Starsman's Farewell

Where to start?…

Funny, I always said I'd never write a goodbye post when I quit, but this is not exactly quitin, is it?

This is insanely sad for me. A month before the cancelation announcement, I had a false alarm that I may be a father within the following 8 months. This will sound crazy, (however my eyes water right now as I type this bit) but one of the first thought was: I ponder if by the time my kid is old enough to use a computer, this game will still be around for me to share it with him or her? You know, same way I see other gamers still share games like EQ or WoW with their children.

I guess I got the answer to that, and it really made me cry at the time. The range of emotions still plague my mind, from sadness to anger, but that has been beaten to death so I won’t go into it all here. Instead, I want to talk a bit(lot) about my time in Paragon.

The Begining

2004, Vega Alta, Puerto Rico.

I was at the local Game Stop browsing around, looking for something that may catch my eye. At the time I was playing Final Fantasy XI rather “casually”, if there is anything casual about that game. While there, I saw this box, a recently released game called City of Heroes. I had read an article on it a few years back but never followed it much, despite my background in super hero comics (I used to be a huge collector and until 2003 worked in a comic book store/anime video club.)

I figured I would give it a try. I paid for it and walked back home. Installed it, updated, and finally the point came to create my account. Cebastian. That is my logging name in this game. Unlike many other logins, this one is unique to this game. I was not taking CoH very seriously at the time, the name was the name of my FFXI one character, and a “reminder” that home was in Vana’diel.

Oh but what an shocking experience. Like most, I’m sure, I spent several hours playing with the character creator and eventually came up with my first [throw away] hero: The Thunder Lawyer. A criminal defense lawyer who discovered he was a mutant with lightning blast powers when his client took the judge hostage at gun point, accidentally blasting said client’s head off.

The possibilities were endless. I created so many characters at first… eventually I decided I wanted to create a clone of my favorite super hero: The Savage Dragon, and Invuln/SS tanker. The name was taken on most servers BUT Triumph, so that’s when I first logged in to the server that, unknown to me, would become my new digital home for the next 8 years.

In my first week of patrol, in Galaxy City, I bumped with another clone, a guy by the name of Action Hank, an Invuln/MA scrapper. He was in trouble so I helped him out and a short friendship was born. We decided to move eventually to Kings Row and decided to make a bigger team. We broadcasted for a member and we got a dark/dark named Nyght.

We entered one of the infamous front-loaded missions and rather quickly got killed. We go to the hospital but noticed that somehow, the Defender survived. We run back to the mission only to find that somehow this woman managed to wipe that entire room by herself while we were in the hospital. That’s a memory that stuck with me for years.

Action Hank did not last long in the game, he left the game rather early, but most my friends can be traced back to Nyght. She started a super group called the Midnight Watch, tight bunch no Zerg for sure. Through her directly I got to meet two of my longest time in game friends: Iron Samurai and Jodie Winters/ManySplinters. None of them play anymore, but we have a lot of fond memories… for instance, the super group colors (at the time fixed at creation) were purple and pink, a theme that looked good in her character, and with her intended combination of mostly purple, but not so good when my gigantic fire/fire tanker stone-skinned balrog decided to die himself 100% pink. This became a pseudo-tradition for a while, at the end of a successful mission or evening, everyone would go 100% pink victory dance. I wish I had those screenshots still, that hard drive died a long time ago.

The Savage Dragon character was short lived, I was aware of the clone policy but mostly I figured at some point I may want to write a web comic about my character, and I can’t really do that with a hero that belongs to someone else. So two heroes were born, my only level 50 heroes: Starsman and Lungorthar.

I can go on with the memories, but I bet the few that started reading this are already over it, so I won’t write my entire biography here.

BTW, I did go back to FFXI, and I was never able to stand it again. Travel restrictions were the biggest barrier of re-entry.


About me…

Few players here know me for my number crunching and charts, although mostly those that follows the tanker forums because I rarely posted outside of it. My truest passion, however, has always just been to fly. There have been many points over the last 8 years where I “quit” the game, not because of boredom but… well let’s admit it, back in the day there was not that much content anyways. But no matter what game I went to play, I would keep my CoH account active because I just had to log in at least once a week and simply fly. I almost was able to feel the air in my character’s face. It was extremely liberating. Fly high… turn it off and free-fall and try to turn fly back on as close to the ground as possible… it was a game off itself.

Mind you, balance still was an important issue for me, although not in the power gaming sense. The few that know about my charts may think I was an epic power gamer. Truth is I only had 2 level 50s and casually IOed. My obsession with balance has never been about the upper limits, but about the lower limits. It was just a tool to attempt to convince the devs to fix what I considered to be underperforming classes and/or sets. I think I did influence plenty of changes, my main goal (tanker revamp) never came to be, but I’m glad to have been a big part of the Dominator revamp.

Back when Going Rogue was released, I quit the game. At the time, I thought I was quitting for good. There were many complex reasons for me to quit. One was how I envisioned brutes would replace tankers and make them obsolete. Another one was that I found the expansion to be lacking from a content point of view. It had lots of content but mostly all spent on tips that were free for everyone without the expansion and branches in level 1-20 content. Unless I planned to be changing a lot of characters faction or play a lot of characters from 1 to 20, I found there was no reason for me to get GR.

But the true stronger reason for me to quit the game was that I wanted to try my own hand at making video games. So I quit, sent a few PMs to a select few and canceled my account quietly. No goodbye letters, no “game is doomed”, I just left with an updated sig stating my activity start and end date.

