts and was somewhat well-known.

During my time playing Tribes and Tribes 2, I had been an electrical engineer for a small research instruments company and then a C++/perl and web developer for a shopping portal site. That shopping portal flirted with greatness but was one of countless others swept away in the dot-com boom correction. They ran out of cash and I ended up unemployed, though with more marketable skills. Fortunately, a childhood buddy of mine had a job opening for someone with something like my skills at a company specializing in sub-prime mortgages. (From dot-com to sub-prime loans. I know how to pick them, eh?) I didn’t work for my friend that long at that point, as he moved to a different part of the organization and I stayed where he had hired me. Under my new boss, I eventually made a recommendation to hire one of the college friends I used to play Tribes with, and he got the job. He and I used to carpool, and we’d chat about all kinds of gaming stuff on the ride to and from the office.

One day, probably late in 2003, he started telling me about this game he was in beta for, called City of Heroes. For the first time in my life, this sounded like an MMO I might be interested in, if only just enough to try it out.

You see, most of these same real-life friends I played Tribes with and this coworker I carpooled with were all regular MMO players. I used to watch what they played and got quite a lot of general knowledge about the games from them, and with the exception of early Dark Age of Camelot, never once did the games appeal to me. The combination of loot grind, loot that could wear out or be lost, non-consensual PvP (that was often a way to lose loot), and a monthly subscription all combined to something I found mildly repulsive. People paid to suffer through that?

But this sounded different. There was no PvP. Loot was not particularly relevant, though there was stuff that sort of wore out in the form of standard enhancements. And it was about superheroes and comic-book themes. I was never an avid collector, but I read superhero comics throughout my childhood and college years. Things like Super Jump and flying sounded pretty nice to me. Then my friend compared the experience of CoH to the speed and 3-dimensional movement of Tribes, which sounded pretty freaking amazing to me.

I never bothered trying to get into CoH beta, but I pre-ordered the game from Game Stop and signed up with my friends during the pre-release head-start. We formed a super-group on Justice Server (Phoenix Star Rising), led by my carpool buddy, and did all sorts of silly stuff together. My gaming friends realized early the power of buffs and debuffs, and particularly favored Radiation Emission characters. We were in Talos fighting Freakshow by level 11. There was no “purple patch” back then.

My first character was a Katana/SR Scrapper. It was a choice based off of the descriptions in the character creating screens. The self-reliance of the Scrapper appealed to me. To this day, Scrappers are my favorite AT, though I enjoy all melee ATs. (For me to enjoy the ranged ATs, they need to have powersets that lend them something like that self-reliance.)

Not long after, maybe just a couple of weeks, I created a new Broadsword/Invul Scrapper named American Steele. SR wasn’t doing it for me, because, well, back then, pre-perma-Elude SR was pretty poor. Invul meanwhile, was brokenly good at much lower level, benefitting from stacking pulses of Invincibility, though I didn’t really know that back then. I relegated my SR to activities with my SG and my new Invul became someone I soloed with. Not too long after I also created an Ice/Devices Blaster (WinterStrike) who I mostly led street sweeping teams with and a Dark/Dark Defender (Nightfall), who I mostly played teamed with a close subset of friends from Tribes.

As an aside, I was using character builders that first week of play. Steele was built with the original Hero Planner. I can thank my friends who were in CoH beta for that. Mids is light-years beyond those early efforts. Of course, those guys back then didn’t have the inside track to powers info that some of the community does today. Jack Emmert’s effort to hide how the game worked from players was in full swing back then.

Somewhere in here, we were handed the original version of the “purple patch”, intended to prevent things like our SG rampaging against +10s in Talos. It was surely a good idea in general, but the first pass was far too aggressive. It made fighting +2s almost impossible for characters on TOs and even DOs, which was the vast majority of characters back then. We had the old sidekicking system, which allowed for a much wider range of character levels on a team. The problem was that if you were any worse than -1 to the mission holder, you were basically useless offensively. This led to me soloing a lot, which mostly meant I played my BS/Invul. I may be wrong, but I recall this situation actually persisted for multiple months before a modified purple patch was released, which is either the one we have today, or one not too different from it. Finally, teaming was viable again.

Originally, there was also no exemplar system. You could out-level content permanently. If you did, the only way to revisit it was to get an invite from a lower-level character who had the mission. Task Forces had max level limits, so if you out-leveled one, you could never go back and do it. Because there was originally no badge system, and no other real reason to try not to outlevel content, I participated in a lot of high-reward XP gain activities, like Oranbega demon portal missions, Rikti Sewer trials, etc. This meant I had already missed out on a lot of potential badges by the time the badge system came about. I decided to start a new character who would be a dedicated badge collector late in Issue 1, a Dark Melee/Regen Scrapper named Sable Slayer. Back then, Regen was crappy before level 18, and then pretty much God mode from then on. (I may have enjoyed it and missed it when it changed, but I can admit how overpowered it was at the time. Invul was, honestly, not that much less overpowered.) The funny thing was I had no idea. I just wanted a secondary with unconditional mez protection. I hated Unyielding Stance – back in the day Invul’s mez protection toggle immobilized you.

