USCI

Well, a few of these names seem pretty familiar to me, but old age does play tricks on my memory. I never "clanned up", but I did run my own solo SG on Freedom, the US Federal Bureau of Superheros (red, white, and blue theme). Most days, I would play two of my favorites... US Customs Inspector (tank) Ammon-Ra (blaster)

Well...I learned after much aggravation that the map server doesn't like VPNs.

That was a great tactic for Dreck....until it got Nerf'd as a timed mission.

Can't quite remember the person's character name, but there was a "fellow" badge hunter on the Freedom server that (at least to me) was respected by the other badge hunters. However, I teamed up with them on a couple of task forces and on EVERY SINGLE ONE they would go AFK the second they hit the map. Mission would complete and they would instantly zone out and go to the next one, then camp as soon as we all got into the door. I'm pretty sure it wasn't another player on the team that was dual-boxing as no combination stood out to me and it was also that one character that did it. I started to call them out in the middle of a Quarterfield and they appeared to "join in" on the fights; however, it was extremely ranged or they even stood out of range watching the melee, then following us to the next group. I think after the fifth time they were on a task force that I joined, I sent the team leader a /tell and told them why I quit and that I won't team with that person anymore. More than half the time, they came back and said, "don't worry, we just booted them...still want to join?"

Someone over on the City of Heroes public group about writing fan fiction. I wrote quite a bit of it for myself as it helped me to bond with my toons and rarely let anyone else read it. I did, however, write one about Dark Astoria (one of my favorite zones) and gave it to one of the folks from Paragon Studios to review (he loved it). There was just quite a bit of conflict between all of the plaques and badges awarded in that zone so I managed to work out a timeline of sorts (in the form of a short story) and believe that I covered all of them prior to the shutdown. I'm posting here because some folks over there wanted to read it and you can't attach documents to it. Please feel free to enjoy and if you find any discrepancies, let me know and I'll correct it. Thanks, R. Backstory_of_Dark_Astoria.rtf

Then you institute either a mechanic that allows it to be imported only once (or not allow the character to /respec for 30 days after importation) or you charge a fee for each character you upload. EDIT: I think it should be both and I could live with that.

Rep+1 Thanks!

Honestly, I think that now it's going to be a community-based MMO, they can drop it to insanely low prices since they are not looking to make profit off of the game. I know that they'll have to bring in some coin to cover the cost of the servers and they can do that by creating an "influence store" (of sorts) where you can use real-world money to purchase influence while simultaneously eliminating the market for gold farmers. This way, it lets those that want to insanely power their toons to do so and allows folks who want to go about the slow way to also do their thing. Everyone wins in the end.

I think that "unbalancing" would only last a few weeks, at most, as many folks I've seen playing in the short amount of time I've been logged into the game. I saw folks advertising for level 30 missions already.

I'm not sure what the time difference makes. Fair? Who determines what's fair? That I had enough foresight and studiously kept my XML files backed-up on four different drives for over six years, it wouldn't be fair to anyone else to restore my hard-earned character because someone else didn't do it? No, not new....restored. I earned those level 50 characters...I put in the time, sweat, tears, and laughter. You see, I would love to be able to play the game like I used to many years ago. In the course of eight years, I racked up over 16,000 hours on one account alone (I only had two accounts). Translate that to years and that's over 1.8 years of solid 24/7 gaming that I put into those characters. There's nothing powerleveled about them. However, I can't play like I used to because after the game shutdown, it forced me out in the sunlight where I found the love of my life, adopted one son and just had my first bio son, and I'm traveling way too much for my job already. It's going to be a community-based MMO now, we can make our own rules.

BINGO! That was it and that was the intent.

Just prior to the shutdown, someone offered (MIDS maybe?) some piece of software that would download all of your character's data into an XML file so they wouldn't be permanently lost. If anyone remembers that, please speak up. Anyway, seeing as how this is now going to be ran as a community-based MMO, is there anyway to incorporate an upload function to the game for the XML files that we were able to save? If not upload, offer a fee service to have an admin change the character data? I would pay some serious coin to be able to recover the data that I had downloaded, specifically the badges and the slotting. Just a thought. Thanks.