srmalloy

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.