Steele, Nightfall, Winter and Sable (how I refer to them for short) were the characters I spent most of my time with early on. Which got the most attention was a bit of a function of what was going on in the game in terms of nerfs and buffs. Between various vogues in power-leveling, street sweeping or just lots of hours of play, I got all of them into the mid-30s to low 40s.

How I Got Where I am Today (Part 2)

Along the way, a lot of those core folks I knew in real life from that original supergroup trialed off and left CoH. Some of them were (and still are) what I call “MMO butterflies” – constantly fluttering from game to game as new ones are released. Some, like my now ex-girlfriend (but to this day close friend) and the husband she met while part of Fireteam, were really looking for PvP, which was non-existent in CoH, so moved on to other games to find that. We picked up some new blood for the SG from other players, and also some of my childhood friend’s team at work joined us. We formed a new SG (Metahumans Local 181) which lasted through I6 and beyond.

Once CoV came out, the same guy who started MHL 181 also started a villain SG, (E.C.L.I.P.S.E.) He used to invite lots of completely random people to the villain SG and ask them to turn SG mode on, and then mostly leave them to fend for themselves. The result was a kind of revolving door prestige sweatshop. These folks would get bored with us and leave the SG, but their prestige stayed behind. I wouldn’t have treated people that way, but I will admit that it did get us a decent lot of prestige in a relatively short time.

I started a second account for CoV, because we had a limit of 12 characters per server per account, and I only played on Justice. I needed more character slots.

Eventually, the two other coworkers also faded away from CoH, leaving a few players met in CoH, my childhood friend / ex-boss (known to some on Justice as @Majic Jax) and one person from the Tribes / Tribes 2 days (well known on Justice as @Quatermain). When the SG leader had been gone long enough, Quat inherited the MHL 181 SG leadership and I inherited ECLIPSE.

Quat and I played this game a lot from I6 through I12, though Quat’s interested waxed and waned along the way. Jax also waxed and waned as work and family limited his play time, but he tended to play less than Quat or I until I14 or so. I got distracted sometimes, but usually was never away for more than a week, and never touched another MMO.

I did have one problem with CoH. Level 50 felt very hollow to me. Not in the sense that I felt I should get more benefit when I hit 50, but in the sense that there was nothing really to do there once you reached it. I didn’t want raids or anything, I just wanted something I could keep doing as a 50. For the longest time, there was really no repeatable content, other than, eventually, Task Forces. Once you ran out of missions, your character couldn’t initiate anything new to do on their own – they could only attend other people’s missions or street sweep. That bugged me a lot. My high-level characters, Steele, Sable and Nightfall in particular, we getting close, and this created a bizarre dilemma for me. I knew that once I hit 50, I would no longer be compelled to play them. They would be “done”. But I didn’t want them to be done. I enjoyed playing them, but felt I wouldn’t want to bother with no progress goal. As a result, I got inventive about spending time among different characters and working on alts, all without hitting 50 on any of them. Paradoxically, I was playing them less to avoid getting to a place where I felt I would barely play them at all.

Issue 9 transformed this aspect of the game for me with the introduction of Inventions. As I mentioned early on, I was never into loot or grinding for it. Fortunately, as loot systems go, Inventions are pretty lightweight, and has only gotten to be more so as time has gone, with the addition of Reward Merits, Hero Merits, etc. Now, at last, I had a goal beyond 50. By then, there was more repeatable content (Safeguard and Mayhem Missions), even if it wasn’t terribly varied, so I could actually feel like my 50s were an active part of the game world. As soon as I9 went live, I got my first hero to 50. I specifically chose to hit 50 first with American Steele. He’s the closest thing I have to a main, so he got that “honor”. Checking my chat logs, it looks like I hit 50 on Nightfall next, then a Dark/Psi Defender on my 2nd account (Fortune’s Shadow), and then Sable.

Quatermain got involved with CoH PvP, raiding Hamidon on Justice (particularly after I9’s changes), and a few other groups of players, and it was through him that a mostly-dedicated soloist like me was invited to several global channels, mostly for Justice players. Several, including one run by @ConFlict (“Con”) and one run by @PumBumbler, were populated with folks who combined power-gaming mindset with friendly attitudes. This was such a perfect match for my personality. We ran Invincible speed TFs back before Inventions made that fashionable. We made it look easy when Inventions gave us new motive to speed content. Access to these folks and the way they ran content kept me in goods and money to equip my characters. Those were great times for me.

A lot of these players were avid members of CoH’s PvP community. I never cared much for CoH PvP, even after I6. It could be fun, but as an old FPS player, I disliked the extent to which having the right character influenced the outcome. Unlike some, I saw firsthand how a skilled player could take a non-FoTM build and excel with it, but I preferred what I felt was a more “purist” reliance on skill most FPSs offered. At least the old-school ones I started on-line gaming with. But I hung out with these PvP crews, enjoyed learning a lot about PvP strategies and tactics, and generally learned that CoH PvPers were some of the most motivated and skilled players out there at figuring out how to “break” the PvE game. To their credit, the ones I knew reported exploits quickly. They just also used them afterwards until they were fixed!

