City of Heroes is shutdown.
The MMO City of heroes was shut down on Friday, Nov. 30. Said goodby to all of my characters, got in a last day of gaming with a lot of old Blacksburgian friends. Logged them off in places that seemed at least somewhat appropriate.
First character I was a dual-blades scrapper, "Thug2". This was based on a VTSFFC film project at Virginia Tech, "The Adventures of Who-Man". Idea was what happened if you combined the 60's era Batman (i.e., Adam West) with the worst of the 70's-80's Dr. Who. One of the jokes was that none of the villians (TrainMaster, Fatwoman, The Twiddler) could tell any of the thugs apart. Thug3 was most upset about this. Details at [url] www.Galtham.org[/url]
The Thugs were on two servers- Triumph (our main server, which we started on because most of the VTSFFCers we knew were on that one) and Victory (Shawn was on that one, although I don't think we ever managed to team up).
First, the Victory Thugs logged out together, in the most cheesy-Batman location we could think of, the giant coin in front of the King's Row police station.
Thug2 on Triumph logged out by himself, on top of City Hall in Atlas Park.
There was an old PnP game in Blacksburg, set in 2032, where I played a guy in a powered, rigid space suit, Orion. I couldn't get the CoH costume creator to make a suit that I liked, so I edited it to be more Apollo-era. And the name was taken, so I tacked "White" on the front, based on the suit color. Gave him a backpack, which was *meant* to be a heavy outdoor backpack, but when colored white it did a pretty good job of looking like an Apollo-era life support unit. Was a Willpower/Energy Melee tanker. Since his backstory was that he specialized in fighting Rikti, he logged out in the Vanguard briefing room in the Rikit War Zone.
A CoH origional was one of Nate's ideas for a themed group. The Rat Pack; everyone was a form of rodent. I picked a gun-toting maniac rodent, named him Rat-a-tat-tat. Assault Rifle/Traps corruptor. Logged out stading on the most military-looking thing I could find, a tank in the Rikti War Zone.
Nate had a later, more popular idea for a themed group: The GunBunnies. From the deranged (and dirty) mind of Dr. Lagomorph, a group composed entirely of supermodels in Playboy Bunny suits carring assault rifles. Names were color-coded (Gunbunny Red, Gunbunny Blue, etc). When we had large numbers of them in one place (I think there were 16? 18?) we freaked out everyone on Protector Server. Mine was one of the later ones, GunBunny Grey (we were running out of colors). An Assault Rifle/Cold Domination corruptor. Each bunny had a series of themed costumes (basic bunny suit, tux suit, Roman toga, anime sailor suit, and Biker were the basic set). Yvonne logged hers (Gunbunny Violet) next to mine on top of the big Lord Recluse statue in Grandville.
My only Praetorian was mostly a joke character. One of the archetypes was a "controller". The game had just come out with animal heads. So...Control-a-bull. Created by the mystic BovoTech Masters. His battle cry was "Bull!". Movement power superspeed (the running of the bulls). Etc. Logged out in front of the Midnighter's Club in Steel Canyon.
My "Main" character, the one I most liked playing, was Lady Lagome/Amy Anderson. She's from the PnP game that we've been running pretty much since we moved to the west coast. In that game, she's the team's healer, magical expert, and biology consultant. Secret ID is head of the Xenobiology dept. of the University of Washington (hopefully the the real UW does not have such a department). The CoH one logged out in the University in Steel Canyon.
Finally, Beamrider. A character from my first PnP superhero game, in Blacksburg. Daniel had "Wavefront", the two were identical twins (real origional, I know :-) Wavefront is in the shot, along with Yvonne's American Girl. This was taken under the statue in Atlas Park, with the huge crowd that had gathered as the server was being shut down for the last time. Due to all the power effects going off from the mass of characters, contrast is really low. We're holding torches, the emote that was used by many characters in the last few weeks to commemorate the loss of the game. The word bubble to the immediate left is from Nate, a VTSFFCier.
Finally: there is a serious effort from the people at the CoHTitan website to get Disney to buy the rights to the game, and restart it. Lead by Mercedes Lackey, a longtime fantasy witer and CoH player. She needs gamers to write letters to the appropirate executives to help convince them. Information, including names and addresses, are on Mercedes' thread on the Titan forums:
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,6354.0.html
If anyone who reads this is a CoH player, please consider sending a letter.
A bunch of people on the Titan boards are also working on "Plan Z: The Phoenix Project", which has the idea of forming a new game studio and creating a replacement game. If anyone has any interest, please check out that part of the Titan forums. There is a seperate replacement effort, "Heroes and Villians", that has a Titan forum area, but that is effecitvely being lead by a single person (who didn't like what the Phoenix Project people were doing and decided to strike out oh her own) but I personally doubt that one will go anywhere.
