Sparkly Soldier

That hinges on NCSoft selling the IP, which is something they haven't done before. Convincing them to do that is what out focus needs to be on. The moment they publicly announced that CoH was closing, it was a given that they couldn't really pull back and say "just kidding," no matter how much they regretted it afterward. The best plan to save the game as it is now has always been convincing them to sell it rather than just mothball it.

That such a miracle hasn't totally been written off yet in itself gives me hope. If it happens, I'll look forward to each and every answer being a red herring.

I was about to say just that too. If the game was being sold, the new company would be starting its subscriptions and billing plans from scratch, so we'd still get this message. Still, hope for the best and prepare for the worst...

Huh! That's really odd, but I'll give it a try later (I'd heard something about pieces being locked by level 10, but figured they'd only be unlocked per character rather than account). One short-lived but exciting pre-custom hero coming right up!

But that's the one and only thing I care about. It's the only reason City of Heroes was the first MMO to win me over as a subscriber. I wasn't worried about IO's or Incarnate content or playing as the handful of AT's still locked up, like Kheldians and Masterminds. I just wanted to support the studio that allowed me to create a character straight out of my imagination and go leaping, flying and fighting with powers that looked and even animated the way I wanted. And that's the one thing no other MMO even tries to do.

I tried to create a character in Champions Online and didn't even get past the character creator: it was just too cumbersome, too bizarrely arbitrary in its behavior (pick a basic costume piece, then pick one of the options below it, you don't like it and... whoops, the basic option has now vanished, start over and try again!) and the archetypes, like most MMOs, pretty much imposed a very specific character concept on you. Maybe freeform powers would be different, but I'm not handing over money sight unseen to find out.

Then again, I suppose CO at least lets you write a bio. The problem I find in most MMO's is that you don't really get to create a character, you just dress up the character the game gave you. I've been playing The Secret World lately, and I like it, but my character's circumstances, background, social class, even knowledge about the game's setting prior to the game were entirely set by the opening cutscene, and they're pretty restrictive. It's the same as World of Warcraft, Aion or The Old Republic: you can pick a face and a name, but really, you're just Soldier #194284215 in the Great War and everyone treats you like it. I swear to God, if I have one more trainer in an MMO shout at me like a drill sergeant... I guess developers think that the story needs to address the fact that you're just one player among many, but I don't pay $15 a month for the pleasure of some NPC telling me how worthless I am.

The topic hit it on the head. It's not just a matter of City of Heroes doing it better than other MMO's, it's that it has an entirely different design philosophy than other MMO's and nobody else has followed in its footsteps (maybe Champions does to some extent, but again, not paying money to find out based on the teeth-pulling I went through just trying to make the costume builder cooperate). City of Heroes focuses entirely on building its world while letting your character have any relationship with that world you want. Every other MMO I've tried tells a story about a character that the developers created, and you're playing the role of that character. Which is fine, it's how most fiction works, but it's also what made City of Heroes different.

Okay, that is just flat-out amazing! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mercedes Lackey! And please, please let there be at least one sane businessman in NCSoft who'll look at her letter and realize the kinds of opportunities that saving CoH would open for them.

Confirmed by Zwill: NCSoft to restore game in a scheme to boost replacement monitor sales!

God I love some of the character names in this game!

In that case, let's hope this being the story of War Witch's resurrection is also an allegory.

Anyway, I've always been puzzled at how casually the characters sometimes treat resurrecting each other ("I have a theory that bringing my uncle's dead girlfriend back to life will help make him good again," said Ms. Liberty, "let's do it!"), but that is very true to comic books, and with that said, this was a very, very fun read. Thank you for posting it!

Whoa, Laura and Graham's arcs are yours? I just ran those two arcs for the first time last week, and they're both incredible! Very well-written, nuanced, I love the morality options you're continually given throughout each of them. Without being too spoilery, I love how the outdoor map mission in Collateral Damage encourages the player to use one particular strategy and then suddenly denies you that tactic, and how later you realize that what happened on that map perfectly symbolizes the antagonist's motives and the problems with them. And on a very different note, I actually laughed out loud when one of Graham's mission briefings had him simply grumbling to himself while my character rolls her eyes and decides to follow a lead on her own. Normally I don't like it when the mission writing assumes too much about my character, but that was totally worth it.

Also...

That too, especially the moment when you open the door. It's such a classic "oh yeah, you and what army... I should really stop saying that" moment.

And if the third part of the Ongoing Training Missions means the Shining Stars, the dialogue between Twinshot and Proton as you're going through the map and then that final confrontation with the villains, then between that, Graham and Laura, you have just become my favorite writer in the game.

To present yourself so modestly, you did some absolutely great writing! Thanks for all you did for the game, and here's to hoping we'll somehow get to play through lots more of your stories.

Yuki was the second character I made and the first to capture my imagination, and yet she ironically started off as just an offhand example character I made for a friend. We're both fans of Sailor Moon (though she much moreso) and I had trouble convincing her to try City of Heroes since, and I quote, "I don't read comic books." In an attempt to convince her that the character options were far more versatile than just spandex heroes, I quickly put together an homage to Sailor Moon reimagined as a young psychic girl in Paragon City, complete with her own talking cat mentor.