Sadly, I13 really splintered CoH’s PvP community, and over the next few issues, a lot of them faded from the scene. Quatermain was eventually one of these, and ownership of the hero SG also fell to me as a result. Now I had two fully-equipped bases, on one each side. Eventually, Jax split off as well and formed his own SG base so that he could have more base storage of his own, so both bases are basically fully my personal ones. Fortunately, I had been introduced to another global channel full of PvE-centric power gamers, and I’m in that channel to this day.

I have a peculiar OCD nature about completing content. Most people are happy to get to 50 as fast as possible. That urge is there for me, too, but I want each character to do all the story arcs in each level range. I want to feel like they are “the hero” (or villain) of the game world. That doesn’t really make sense in a world populated by multiple characters, especially ones on the same account played by the same player, but I am willing to gloss over that in exchange for the sense as I level my characters up that they solved great mysteries or participated in key world lore. I never PL characters any more – I don’t think I’ve done that since probably I4 or I5. I almost exclusively play them solo to 50, so I can control what they out level, and maximize the sense that they’re the hero of the story. Since we were given the “noXP” toggle, I regularly use that to stop progress so I can complete a contact’s arcs. It’s a source of pride for me that my later characters have full contacts progress bars wherever possible, with a few exceptions where I screwed up and leveled by accident, or the contact just doesn’t offer enough missions to fill their own bar.

I take a vaguely similar approach to inventions. While I’m willing to “twink” new characters to some extent, giving them a few key IOs or accolades or such to make them easier to level, I have largely insisted on self-funded IO progress. How “self-funded” is achieved varied from character to character depending on their abilities, but my approach almost always called for playing the character at 50 for extended periods. This is a natural extension of my old view that 50 was “the end”. The opposite of that is having a reason to keep playing. So having all my Inventions ready to slot as soon as I hit 50 (or earlier, where possible) would partially defeat the point.

Because of all this I’ve gotten a relatively small stable of characters to 50, for how much I played over the years. I added it up, and I have over 20,000 hours of on-line time across my most-played characters. That’s probably not completely accurate, as I do dual box a fair bit, but there’s probably no more than around 10% overlap there, which is still going to be something like 18,000 hours. My Dark/Dark Defender, Nightfall, has just shy of 2700 hours on-line, with the Dark/Psi Defender next at about 2525, and then my badger, Sable Slayer, at 2180. That pales compared to some folks’s time on their main characters, but I don’t have a main, so I have a bunch of characters with 1000-2500 or so hours on them. I have eleven level 50s in total. The one with the least time played is Tachyonic Daze, a Mind/Rad Controller who just hit 50 a couple of issues ago. Tachyon’s an example of something I have a lot of examples of – a character who I created years ago who has languished at low levels for years. I think Tachyon was level 22 for about five years while I leveled up other characters.

Given my desire to progress my characters “beyond 50,” the Incarnate system has been of great interest to me. I like the idea, though I’m somewhat lukewarm on the execution. I know there are some people who wanted end-game raiding in CoH, but I’ve never felt like it was that many. I have no way to validate that, though. What I do know is that progress mostly tied to content calling for league-sized teams was a big break from both regular leveling and the Inventions system. I always felt like I could make progress in CoH while alone, even though I teamed quite often. On that count, Incarnate Trials bothered me. That said, I piled into them with gusto, and have run literally thousands of them. All my 50s have at least one T4 of everything, hundreds of Astral Merits and have earned dozens of Empyrean Merits. (I spent a lot of Empyrean Merits on PvP +defense IOs before Converters came out. I don’t regret it.)

I have known the player behind @Majic Jax since we were children. We grew up in the same neighborhood and shared a love of video games and computers since back then. (We became friends over Commodore computers.) We grew apart for a while after we both went to college, but we really got back together after I started working with him. Jax now has three kids, and I am the godfather of the oldest, who grew up around Jax and I playing the game – he literally cannot remember a time before when we played it. (He is very displeased it (and his characters) will go away soon.) Jax and I usually both hop in game every night and chat on Skype while we play, and have been doing so for a few years now. This is essentially a continuation of something we’d do when we were teens, getting on the phone for hours while we did chores, played with computers, whatever. Today, though, we can both be in the same game. We’ll have to find some other thing to do together while we chat, but neither of us has any idea what. Jax didn’t play on-line games at all before I snookered him into CoH.

I found out the other day that the carpool buddy who originally told me about CoH, but who hasn’t played since something like I7 or maybe I8, has kept his subscription active all this time. That means he paid without playing for roughly six years. I’m not sure if I’m impressed or mortified (I think it’s both), but I’m also grateful. While a drop in the bucket, he was doing a little bit towards helping keep the game alive for those of us still actively playing.

UberGuy on the Forums

I suspect I first came to the CoH forums looking for game info. I know my experience in Tribes taught me what a great resource forums can be. Honestly, though, I no longer remember why I visited. My CoH master account dates to April 26, 2004, and my forum account to May 5, 2004. I suspect I didn’t register for a while because it took me a while to want to post anything. I am fairly sure my first post was in a thread claiming that Scrappers were pointless. This was early in the “City of Blasters” craze that swept the playerbase early on, when we were all low-level, most critters lacked ranged attacks, and most of us didn’t yet know how mez-happy the higher levels would be. (If you weren’t around back then, you might be surprised to know that mezzing in the 30s was worse back then than it is now. The 40+ game didn’t exist yet, though.)