First character I was a dual-blades scrapper, "Thug2". This was based on a VTSFFC film project at Virginia Tech, "The Adventures of Who-Man". Idea was what happened if you combined the 60's era Batman (i.e., Adam West) with the worst of the 70's-80's Dr. Who. One of the jokes was that none of the villians (TrainMaster, Fatwoman, The Twiddler) could tell any of the thugs apart. Thug3 was most upset about this. Details at [url] www.Galtham.org[/url]
The Thugs were on two servers- Triumph (our main server, which we started on because most of the VTSFFCers we knew were on that one) and Victory (Shawn was on that one, although I don't think we ever managed to team up).
First, the Victory Thugs logged out together, in the most cheesy-Batman location we could think of, the giant coin in front of the King's Row police station.
Thug2 on Triumph logged out by himself, on top of City Hall in Atlas Park.
There was an old PnP game in Blacksburg, set in 2032, where I played a guy in a powered, rigid space suit, Orion. I couldn't get the CoH costume creator to make a suit that I liked, so I edited it to be more Apollo-era. And the name was taken, so I tacked "White" on the front, based on the suit color. Gave him a backpack, which was *meant* to be a heavy outdoor backpack, but when colored white it did a pretty good job of looking like an Apollo-era life support unit. Was a Willpower/Energy Melee tanker. Since his backstory was that he specialized in fighting Rikti, he logged out in the Vanguard briefing room in the Rikit War Zone.
A CoH origional was one of Nate's ideas for a themed group. The Rat Pack; everyone was a form of rodent. I picked a gun-toting maniac rodent, named him Rat-a-tat-tat. Assault Rifle/Traps corruptor. Logged out stading on the most military-looking thing I could find, a tank in the Rikti War Zone.
Nate had a later, more popular idea for a themed group: The GunBunnies. From the deranged (and dirty) mind of Dr. Lagomorph, a group composed entirely of supermodels in Playboy Bunny suits carring assault rifles. Names were color-coded (Gunbunny Red, Gunbunny Blue, etc). When we had large numbers of them in one place (I think there were 16? 18?) we freaked out everyone on Protector Server. Mine was one of the later ones, GunBunny Grey (we were running out of colors). An Assault Rifle/Cold Domination corruptor. Each bunny had a series of themed costumes (basic bunny suit, tux suit, Roman toga, anime sailor suit, and Biker were the basic set). Yvonne logged hers (Gunbunny Violet) next to mine on top of the big Lord Recluse statue in Grandville.
My only Praetorian was mostly a joke character. One of the archetypes was a "controller". The game had just come out with animal heads. So...Control-a-bull. Created by the mystic BovoTech Masters. His battle cry was "Bull!". Movement power superspeed (the running of the bulls). Etc. Logged out in front of the Midnighter's Club in Steel Canyon.
My "Main" character, the one I most liked playing, was Lady Lagome/Amy Anderson. She's from the PnP game that we've been running pretty much since we moved to the west coast. In that game, she's the team's healer, magical expert, and biology consultant. Secret ID is head of the Xenobiology dept. of the University of Washington (hopefully the the real UW does not have such a department). The CoH one logged out in the University in Steel Canyon.
Finally, Beamrider. A character from my first PnP superhero game, in Blacksburg. Daniel had "Wavefront", the two were identical twins (real origional, I know :-) Wavefront is in the shot, along with Yvonne's American Girl. This was taken under the statue in Atlas Park, with the huge crowd that had gathered as the server was being shut down for the last time. Due to all the power effects going off from the mass of characters, contrast is really low. We're holding torches, the emote that was used by many characters in the last few weeks to commemorate the loss of the game. The word bubble to the immediate left is from Nate, a VTSFFCier.
Finally: there is a serious effort from the people at the CoHTitan website to get Disney to buy the rights to the game, and restart it. Lead by Mercedes Lackey, a longtime fantasy witer and CoH player. She needs gamers to write letters to the appropirate executives to help convince them. Information, including names and addresses, are on Mercedes' thread on the Titan forums:
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,6354.0.html
If anyone who reads this is a CoH player, please consider sending a letter.
A bunch of people on the Titan boards are also working on "Plan Z: The Phoenix Project", which has the idea of forming a new game studio and creating a replacement game. If anyone has any interest, please check out that part of the Titan forums. There is a seperate replacement effort, "Heroes and Villians", that has a Titan forum area, but that is effecitvely being lead by a single person (who didn't like what the Phoenix Project people were doing and decided to strike out oh her own) but I personally doubt that one will go anywhere.