It was a bumpy road, but I managed to make two games for mobile devices. Despite their simplicity I learned some big lessons, like how much is involved in the silliest of changes EVEN when you have 100% control of the game’s direction. And these where very simple 2d games, no deep content heavy complex system mmorpgs! So needless to say I developed a lot more tolerance and understanding for this game’s devs.

By the time I came back, so much had changed. Pretorian content had been heavily expanded, so many new power sets introduced, my “favorite” goto devs gone (Castle and BABs) and a crazy incarnate advancement system. Oh and although people did not shrug tankers aside, every mission I shared with a brute seemed to have the solid understanding that it was more productive for the brute to be the main tank so he can feed his fury. *Lesigh.*

I still have been having a blast, missed flying so much, and got to admit, missed herding just as much.

There was so much content I still had to play, I never played the signature arcs and doubt I’ll have time to play them through by tomorrow. Cant whine much about it, had a lot of time in the last 3 months and wasted it, but it was not the same with nearly all my friends gone.


Death my heroes? Not on my watch.

Over the years, Starsman has grown to be a very complex character in my head. He is not a bunch of pixels on the screen. The character in the screen is merely an interpretation of the one in my head. How many of you respect your characters, and changed your costumes over and over?

I have played many MMOs, with EQ being the first. For many years I would play Borus Wintersong, a bard. This character moved with me to every MMO I played either as a bard or a rogue (if no bard class… sidenote: WoW, want me back? Give me bards!) A version of him even exists in this game, although admittedly it never fit this environment nicely.

My point is: my characters are part of me, not part of the game. The look may never be right, but they will live be it here, DCUO, CO, pen and paper, or in a game of my own making years from now. There is only one way NCSoft can kill Starsman and it’s through putting a bullet through this Puertorican’s head.


Where to next?

I doubt I’ll get into any other MMO. They are a huge time sink. I also don’t see me ever diving into numbers as much as I did here, and without that knowledge I feel naked in almost every MMO. Diving that deep into the mechanics is extremely time consuming and it’s something I did slowly over years of analysis.

As much as I love CoH and hate its forced exit, its closure WILL force-save me a lot of time I can use developing my own games. So most likely I will be sticking to single player games (I have a HUGE backlog anyways… goes back to the PS1…) and focus on making my own games. I have already been toying around with my next project.


Finally, good bye

Well, this is it. There is a lot more I can say, but I will end here. I want to say a few words to a lot of people:

To the devs, but mostly Castle, BaBs, Arbiter Hawk and Synapse: You guys rocked. Yes all of you. Even when we disagreed, even when you messed up. It was a learning curve, but the last few years have proven you guys mastered the system. Sure there still balance gotchas, but the amazing factor has never been in the downslope. Wherever you go: keep up the great work.

To friends gone and not:

Nyght, Fire Drake, Action Hank, ManySplinters, Iron Samurai, VoidTyger, TabbyCat: I miss you still. I don’t think I will ever forget you (hey if after 8 years I still remember some of you guys I think I have no way out of it!)

Arcanaville, you got to be on everyone’s list I think! You were epic and always helpful. I think I never had such a pleasant experience at disagreeing with someone in the past than I did with you. You were always objective and there was always something to learn. You won a thousand internets. I also enjoyed that special brand of trolling you would pull out once in a while. It’s like watching someone pummel an plague ridden mutant rat with a silk covered club… trolling finesse to its… finest! You will be missed!

And I want to add a special mention to:

Dark_Respite. Your videos were extremely epic. The game may go down but the demo-record editing may go on, I hope I get to see more of your work show up in the titan forums.

To everyone else:

This community was amazing, and all of you (minus the rare party pooping troll) are all responsible. I will miss you all.

DARNIT, I thought I had all the tears out of my system already...

Contact info

If you want to contact me, you can find me in the following places:

Twitter: @BomberCat
Email: hjoy at starsmangames.com
Xbox Live: Tharsman
Steam: Tharsman or Starsman (also try the Steam group “Paragon Hub”)
AoL: Lungorthar

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Starsman, you fit nicely into a constellation of posters (see what I did there?) who defined how we received and understood our knowledge of the game. They were posters who made me want to check a thread when I saw they had posted in it, or especially if they started it.

For being one of those people, I thank you. This forum has probably been close to as important to me for the past 8.5 years as the game itself. It, and those posters on it who stood large in my mind, will be missed.

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Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA

As someone who was also active on and made some good friends from the Tanker forums, I'd also like to say thank you for your efforts to learn about the game and share information about what you learned.

It was good talking with you in the past about Tankers and the game. Good luck with your games, I'll keep an eye on your website!

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Please try my custom mission arcs!
Legacy of a Rogue (ID 459586, Entry for Dr. Aeon's Third Challenge)
Death for Dollars! (ID 1050)
Dr. Duplicate's Dastardly Dare (ID 1218)
Win the Past, Own the Future (ID 1429)

Thank you guys. I will miss you all. Big time.

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TLDR but will say bye and see you on Guild Wars 2

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The Alt Alphabet ~ OPC: Other People's Characters ~ Terrific Screenshots of Cool ~ Superhero Fiction

I keep reading the title as "Stateman's Farewell". Darnit!

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You were a legendary forumite. Never forget the community you helped lead.

/em hug

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@Rien

I am Lord Omi. Now and forever. They can take our City, but they can't take me.

I wont forget even if I tried


BTW, found my first character in the Liberty server. He still is wearing costume pieces that are no longer available in the character creator. Here is a shot:

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