Over the years, I have been a frequent poster in one of two forums. Probably the greatest part of my posting career here has been in the Scrapper AT forum. My first two characters were Scrappers, I have more level 50 Scrappers than any other AT, and I play the ones I have a lot. The other forum came much later, and was the Market (auction house) forum. (Originally, the Market forum was distinct and separate from the Inventions forum.)

Over the years, the Scrapper forum has been an incredible source of information about the game. People tested and measured things, came up with models for survival or victory conditions, and generally applied excellent logic, math and rigor to understanding the game. Why? So they could kick more ***. Because that’s what Scrappers were for: flipping out and killing people, and the Scrapper forum regulars wanted to flip out as optimally as possible for maximum carnage.

The Market forum obviously didn’t come out until after I9 brought us both the Auction House / Black Market and Inventions. CoH’s market system has a lot of unique aspects. Some people like it, some hate it, some consider it a necessary evil, and some consider it the work of Satan. For a very long time after the market was added, there were two main types of threads that would appear in the Market Forum. One type was theory crafting about how market forces of supply, demand and other external factors interacted with the market implementation. The other was a sort of emotionally charged quasi-religious debate about people who used the market to maximize their own profit, whether that should be regulated, and how the market should be changed to enforce such regulation. Often, topics from the generally unemotional theorycraft threads would be brought to bear in the emotional debates, though it was rare that anyone who came into the forum breathing fire and brimstone was swayed by logic of any quality. (It’s worth noting, though, that over the years, some market haters came around to see the other side, and came back and said so.)

As time went on, I started to branch out more, poking into the Defender and Corruptor forums (I had a lot of those AT's too), plus the Brute and Stalker forums. By extension, I also started to hang out in the AT & Powers general forum, as both cross-AT and sometimes AT-specific topics of interest to me would appear there, as well as general discussions on game design or “balance”.

Finally, in the last year or two I’ve been spending more time in the General Discussions forum. Sometimes topics that probably strictly belonged in the AT & Powers forum would appear in the Discussions forum, but I did start to get into some of the more philosophical discussions. These were less about how the game worked, but why did it work a certain way, or would it be better if it worked differently. A lot of design and balance topics naturally arose, but so did a lot of discussion and debate about lore, presentation, quality of writing, direction the writing was going, etc. This was a whole new sort of debate for me, and it served both to open my eyes to other opinions and teach me how to defend more subjective positions than I usually had to debate in the AT or probably even Market forums.

I’m one of those people that this comic strip describes perfectly. I dislike seeing two kinds of posts.

· Factually inaccurate ones that may spread misinformation or misunderstanding
· Subjective opinion presented as fact, particularly if it is used as part of advice on choice making

Having those character traits means I got into a lot of debates here.

So I have liked reading the forums to increase my own knowledge (and to re-share what I’ve learned with others, where possible) and to fight the good fight against the People Wrong on the Internet (PWotI). Just looking for new info and questions to answer naturally means I run into what I think are PWotI all the time – and I was never afraid to dive right in. Between the two, I have spent just a ton of time on the forums. According to the forum software, I have over 26,000 posts on the CoH forums (spanning both the phpBB and vBulletin incarnations), which is an average of about 8.5 posts a day. If every one of those posts took 5 minutes to write up and proofread, that’s close to ¾ of an hour a day. I’m pretty sure 5 minutes is a low estimate for me.

Given that most of what I’ve learned on the CoH forums is game mechanical information that will be pointless to know after the game is gone, it may seem like this was a colossal waste of time. But I don’t think it was. You see, I have communicated with a host of other forum-goers. If I’m explaining how something works, I sometimes need to give clear, concise explanations. If I am proving something to someone who doesn’t believe it, I need to provide proof or strong evidence. If I am debating something with someone, I need to make sure I check my facts before I discredit myself by posting bogus conclusions. If I care whether a poster becomes angry with me, I need to choose words in ways that help overcome pure text limitations.

Sometimes I screwed up and posted a conclusion based on false info, because I didn’t check it. Sometimes I made someone mad when I didn’t mean to, because I didn’t consider how what I was saying might sound outside my own head. But those taught me lessons to remember.

And I would be remiss if I were to fail to attribute improvement on my part due to reading the posts of others. I learned a lot not just about the game, but about how to communicate with others by reading what other posters said and how they said it.

So in summary, I believe I have become a far more effective communicator, both in written and spoken word, because of the years I have spent posting here. This is reflected in my professional career, where my communication in mediums like emails, design documents or project documentation is held in good regard. I directly attribute a lot of the improvements in that area to my lessons learned posting here.

On many levels, CoH is very simple, and yet its implementation is almost hideously complicated. That creates a sort of fascinating environment where it’s not particularly necessary to dig into the details, but when you do, it can go on forever. I will miss the intellectual stimulation of debating models, math, and theories about how this game works, not just at an engine implementation level, but also at a social level, with regards to features like the Auction House and Incarnate Trials.

