Not in my experience. Yes, if you provoked a high-purple mob, he’d skwush you, and maybe if you held still too long in his view… but I recall being ignored in many high-level zones. At a minimum, they wouldn’t go out of their way to bother you.
Oh, trust me, the Rularuu would not ignore you. I also got pot-shot by snipers and such in Peregrine when I was getting those badges for Aggie. The “no one-shot” code helped, as did the fact that all mobs had that delay when they went from passive to alerted to aggroed. If you just kept running, you could often get far enough away that only the closest mob would get a shot at you before the leash kicked in, so you could escape with 1 point left. Even so, the Ruu tended to be so closely packed that I’d sometimes make a run for a geyser, reach the next rock…and get hit by half a dozen blasts a moment later.
Like Bal said, they weren’t ignoring you, you were moving out of their aggro range faster than they could react. If you didn’t keep moving, you faceplanted.
Okay. Maybe I was just lucky or never stood around long enough to get shot at - or maybe I’m just misremembering my Level-1 runs.
This. If my level 25 empath went to Peregrine, he could walk right up to a mob of level 52 CoT in the parking lot of Portal Corp. and be ignored. It was as though they simply didn’t see me…at least that’s how I remember it.
Actually, they would see you better. If I’m remembering correctly, the formula for aggro range took into account the relative levels between the players and the mobs. If you were higher, their aggro range was lowered, so when they were grey to you they only attacked if you initiated it or they were forced to by mission parameters. Conversely, if you were grey to them, their range expanded to a certain point so they were more likely to chase you down. The only way to get up close to a purple mob without them beating was if it was a mission parameter or if you were stealthed in some way.
I really am remembering lowbie heroes being all but invisible to +4-5-6 and up mobs. I fully concede that I may be misremembering or had some kind of faulty interpretation, but I joined the game about ten days after launch and played until Blackout Night, and that’s now I 'member it…
Gaming the landscape was also an option. For example, the Astoria cemetery was atop a cliff, knock a non-flying purple off the cliff and it had trouble getting back to the top.
Is the reimagined COH still in the works? Haven’t heard anything for a while.
Stop bumping this thread. Just stop it, I say. 
It looks like the Phoenix Project/City of Titans chugs along. Big heart, sincere intent, got my $50 in kickstart. Not holding my breath, though.
But it’s crazy how little I can let go of that world.
Hey, I’m throwing up updates every week on the kickstarter. We’re doing okay. Slowly but surely, and surprisingly we’re actually meeting our internal timeline. Except for lore which is way ahead of it because it doesn’t need licenses.
And I’m following the updates. 
Nice update from MWM today, noting that it’s the tenth anniversary of the CoH game launch.
I’d have to dig around to find my original join date, but it was about two weeks later… meaning I was thisclose to being a charter player and always two weeks behind the wave for badges, etc.
'Gunner Lives.
OTOH, I started on launch day and never knew when a badge or Vet reward would show up until they re-did it for the freemium launch. And even then the timing was screwy on the points they gave.
Yeah, I was a player from day one - in the beta, in the pre-release, etc - and the timing for veteran badges was always funky.
The CoH creators did a Google Doc AMA (ask me anything) about Game Lore. Link is here (doc has link to two others they did as well.
I still wish I had learned, years earlier, that CoH was playable on a Mac. The marketing for the game was terrible. Over the years, I have seen so many online ads for video games, and I don’t recall ever seeing a CoH ad until after I was already playing the game. I only discovered I could play it on my Mac in 2011, when I posted in the WoW thread that I was bored with the Cataclysm expansion and wished that there was another MMO that I could play. Somebody mentioned CoH, and I signed up, and I was hooked. And then I only got to play the game for a year before it shut down :mad:
So I’m downtown, getting the wife’s car fixed (bad seat belt retractor) and on the way home the local junk-pop station played a pretty good kick-ass mission set: “Pour Some Sugar On Me” (my empathy buffer’s theme song), “Rock You Like a Hurricane” (my tanker’s working song) and then the good general rolling-thunder mission piece, “We Built This City.” I was already feeling pretty mopey when there it was: the three-lane sweeper to Providence. I wanted to go so bad.
I know it’s not there. I didn’t really care at that point. I had to will the car into the other lanes.
Fuck. When do you get over this stupid obsession?
I was watching some City of Heroes videos the other day (Boom De Yada, among others) and nostalgia hit me pretty hard. Even if City of Titans is great, with all or many of the things that City of Heroes was (and it won’t be this out of the gate – the community will have to come together and grow organically, and even City of Heroes wasn’t City of Heroes out of the gate), it won’t be City of Heroes. We may enjoy it more, it may have more of the things we liked about CoH, and better things to boot, but there’s no bringing back the past. City of Heroes was wonderful, goofy, addictive, social, versatile, and so much more. It wasn’t all things to all people, but it was many things to many different types of players.
I look forward to City of Titans and/or other successor games, but it’s kinda like that old saying: “You never forget your first.” City of Heroes wasn’t my first video game (yeah, I know, it was an MMO, but I’m talking general category here), but it was the first video game of any kind that I loved. Watching the scenes from the videos, I know I will always miss it, no matter what else comes down the pike. That’s the strongest feeling I have about City of Heroes.
As far as NCSoft, I still want nothing to do with them, but all the heat has gone out of my anger – just a lesson learned there, which really applies to all MMOs that could go out of existence tomorrow, leaving us with nothing to show for our years and years of having lived characters that became part of us. The City of Titans folks, Missing Worlds Media, have stated that one of their goals is to have some way that its players can keep their creations and play them in some form of setting, even after the game sunsets.
Lastly, I still get annoyed with people who say “Get over it! It’s just a game!”, again without any real heat in my annoyance. I don’t wanna rehash that ol’ dead horse, but I look forward to being a part of the trend that turns MMOs and other games into a service, not just a product that may turn a significant chunk of my entertainment life into nothing but “wasted” hours and years, with little or no warning and with no recourse on my part.