I spent a few minutes visiting the characters I care about the most.
Thermocline, my first 50, is standing in front of Miss Liberty. “If there must be an ending, let it be where it all began,” he says. “I stand ready.”
Super-Collider, my first character post-beta, who never made it to 50, is in Portal Court. “There’s so much to learn, and to explore. Maybe in another world, there’s a place where it will go on.”
Truck Driving Elvis, the villain I played to 50, who made it to Rogue but won’t complete his transformation to a hero, is standing next to Positron and Valkyrie. “Steel Canyon looks like a nice place to make a last stand. I’m ready to rock.”
“Undergoing a renaissance” is exactly how I’ve been describing the game to acquaintances. This game was doing well for an MMO – in fact, if you subtract the anomaly that is WoW from the field, COH/V is currently a major success.
Hell, my “other game” is Diablo 2 (still!) That one’s been running years longer, for free, and is still supported. So I didn’t particularly think a going concern like COH/V would fold at any particular time.
Adding to my angst, with D3 out, it seems logical they might shut down D2 soon anyway. THAT’S the game I was afraid for.
I’ve been searching for a metaphor to explain the impact of this to people, and I think sports provides something of an example.
Imagine the dedicated sports fans you know. They know it’s “not real,” they know it’s “just a game,” but they bleed team colors. If NCSoft had just shut down a server or two, it would be like your home team leaving town forever. There are STILL people upset about famous team moves, decades later (try whispering “Robert Irsay” in Baltimore).
Shutting down the whole game is more like your entire sport, say, football, simply ceasing operations. Even though it’s making money and popular.
“There are other sports,” people will argue. “Try curling!”
There’s other pieces too, but that’s enough for now. And, yes, I had plenty of male characters as well but they never seemed to get the art love
Anyway, I haven’t thought about my little collection much recently but, with CoH going under, it’s nice to have some tangible reminder of the good times.
Nice, Jophiel. I wish I had the artistic talent to draw my characters the way they are in my head (as opposed to the stick figures that actually appear under my hand). I’ll have to make do with screenshots and copies of their bios.
I think Agoraphobic Man will see the servers out standing on the Storm Palace, his fears conquered at last. It was a looooong slog to get a level 1 character out there on foot, and I consider it his greatest triumph.
Djinn Rumi will be in Pocket D, producing drunken illusions and special effects, and standing a round for the house.
And Balanced, my first, main, and always…will call upon the Dream Doctor to use the Dagger of Jocasta one last time, just as Bal transitions between their two forms, and restore the twins to separate bodies at last. I’ll create two new characters, one in her demonic image, and one in his angelic form, as a new crimefighting duo. (Though I won’t delete the old Bal, ever–the two can still rejoin to face cosmic threats.)
Those are the ones that matter most to me. The others, well, their lives will go on. Naramie will finish college. Regular Joe will keep heroing when his office job allows him the time. Redemption Jack will watch his adopted daughter grow up, and someday spoil her kids rotten; they’ll never know Grandpa was once an evil sorcerer.
Mostly, though, they’ll go on as they always have. Just because we won’t be there to see it doesn’t mean Paragon City won’t still be facing everything from street crime to alien invasions to interdimensional world-eating demigods. And our characters will still be there to protect it, or profit from it, according to their natures.
I already signed it, and even sent a #SaveCOH message on Twitter. I hope they can pull something off, but I’m dubious.
And yeah, maybe I can pull together enough free time to hit 50. But I want to make sure I save some screenshots of all my costumes and all my bios for my characters too..
Note that the Titan Network has released a tool that will capture each character’s costume, description/bio, experience, influence, powers, slots, enhancements, and so on and preserve the info in a file that could in theory be used to reconstitute the character in a rebooted version of the game if that becomes possible.
It’s strictly a lifeboat strategy, but it’s something.
It’s weird. I haven’t played in years, but this still bothers me. Playing with the old SDMB group. Megs, Eric, Brianac4, Manuel Errata, Max Carnage, lots of others. I still think about signing in Johnny Daemon, but real life take precedence. I guess I just figure it would always be there, which is silly.
But for a year, the year I played basically almost every day, the year the I probably caused a lot of problems with my future wife (at the time, she’s my wife now), the year that I thought nothing of the fact that it was 2 am and I was trying to farm wolves (and since I couldn’t stay up for that now), it was great and wonderful and I will always be something I miss. When having a six slots full of SO enhancements was a big deal. When you could take an arch villain solo. When you still got the actual printed comic in mail. Before Smoke Grenade got nerfed. Or invincibility. I remember trying to play from a terrible company issued laptop on a hotel connection because I wanted to make sure we could finished something. It shouldn’t bother me that it’s going away, because I haven’t payed or played in forever, but it does. I signed on right after the beta finished. I feel like something I helped build is going away.
Guess that’s all part of being an adult, but still, that year that I went to 50 was great. Just wish it was going to stick around.
I haven’t played this game in years, but I’d sad to see it go. I won an “award” of sorts for best thread (maybe best humor thread–something like that) on the official forums years ago. It was a “Ask the Newbie” thread as my main (and only 50), Angus McKenzie. The “award” was merely online recognition with an official mention in the forums, didn’t even get a free month subscription extension or anything.