There are so many posters I want to thank for being people whose posts I enjoyed reading. I want to list some I can think of, but I will undoubtedly forget some. I’m afraid I never got to know most of you, but you still affected my life without even knowing it, even if you were arguing with me, and I thank you for it.

Arcanaville, bAssAckwards (a.k.a Fire Man), Dechs Kaison, DeProgrammer, docbuzzard, Obitus, PleaseRecycle, Hopeling, Nethergoat, Werner, EvilGeko, Starsman, Samuel_Tow, Sarrate, seebs, TopDoc and more I’ve missed.

There are more who stopped posting long ago, such as The_GameMaster, whose insights and knowledge I really miss.

Loss and Grief Over a Game

I’ve seen many posters compare the news that CoH is ending to the loss of loved ones, of pets, and of significant others. To some, this may seem very extreme. CoH is not a person, it’s a video game. Even if you (sensibly) expand losing CoH to mean losing access to its community, it still seems hard at some level to reconcile that loss with comparisons to deaths in the family or a divorce.

And yet, I think I understand. I’ve felt those senses of loss before, and it does share something with them. Personally, I was completely taken off guard that this was the case. I always knew I’d be sad to lose CoH someday, but I never expected it to hurt the way it has. That led me to reflect on why it has hurt quite so much. After a couple of days to reflect on it I think I understand it better. I apologize if this was blatantly obvious to some readers – it took me a while to make sense of.

When we do suffer “real-life” loss, such as a death of a loved-one, the end of a relationship or friendship, even the death of a pet, that loss leaves a gap in our lives. When that person or pet was around, became accustomed to having them in our lives. To whatever degree is appropriate based on who we’re talking about here, we plan our future around the expectation that a person will be there. We plan vacations, anniversaries, having children, home purchases, etc. with a spouse. We plan season game tickets or Friday night movie nights with good friends, or to be able to chat with them on the phone in the evening. We plan to walk the dog every day when we get home from work. You learn to know how the other person or pet will act and react to things around them, including you, and you adapt as needed. You gain familiarity and stability.

When you suddenly lose the other party, you lose all that. All your plans are uprooted. A huge part of what you are familiar with could be gone. You may be faced with the choice of being alone or having to start over with someone else, learning all their foibles and traits from scratch. A new pet will probably have a wildly different personality. You are faced with having that with which you were happy and comfortable replaced by an unknown, uncertain future.

And this is why I think losing CoH feels a lot like these other kinds of loss which we would expect to be much more personal. Look at how much history I have with this game, how much time I’ve spent on it, and how much a part of my everyday life it has become. For those of us who played it a lot, for a long time, it has become something we made plans around, have deep understandings of, and have mementos (characters, badges, etc.) that we’re attached to. It’s not like a person or a pet, but it’s still a big part of how we live our everyday lives that will be lost. Old habits will be invalidated. For a lot of us here now, there is no clear expectation that another game will hold our attention the way CoH did, that the community or devs will be as welcoming or engaging. We don’t know what the future will bring.

It’s not exactly the same kind of gap as when someone you care about dies or leaves, but for those who played it a lot, who actively participated in its community in some way or other, losing CoH is still going to leave a gap in their lives. It may not have the same magnitude of loss, but it feels very similar.

Why I Stayed (Part 1)

Looking back over the synopsis of my time here given above, I mention several times that good friends of mine left CoH, while I stayed. That really begs the question: why did I stay? The answer to that involves the complex interaction of multiple factors, but I think it is key to understanding why CoH became such a big part of my life that losing it leaves a gap large enough that I actively mourn its loss.

A lot of those friends who left CoH did so in order to play other MMOs. As mentioned, I didn’t like most other MMOs enough to follow them, so despite wishing I could find yet another game to keep playing with them after Tribes, the games they were leaving for just didn’t appeal to me.

Another problem was that they didn’t all just go to any one game, especially in the longer term. They slowly all went their own ways.

On the upside, it’s not as if I was left completely alone. Not only did Jax and Quat stick around, but we did pick up other CoH players who joined our SG and became new friends. Sadly, these players, too, all eventually moved on. Sometimes they first went to other, more populous SGs (as ours became thin), but eventually all of them stopped playing CoH altogether.

While I long prided myself on my willingness to play solo, I think I was somewhat kidding myself that I would not have missed bantering with friends while I played, even if I wasn’t teaming with them. The thing that really kept me in the Justice Server community, and so gave me these kinds of ties, was access to the various global channels I was invited to. I particularly owe @Quatermain for my access to some of the private channels I was invited to. I’m positive I’m not the only person for whom global channels became a replacement for SGs. While SG bases were a great (though limited) addition to the game, they were not really a vehicle for social interaction. That was really what each SG’s member list and chat channel were for. But using SGs as the basis for social interaction is pretty limiting – you can only be in one SG at a time. Global channels effectively let you be in multiple virtual SGs, letting actual SGs just provide access to bases for storage and transit. Global channels, then, provide access to social interaction and teaming across zones and even servers. I think that’s a far superior, and I consider myself fortunate to have had access to the best of both bases and global channels.

