srmalloy

The classic was the Portal Corp mission 'wolf farm' on the instance map that was the NE corner of Bricktown; the mission goal was to close the eight dimensional portals, but you ignored them. You needed a tanker (Inv worked best) and a /Dev blaster. The blaster flew to an open-top dumpster to the north on the east side and started putting down Trip Mines continuously while the tanker ran around aggroing the map (the trip mines would age out and vanish, so the blaster had to keep putting new ones downl. When the tanker had grabbed the map, they would call 'inbound', and the blaster flew up toward the height limit. The tanker would jump into the dumpster, and the wolves would jump in after them. Because mobs didn't have a vertical collision box, mobs could jump down onto each other and overlap, and you'd get about 90% of the map in the dumpster. Because of a quirk with Trip Mine, if the blaster that put it down was too far away, the mine wouldn't go off, so the 12—15 trip mines in the dumpster would just sit there. Once the tanker was sure they'd gotten all they could into the dumpster, they'd call 'in', and the blaster would dive down; when they got in range, all the mines would go off. All the wolves in the dumpster would go down, your Inspiration and Enhancement trays would instantly fill up, and you'd get around 600,000 to 800,000 XP. Exit, reset the mission, and repeat. One of the funny things that would happen, if you were too close to the dumpster when the mines went off, is that you would get a pop up window from the game engine that said "Too many effects to render." Unfortunately, the change to the aggro limit made it impossible to get the entire map at once, so the classic wolf farm fell to the game updates. Prior to that, though, putting limits on how many times you could reset a mission, and making that mission timed, restricted how much you could exploit it for XP and drops, but didn't stop it. A lower- level open-zone version of this, with somewhat different tactics, came from before the changes to Burn that ended the Burn Tanker as the brain-dead leveling build, epitomized by the Burn Tanker -- and I'm sure someone still has screenshots of this -- running through Perez Park aggroing all the Skulls and Hellions on the streets and dragging them to the dumpster in the southeast corner of the zone, jumping in, and burning down all the mobs that followed them in.

And the people out farming Madness Mages for the Luck Charms they dropped; those were always the limiter on making the first-tier Accuracy IOs. I would slot out in 15 IOs at 12, then try to hang on to replace everything with 30s at level 27, because 30s were better than even-level SOs, so from there to 50 your IO slotting just got better.

Unfortunately, no. If you read deeper in the story:

One of my characters from before the shutdown, Yaderniy Ogon, used the chitin set colored to look like chitin plates and exposed muscle. When I found that CoH accepted Unicode, I made her a chat bind that said, in Russian, "This isn't a costume; this is my body. A 'gift' of 'glorious Soviet technology'." She had some issues.

I can't tell you offhand what pieces I used (from screenshots of all my characters before the shutdown), but there are insectoid costume parts in the creator:

Given that PvP wasn't part of CoH until issue 4, and was then restricted to the Arenas, and that the devs entered into an ongoing process of reworking the way powers worked (with the claim that "we won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons", which soon became "we'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons" and then disappeared completely as more and more changes were made to PvE abilities to fix balance issues in PvP -- remember movement suppression?), I think it's pretty clear that CoH was designed from the ground up as a PvE game -- and, in fact, one of the things that attracted me to it in the first place was that it didn't have PvP -- that had PvP plastered to the side as an afterthought.

The thing that epitomizes City of Heroes for me above everything else comes from an ITF where a mother and her five-year-old son were on our team, with the kid carrying his weight in the fights, and the mom said that CoH was the only online game that she had no qualms about letting her son play unsupervised, because of what the playerbase was like. And in every other MMO I've played, there is a visible level of vitriol in the chat channels, the official forums, the reddits, and where open-world PvP is enabled, a population of yahoos whose sole metric for how skilled they are as a player is how fast their level-capped character in best-in-slot gear can gank characters fresh out of the tutorial area. It's a sad reflection on other MMOs.

There is only one thing that would make this more magical than it has been for me being able to recover something I feared lost forever -- When the game shut down, I was playing the first character I'd created, four days after launch, in the bottom of the bowl in the middle of a Rikti Mothership raid,playing as if it was just another night and the game wasn't going to be shut down; if I'd been able to come back to the bowl, it would have been the perfect resurrection of the game. But the work that has been done to bring it back at all is more than I thought I would see. Thank you.

I suspect that it's an issue with the host that is managing the server access -- so many people going through it that it's not getting connections back from the individual servers quick enough, and they're timing out, so they're showing as down.