But something happened: her story started blooming with hardly any effort. Mira leaped out at me as the perfect name for her mentor, and as I read about the Kheldians, the Nictus quickly emerged as the aliens who rule the future Earth, and the nature of the future apocalypse became clearer: a disaster called the Shadow Storm (no relation to the Coming Storm) struck the world, casting it into endless night and reshaping the environment to allow them to possess most of the population. The name Seraphea emerged as Yuki's future self and from there the story just kept building on itself. I wound up publishing my first AE arc as Yuki telling the player about her origin story, with flashbacks to the post-apocaypse, the day she received her powers and her first attempt at fighting crime.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=283166

And Yuki kept growing as a character in my imagination. She embodied everything cheerful, wholesome and idealistic about both the magical-girl genre and Paragon City's own optimistic atmosphere, and more and more details came to mind, from the introductory battle speech she'd have spent all night coming up with (complete with badge and title references) to the attack names she'd shout. I wrote a story about her nearly taking a life and becoming a vigilante after her harrowing journey through First Ward, and began work on two more AE arcs, a trilogy culminating in the final battle of the future war. Three more stories about Yuki as a post-Batallion adult, a hardened but still idealistic Vanguard officer leading a Nictus-hunting team of heroes in an effort to change history, emerged and other details about her life came to mind that I would love to have immortalized in story form, given the chance.

As for that friend who thought she wouldn't like City of Heroes because she loves anime and "doesn't read comic books?" As a Premium player, she's spent far more money and earned more points than I have as a year-long subscriber... and her main character is a very Silver Age-style mutant with fire powers and a spandex outfit to match.
__________

Astorian Shade, birth name unknown
Necro/Dark Mastermind

"The fog whispers your name..."




Long before I'd actually tried City of Heroes I'd heard about a place in it called "Dark Astoria," mostly from MMO-savvy friends who knew I liked atmospheric horror games like Silent Hill and Fatal Frame. The screenshots had always made me curious, and one of the first things I did upon reaching a survivable level with Yuki was go to Talos Island and find out what exactly lay behind that misty gate to the east. What I found, of course, was a place where superheroes fought Silent Hill... and Silent Hill won. The exploration badges told a fascinating story and I only regretted that there weren't more arcs involving that abandoned, haunted corner of Paragon City.

And then the news came that Dark Astoria was being revamped for incarnates.

Even if the revamp turned out to be amazing (and it did), the hauntingly atmospheric Astoria I loved seemed to be going away, and at that point there wasn't any guarantee we'd have an Echo. So, before Issue 22 came out, I vowed to create a character as an homage to the old, foggy Astoria. An idea for a Croatoa-based fairy queen summoner hadn't panned out (the powersets that would have made her feel right at home, Beast Mastery and Nature Affinity, simply didn't exist yet) and the idea crossed my mind of a ghost summoner, a vengeful spirit that summons the undead to her aid. From there her spectral form emerged, and then a human guise to justify her talking to contacts, and then a story.

The first attempt was just a vaguely poetic explanation of her background and it lasted hardly a week before the much livelier idea of presenting it as a dialogue came to mind. The question then arose of how did MAGI know about her and what's her connection to them, and as the answer grew in my imagination, it became less and less about her and more about Dark Astoria's own background. Eventually it turned into its own AE arc, a murder mystery and sort of introduction to Dark Astoria before the changes that were already being unveiled in beta...

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=283167

Her character soon began to grow into something more, and surprised me with how it developed through the story arcs. The most memorable moment was at the end of the Atlas Park arc, when she had to choose what to do with Aaron. I'd anticipated that choice thanks to playing it twice already, and imagined her being spooky and malevolent even as she spared him.

But when the time came, everything he said about heroes abandoning their duties struck a very deep nerve for her, and as she heard her own vengeful philosophy repeated back to her, she realized how wrong she'd been. And so rather than the threatening taunt I'd anticipated, what came to mind instead was her dispelling her minions, changing back into her human form and then softly and sadly saying "you're wrong" before turning her back on him and walking away to let the police handle things, and then smiling for the first time as a ghost while talking to Matt and his wife.

She was the one character to really have a narrative climax within the game, that of awakening her dormant incarnate nature, returning to Dark Astoria and challenging Mot itself for the fate of the world. I just hope I can race her through the game fast enough to get there.

During the first week or so of floating around Atlas Park as a ghost, another player ran up to her, stared for a moment at Shade with her bandaged eyes and oversized axe, and responded with a local "O.O". That may be the best compliment I've received on a character design.
__________

Virginia Dare, aka New World Daughter
Electric/Storm Corrupter

"Stay thy hand, or else lose it."


Croatoa was another zone I'd heard all about long before playing the game, and my very first character was a detective from Salamanca. But once I learned of the Cabal, the Roanoke colony's connection to Paragon City, the idea of the real-life Virginia Dare as one of the Cabal seemed too perfect to pass up. To my amazement, the developers hadn't explored that idea at all; I have a theory that Katie Hannon was written as Virginia at one point, but got changed for some reason, perhaps because Marvel's 1602 also used her and the studio just didn't think it'd be worth the headache. At any rate, it did leave "Virginia Dare: Cabal Sorceress" wide open for the players, and as a North Carolina native, the Roanoke story and the story of Virginia Dare held a special significance for me.