Meanwhile, there was a lot I still wanted to do in CoH. I did want to try more ATs and powerset combinations, but mostly I wanted to get more of the characters I’d already gotten to middle or high levels. I wanted to experience them with more powers and more enhancement slots. The point wasn’t to hit level 50, but rather just to continue to experience how the characters improved as they advanced. One of the best messages I often saw written on the CoH forums, especially in the days before IOs and Incarnates, was that CoH was more about the journey, and not about the destination. For me, this was incredibly resonant, for reasons I struggle to explain well. But it has a tremendous relevance to why CoH captured my attention for so long.

Growth and advancement of characters in any MMO takes an investment in time. Generally, the higher up you get, the longer it takes to get to the next milestone. I don’t always share this view, but I have seen many forum posters over the years express their opinion that CoH’s returns in new advancement didn’t feel as large at high levels as they did at earlier levels. These folks often didn’t think that getting more slots versus more new power picks was as exciting. I saw similar commentary about Epic or Patron Pool powers – some folks didn’t feel that getting these powers made as much difference to a character as earlier powers in primary and secondary powersets. For some players, this meant that they rarely took characters all the way to level 50, or if they did, they often preferred to “power level” them there, so they could just cut right to experiencing the whole set of powers, without the incremental progress.

For me, though, there was something about certain characters that made worthwhile putting in the extra time and effort to see them to each next step, even when the process slowed down. I really wanted to see the incremental performance change from those added slots, or from layering on Epic/Patron pool capabilities onto primary, secondary and pool powersets. This is the part that gets hardest to explain, because for each character, a sort of perfect storm of factors had to meet to make me want to play the character that fully.

I’m a very performance-oriented player. I want my heroes (and villains) to kick butt. I have, from the very first days I played CoH, loved that we can take on multiple foes and win, even when solo. Also, and I have no idea why it should matter quite so much, it was always exciting to me for my CoH characters to be able to take on high-con foes solo and still win. If foes conning white through orange were where we were “supposed” to fight, fighting orange through purple felt like I was somehow getting away with something. If the Devs had left the challenge alone and simply reassigned the con colors, branding +2 minions as white con, it would have sapped some of the enjoyment of the game from me. I know this is true even as I acknowledge how illogical it is. If a character could more-or-less-consistently take on “over-con” foes in this way, I cared more about the character than if they could not do this. Conversely, even if I liked a character a lot for other reasons, the less capable they were of fighting stuff that was technically over their head, the less attached to them I was.

I know I’m not the only person who enjoys this about CoH. I think the fact that it worked this way, that we were allowed to “break” the con system so easily, was a formative accident early in CoH’s history. The early Devs missed their mark on player vs. environment balance pretty widely. So widely, that their corrections, in terms of the “Purple Patch” , Enhancement Diversification, and the “Global Defense Nerf” still left us pretty capable of thumbing our noses are the con system.

Even though performance was quite important to me, it was far from everything. The other critical factor was how I felt about a character’s customized appearance and backstory. At this point, I feel the need to explain a bit about how I create characters in CoH. I know a lot of folks don’t bother with character concept at all. They are just interested in the experience of using given AT/powerset combos in the game. But I also know folks who start with a character concept and then try to match that with ATs, powersets and costume elements. Neither of those approaches would ever make me happy with my characters. Every character I ever made starts with a powerset combo I want to play, which then drives a choice about AT. Then, I create a character backstory that makes sense for a person with those powers, abilities and (sometimes) AT role stereotypes. This usually also drives my choice of Origin. While Origin may have little mechanical meaning in CoH, I never choose a character Origin that I consider at odds with my backstory idea.

Why I Stayed (Part 2)

I think that, most times, my backstory concept comes first, and then I start building a costume that makes sense for the backstory. On occasion, if I am struggling with coming up with a backstory, I’ll fiddle around in the costume creator first, and sometimes I stumble across a look that inspires a concept for the character’s background (and Origin).

Every character backstory I have written is either directly tied to in-game lore, usually via some association with NPC villain groups such as Crey, the 5th Column, the Rikti, or Arachnos. At my most free-wheeling, I have written things that I believed were compatible with canon lore even if my story did not directly reference that lore. I think I pulled this off with some success – I have a character from Issue 1 whose backstory involved gods and god-like power, and yet managed to not conflict with Incarnates, twenty-odd issues and seven-odd years later.

So, costumed appearance and backstory, including how the backstory ties the character into the wider game world, both become critical elements in my attachment to a character. I have had highly-performing characters that just never made it that far because the right switches in my brain didn’t flip in response to their look and concept. Likewise, I had some characters whose backstory and appearance I really liked, but if they couldn’t solo decently enough, I lost most of my interest in them.

Naturally, I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir if I talk to other CoH players about the game’s costume editor. It has its annoyances and some very significant limitations, but it is still fantastically flexible. It has been well-regarded in MMO discussions outside of the CoH community for as long as I can remember. The great degree to which the costume editor was a success may have been accidental, but someone clearly set out to make something better than other games had provided previously, and I think they pulled it off in spades.

But the description field for our characters? I have often wondered if that was not almost completely accidental brilliance. Sure, the community (myself included) has long groused about the character limit and, more recently, the foibles in the text editor. But I think that simply giving us a blank slate in which to write about our characters is brilliant. It’s not something many games have, and it is the ultimate companion feature to the excellent costume editor – the ultimate stamp that says, yes, this character is truly my creation.

