What made City of Heroes unique for you?

awesome character creation
a modern, urban setting (was unique at launch)
a lack of crafting (at launch)
the best teaming I've expirenced (an eight-player team is some of the best fun I've had in gaming)
fun, active combat rather than setting your main weapon to "attack" then throwing in the occasional spell
powersets that can make different characters the same class (archetype) play completely differently

The best community out there.

More Pie per player than any other MMO in history.

Demorecording, and being able to create machinima that went FAR beyond what just recording in-game could allow you.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Thanks for the continued sharing of thoughts about what made City of Heroes unique for you.

Here are some more new entries for the list:

* Never went through a server merge

* Let you preview your abilities during character creation and costume modification

* Decoupled your character's appearance from its abilities, providing complete freedom during the costume creation process

* Allowed you to write publicly-viewable bios/backgrounds for your characters

* Had a cross-server marketplace with complete anonymity between buyers and sellers, and opacity of selling and asking prices

* Was the first MMO to allow your character to be capable of fully unrestricted and untimed flight, without gliding or using mounts

* Allowed you to create 8-person teams, or up to 48-person leagues for larger group content

* Had a demo recording function that allowed you to record in-game activities, or edited to create your own machinima productions

* Allowed you to save/load costumes, preferences, and UI customizations for use on other characters

* Had 20 different methods of transiting between game zones, including across realms, resulting in some of the fastest play and travel times of any MMO
(methods considered are direct (i.e. AP to SC), train, ferry, helicopter, TUNNEL, Ouroboros, Pocket D, Midnighter Club, Vanguard base, smuggler ship, Portal Industries portal, Hortha vine, Submariner Janus, auction house TP, mission TP, base TP, long range TP, lighted path TP, DA portals, and Mistress Eva/Carter Mordesen portals)

* Allowed you to pause multi-quest "dungeons" to finish later at your convenience

* Had both local server and global friends lists, as well as a global ignore list for spammers or offensive players

* Had multiple levels of publicly hiding yourself from other players, allowing your gameplay to be as social or as private as you chose

I'm so saddened this game is closing it's doors after being a player from the very beginning.

Power Animations - For me the power animations are completely unique to this game and the best I've ever seen to date. So many other games the animations look clearly artificial and computer generated or cartoonish. CoX animations are fluid or sharp exactly where they needed to be and completely believable. The lighting f/x, particle effects, you name it they are hands down the best around.

Teaming- I have never played another MMO that had such ease in jumping in on or creating teams. COX WAS ALL ABOUT TEAMING! You never get turned down joining a team, except for the rare idiot.

The community - Getting help or giving help was a joy in this game.

"Costume Contest under Atlas Globe X million for first prize."

Demo creation and customization - Capturing and customizing demos to your hearts desire was amazing in this game with 3rd party tools that the community created to do it. I have bunches of vids on youtube as do soooo many others. Hats off to you Samuraiko for all the amazing videos you have made. I would love to see a final tribute to CoX by you.

Goodbye everyone. .....

Hello, everyone.

For me it is simply the great community of players.

Over the years that I have been here, I've been continually amazed by the people I've met: many from distant corners of the World.

As a new player, I would suddenly find a high level SO dropped in my inventory by a passing lvl-40, giving me funding to outfit my character. A timely helpful hand when I was in over my head street swiping. And just having someone I might never see again give a positive comment on my character name, bio, or costume.

Meeting people just hanging out in Atlas to chat with. Interesting and well planned costume contests that attracted over 200 players for over an hour of competition. That group of midget robots I saw in Steel Canyon that had the same look except for their assigned functions in the group: great idea!

The Taxibot teleporter system for location badges. That was an awesome Supergroup.



Other MMO's will have a hard time matching the community depth that I have witnessed in CoH.





Stormistress

I didn't notice if anyone had mentioned it, but the fact that the playable characters were superheroes, and moreover player-created superheroes, was what made it unique (for me), and was the entire reason I bought in.

I know for others, it was the game mechanics, or the community, or the feeling of personal relationship fostered with the devs over time, but for me it was definitely the genre. Those other things were pleasant enough, but they were icing on the cake. If it hadn't been specifically about superheroes, I'd likely never have tried it.