Alas, I spent the next month just trying to think of a fitting name for her. Weird Al certainly didn't do me any favors: it took most of that time just to chase "Dare to Be Stupid" out of my head! Then one day the phrase "new world daughter" popped out of nowhere, and a few hours later Virginia the rogue Cabal sorceress and fledgeling Paragon hero was taking her first step into Atlas Park.

The background I'd written for her character in the game gradually evolved into a much more detailed story involving her arriving in modern Salamanca and quickly being recruited by Midnight representative Ashley McKnight and MAGI representative Gregor Richardson, and it became the first story I posted in Roleplaying, and the first fanfic I've written in, oh lord, let's just say a few years...

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=293110

Veteran powers like the Blackwand and the Blue Wisp Pet really helped bring the image of her as a Cabal witch to life, and, once she returned to Salamanca at level 25 to find the rest of the Cabal running wild and the eternal war threatening innocent people, her story gained a symmetry with the game that just left me amazed at times.

From her disastrous first fight with a group of Cabal girls as they shouted "how dare you stand in my way" and "you won't take this one from me," to her changing into modern clothes and going by "Ginny, from MAGI" to avoid admitting to Mayor Bower and Skip that she's one of them, to a ferociously epic battle above the rooftops with a Sorceress of the Winds wielding precisely her powersets, the game really seemed to unfold as her story. A seek and destroy mission against the Fir Bolg quickly turned into a stealth mission when she overheard "why is she tormenting us?" and "maybe she's in league with the Red Caps," and was painfully reminded that she used to be their allies and they don't understand why she's turned on them, and the level gap between Skipper and Kelly, from 26 to 30, became a one-woman, forest-sweeping war against the Red Caps.

I'd looked forward to seeing just how a level 50 character with the Cabal's electric blast and storm summoning powers would play, but for now, I'll be content to just finish Croatoa, run the Katie Hannon Task Force (the battle between Virginia and Mary MacComber would just be so perfect from a story perspective... if agonizing from a gameplay one) and maybe, if time allows, earn the Geas of the Kind Ones accolade so her adventure can come to a proper conclusion.
__________

Eric Grayson, aka Shadow Ecliptic
Warshade

"Nobody ever picks the easy way..."



I'd already learned a lot about the Kheldian lore thanks to Yuki's backstory, but it took one friend asking me to make a low-level toon to run through the game at her pace and another friend singing the praises of his newly rolled Peacebringer character to convince me to give the Kheldians a try. Originally I'd intended to simply roll a Peacebringer character I'd written for Yuki's stories, but when every permutation of his name turned out to be taken, I went with a brand new Warshade instead. His look actually came before anything else, and that helped inspire a story that went through several twists and turns before settling into its final form.

At first I imagined an unwilling bond leading to antagonists sharing the same body, sort of Ash and his evil hand from "Evil Dead 2" starring in a buddy cop movie. That gradually turned into a more dialogue-driven concept of a human and unwilling Nictus as partners, somewhat resembling Light and Ryuk from "Death Note," and then the thought of GLaDOS and Chell crossed my mind. And the moment I imagined the Nictus having a female mental voice, his entire character snapped instantly into place and I spent the rest of the night on a caffeine-fueled typing bender to get the story that had suddenly flashed through my thoughts down on paper. Early the next afternoon, the finished story was posted. In his case, the full fanfic story actually came first, and his character background is a very, very truncated version of it...

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=294857

I haven't played him very much, since I was just arriving at Croatoa with NWD at the same time, but playing a Warshade had turned out to be immensely fun, even solo, and Dark Nova's won over even the most jaded WoW fan on the basis of "okay, I've gotta admit that looks really cool." Since his story ends with an appearance by Keith Nance, I guess I'll aim for "Twisted Reflections" as his chance to prove himself once and for all a hero, along with wherever Shadowstar's missions have led him by that point.

Anyway, those are my four biggie characters and the rambling stories of how they came to be! Here's to hoping the game can be saved somehow - I really want to find out how all their stories end.

In a way, though, that's a good sign. He could give an answer because he already knew what it was. NCSoft probably isn't saying a word because they don't know what to say yet. It's also encouraging that in their reasons for ditching CoH, they didn't use any phrases that might denigrate the game or its sales, like "due to declining revenue"; that suggests they don't want to poison any potential buyers against the game.

Okay, we'll need all you water blasters to aim up...

Think of it this way, though. They're in "competition," but no matter which game people are playing, SOE would be the one getting money from them. City of Heroes' fans by and large don't seem to overlap with DCUO's fans: what people like about this game is stuff they can't find in that one, and vice versa. If either SOE or PWE gets this game, they'd immediately double their subscribers and gain a huge market advantage over their remaining superheo MMO competitor. I wouldn't be surprised if any bidding going is mostly between the two of them.