Believe it or not, I’m not completely rambling. This is strongly relevant to why I stayed in CoH for eight years. I originally came here for multiple reasons that had nothing to do with characters. After all, I didn’t have any characters, at first. This was finally an MMO I found enjoyable, with a genre I liked, where friends I already knew were playing, with gameplay elements not so far removed from the fast-paced FPSes I had loved. I stayed initially because I met new friends, and there were many different things I wanted to experience.

But eventually, I realized I was really, really attached to playing just a handful of my characters. I had plenty of alts I could level up, and (given that I had two accounts), I had plenty of open character slots for brand new alts, even just on Justice Server. But more often than not, I would log in one of my existing favorites, and either join TFs with friends, or run repeatable content solo. I still enjoyed the idea of playing new characters, of getting those many lowbie alts to 50. But in practice, when I logged on, I was most likely to play the characters I had already invested the most time in. They are like comfortable clothes or a broken-in baseball glove – they are easy to get into and use.

Because of all the time I’d invested in them, tweaking their builds, funding their Inventions and (towards the end here) earning their Incarnate Powers, they became the ultimate expression of that enjoyment I derive from taking on foes I theoretically shouldn’t be able to win against. As the sun sets on CoH, I have characters that can take on the highest challenges available and come out on top. Most have soloed Arch Villains. Some soloed Giant Monsters. All can solo missions filled with level 54 foes, on team sizes from x6 to x8, even in places like Dark Astoria or against nasty foes like Arachnos. These things aren’t always easy, and flawless victory is almost never assured, but my best characters win far more often than not, and in quite reasonable time, in my opinion.

And I enjoy the hell out of it. This, more than anything else, is why I play. The thrill of logging in one of these favorite characters, whose backstory I am proud of, whose appearance I am proud of, and rampaging through enemies. It’s like I am some sort of Conan of Cimmeria for the digital age (sadly without the bulging biceps.)

One of the best messages I often saw written on the CoH forums, especially in the days before IOs and Incarnates, was that CoH was more about the journey, and not about the destination. For me, this was incredibly resonant – I never wanted to actually reach the end of the journey with my characters. With the plans for so many Incarnate slots in the future, that was virtually assured. Meanwhile, while I waited I could avail myself of the many ways we could now repeat content.

For what it’s worth, I did level new characters. Right around when I24 was hitting VIP beta, I was finishing leveling, slotting and “Incarnating” Tachyonic Daze, my Mind/Rad/Fire Controller. But it took a long time for me to get back to her after richly investing in Incarnate Powers for the characters that preceded her to level 50.

UberGuy's Characters

Originally, I intended to create a section here outlining my characters. That now seems like it needs to be its own thread, honestly. I have a good 14 characters who deserve serious write-ups. Some would be more detailed than others, but regardless, most of them deserve a post of their own. I also want to include some good screen shots of them, and I don't have hosting space for that at the moment. That's not hard to solve, but I don't want to leave this thread laying around incomplete for several days while I get it fixed up. So I'll create a new thread in the next few days, and link to that one from here. (That's probably not that important - the General Discussion forum is on fire, and threads like this sink fast. But hey, I'll feel like I did a thorough job. )

What Comes Next

Clearly, I have characters I dearly enjoy playing, and I don’t plan to give up on playing them until I’m forced to. I'm not alone - I have many in-game friends who plan to be here till the lights go out. I think the reasons for all of us combine those two things – we all want to stay so we can wrap up the stories of our characters as best as possible, so we can squeeze the last bit of enjoyment out of playing them, and so we can be there with and for each other as we all do so.

I always claimed on the game's forums that I would be there in CoH when the lights went off on the servers. I wasn't just saying that – it was a sincere claim, though it's one thing to say it when it’s not happening and another to actually be faced with it. Now, finally faced with it, that's what I plan to do. But damn if doing so isn’t bittersweet. I don't blame anyone for walking away just to avoid the sad part of the experience. However, I’m stubborn, and more importantly, if I walked away now, I think I would look back on it as “giving up”, and I would regret having done so.

Even among folks who plan to play to the end, I see a lot of talk of the game's sunset being a kind of Armageddon, an end of the world scenario, where everything ends and all the characters die. That actually surprised me when I first read it, because that's not how I envision it at all. For me, this is going to be like the end of a movie that leaves open the potential of a sequel, and makes you actually want there to be a sequel. I don't mean a CoH 2.0 sequel. I'm talking about the story of my characters. That story I get to see played out on a screen in front of me is going to end, and I wish it wasn’t so. But just because the movie fades to black doesn't mean the world ends. It just means I have to imagine the story after that point. I have to imagine the further adventures. It’s not as satisfying as getting to play, but it’s much better than imagining that they all die.

I look at it like this. CoH has given me eight years to use a wonderful set of tools in a great setting, which combined to let me create characters uniquely my own. CoH’s tools and setting clearly strongly influenced the form of those characters, but their core sprang from my imagination. CoH going away will take certain things away from me that I will always miss, and I will miss some quite terribly, but in the end, it can't take my imagination or my dreams away. My characters will not die. They will live on as long as I do, and maybe even as long as some of my gaming friends do.