There was no other video game at the time that offered the same level of ease and simplicity with which to create your own superheroic characters. Being able to play with friends was pure bonus.

Added a few more items to the list:

* Didn't use pointless backtracking along explicitly-defined paths as a time sink for traveling between quests and contacts

* Gave you the ability to call contacts directly rather than having to return to them for your next quest

* Didn't place silly restrictions on your character's movement around game zones - "You want to climb that hill over there that you'd be able to in real life? Sure, go ahead!"

* Didn't automatically force you to team with other people simply because of where you were or what you were doing

* Didn't require you to "gather ten of those plants to make a good soup" or "kill five of those predators to protect my herd" - 99% of quests were combat-oriented "go punch somebody in the face"

* Used actual opening and closing doors for quest instances, providing better immersion in the game world

* Used Buffing and Debuffing characters as "force multipliers," making your team much more powerful than you would have been without them

* Had a power-to-level-difference ratio such that your character couldn't still be defeated by an enemy mob five levels below you

* Had a Pet/Summoning class which could have buffs, debuffs, healing, and damage all rolled into one fully-controllable "Army of Seven"

Two more to add to the list:

* Always gave you entirely new abilities when you leveled up, rather than just more powerful versions of old ones

* Scaled your abilities' effectiveness as you leveled up, making them just as useful at max level as at level one

Discussion in a thread about inspirations made me realize I'd completely forgotten to mention them in the list. So, the following points have been added:

* Had multiple tiers of consumable buffs (obtainable as drops or purchased from contacts or the market) that increased your health, endurance/mana, accuracy, damage output, damage resistance, defense, or protection from status effects, or rezzed your character from defeat

* Allowed you to combine unwanted consumables into a specific one you needed

* Allowed stacking use of consumables that could turn your character into a nigh-indestructible damage-dealing god for a short time

* Would auto-rez your character if you leveled up while defeated on the battlefield, while also applying all top-tier consumable buffs simultaneously

THe powers mostly. I like the different power sets. Not so much the cherry picking system of CO.

There is no other game on the market that handles teaming as well as this one does. Whether it be just you and a friend or a whole team the auto-sidekick system is awesome! And the fact that any eight players can for an effective team regardless of their builds is good too. In the old day there was no team more powerful than eight Controllers in the high 20’s.

Pick up groups are also huge fun. Not just for the above reasons but because 95% of the time they really worked out well. I stayed up much later than I planned more often than I care to admit just because I got on a team that was blowing through levels like Kleenex!

This is the first MMO that I ever played and every game from now on will be measured against it.

Whoa, I just noticed my join date is December 2004!

Besides the plethora of really friendly people, I think it is the ability to customize everything. Your characters can have personalities reflected by costumes and bios. They aren't a bunch of same-faced clones with few choices of looks or powers. (Through the years I saw many toons created to honor a friend or family member that had passed away, and it was represented in the bio and appearance. I even cried a couple of times.) I truly believe this is why everyone cares so deeply for this wonderful game. It is personal to so many because we can make it so. That is why there is such a feeling of loss and sadness for me at the thought of losing this amazing playground....a place where I can actually fly and do heroic things.

I've updated two points on the list with more accurate totals after performing some maths:

* Had over 1200 different ability set combinations for each of those 768 potential character slots at character creation, with nearly 3 billion total different combinations available
(formerly "over 30 million")

* Had literally trillions of costume combinations available right out of the box, with hundreds more costume pieces you could earn, unlock, craft, or purchase, making over 4.5 quindecillion (4.5 x 10^48) total combinations per costume
(formerly "over 10 tredecillion (10^42)")

The ability set combinations include Primary, Secondary, Pool, Epic, and Incarnate sets, but NOT individual combinations of powers within those sets.

Costume piece total includes every piece that is available to unlock on both live and beta servers, excluding weapon customizations.

Was my first MMO ever and got in the beta and I was a total n00b with keyboard clicky stuff and I thought to myself I will never learn this but I was amazed even back then how easy it was to play and the game was just amazing and it was a SUPER HERO game lol that was sooooooo unique to me...love CoH forever