As much as it hurts to have to look forward to losing the CoH community (as such), the entertainment of playing the game interactively and the hobbies of posting on the forums and creating new character builds, life does go on. CoH has touched and shaped all of our lives and we'll still be here when it's gone. We shouldn't plan to purge from ourselves the good things we got from CoH that don't shut down with the servers. I plan to take all of it with me when I go, wherever I go, and that includes my dreams of my characters' further adventures. For that, I have to imagine that they live on, even if I can’t see them anymore.

And maybe, someday, I'll get that sequel after all.

Thanks for sharing, Uber. As a fellow speeder-in-crime may you continue to break rewards records in everything you do in life. To think I was weeks away from quitting when Gerswin introduced me to a group of people (which included you) that would become my best friends in-game for the next few years.

My top two favorite moments during the game that I shared with you:

1. Double MO Apex where we used the original Master of settings while also completing the new MO settings for the Apex TF. No temps and no deaths (enemies were lvl 54) all in 36 mins; good times.

2. P.E.R.C. Presents The Rikti Global Offensive contest, where we took first place in the Extreme Challenge (Extreme: Complete the LGTF with all of the following selected; NO ENHANCEMENTS, PLAYERS UNDER CONSTANT DEBUFF, and NPC’s BUFFED. The team with this selected and the least amount of deaths will earn the title: THE MOST EXTREME!. *Note: In the event of a tie the winner will be determined by the fastest time.). We managed to complete it in 59mins and were 2 generators away from having 0 deaths (lol @Nakoa you blew it dood :P ), easily taking 1st place.

Hopefully there will be a game that comes out down the road where we'll find the perfect storm of mechanics/fun that we can abuse together again.

Cai =^;^=

I didn't expect to read this just now, but I ended up doing so! I've been contemplating a "book" of my own about my experiences here, but it'd probably only be half as long!

First, I just want to thank you for your contributions to the community. It is very much appreciated!!

And, it is funny... for the most part, your playstyle and mine couldn't be much more farther apart. The delving deep into the numbers for maximum optimization and such, as well as the completionist/near-ocd aspect that you mentioned yourself are pretty much opposite my extremely casual, numbers-mostly-be-damned, not really think much about anything other than immersion, joy, role-playing and character concepts/background/development... Aha! As I continued to read, there was more similarity, after all.
Plus, I also grew up playing old game systems together with my friends. My brother and our nextdoor neighbor basically all lived playing together (Apple iie, Atari 800, Atari 2600 and on...).
I wish we all had continued to play together, as you have with your friend... perhaps we may still reconnect some day and do as such.
Regardless, I can relate to how much of a lifelong impact that has had between you and with this game, specifically.
That is no small thing, at all.

Another thing I can really relate to from your post is the forum experience. I'll not go on and on any more (I'll save that for my own "book", haha), but interacting with this community has been a great resource for more than just the game information and culture. Learning more and more about communicating and interacting with others in this form has been a great aspect of these forums for myself.

Anyway, I think we may have interacted once or twice, possibly while you were first stepping into the broader ranges of discussion around here. Of course, we'd probably be on some opposing points of views about design and such... but I share your utter dislike of incorrect "facts" and subjective opinions stated as facts. And I certainly came to find yourself to be a reasonable poster and member of this community.

My hastily typed out response here aside... Thanks for sharing and I hope the unknown is filled with a lot of pleasant replacements (for lack of a better term). I too am glad for my time here and know that all of my characters will continue on (possibly in writing).

Excelsior!

I really appreciate that. A lot of writing that up was about trying to really get my own head around what this game meant to me, trying to make sense of the pain I experienced when I heard I was losing it. But it very much warms my heart to know that by writing it I let someone else see a connection between themselves and someone very different, so I very much thank you for sharing that.

Holy wall of text batman!

I'll make my way through it a bit later, but Uber, you were always one of the poster names that made me pay attention to a thread.

I would love to give you five stars for that, but as you know, that rating system went out the door a long time ago.

Great, great post reminding me of a lot of what I had forgotten. Thank you UberGuy.

I've always liked your style, Uber, must be the Tribes connection. Two of the best games ever made, and the revival isn't half bad itself.

*burns uber to the ground with a plasma rifle while he's busy typing.

I'd gotten burned out about a year and a half ago, but it was always comforting in some way to know my characters would be there if I wanted to see them. There are a few that I'm attached to in some odd way.

But people are a whole other story. The communities you mentioned kept me around long after the challenge of the game had faded, and you were a big part of that. Reading through the epistle of Paul to ncsoft brought back a lot of good memories, over whats almost been a generation of time (we talked about when tribes came out, and its been nearly 14 years ago that we met).

I'm pretty bad about staying in touch with people, but this is a community I'll probably make an effort to stay in some sort of contact with.

It's really disheartening to see you and everyone else treated this way. I'd always expected CoH would slowly transition to a small group of dev's keeping it up over the years, and never get shut down, because it had such dedicated players. To see it go like this, when they've finally introduced a real end-game, is very disappointing, and really illogical on their part. As Con always used to say to me: "Q, take your logic and get out".

This is a great thread, and a great personal story. Thank you for sharing it.