So refreshing.

[Grumps]

I realised this morning just how refreshing it is to play a game just because I want to, how I want to.

I know this sounds silly right, why would you play if you didn't really want to but what I mean is I don't have to log in to open a box every day.

I don't need to run a specific piece of content each day every day for a needed reward.

I haven't got to spend 20 minutes of my playtime after each group encounter sorting through a mountain of useless loot to find the one piece that might be an upgrade.

There is no constant ingame reminder of shinies that I might want and can instantly obtain if I hand over some more cash.

Instead I have a huge range of activities I can join in with if I want to, or not if I don't want to.

 

At the moment I have my main an Earth/Kin which is tricked out and runs like a dream in any group content, she has bankrolled and continues to do so, all my other characters.

A number of 50's still requiring Incarnate upgrades so I cycle through them as I fancy or to fill a team need.

I have a fire/spines AE farmer just because,  she sits in cap and to be fair gets played very little there is just so much else to do.

I have finally learned how to 'build outside the base' and so am slowly building a massive project I sink a lot of time into.

I have 15 characters between 6 and 35 who I swap between for group content and task forces, my current fav is a new Dark controller, something I never had before.

My solo character is a Bots/FF mastermind, I use her to munch through Flashback arcs which I love the discipline of.

 

I am so thankful to see this game back, it is a reminder of how much I dislike a lot of the modern mechanics that have become the norm in many games and instead of feeling like I need to log in each day instead I feel like I want to, and if I don't then that is also ok.

[boggo2300]

Wonderful sentiment, if somewhat at odds with your username 🙂

[Clave Dark 5]

20 minutes ago, boggo2300 said:

Wonderful sentiment, if somewhat at odds with your username 🙂

Look if poor Grumps has finally found something to bring a smile to that weary, irritated visage, let them have it!

[Heraclea]

[boggo2300]

Don't you mean...

[Abraxus]

In the 7 years that this game was gone, I came to realize that, even though I had moved on to other games, this was the only one I REALLY wanted to play.  Everything else was a pale substitute in my world. 

 

Last year, I found out about the SEGs effort to basically re-code the game, expunging it of anything actionable for doing so, and working towards bringing it back to life.  After the previous failed attempts at talks with NCSoft that sparked hope, then failed, it sounded like the best opportunity to play my beloved game again.  At that point (and I don't believe too much progress has been made since), the game was in a very early stage of functionality.  Not much more than what was in Paragon Chat, except that this version was based on the Issue 0, or Issue 1 version of the game, so there was a lot missing.  It was very rough, but you could see where they had made some progress.  At the time, I still believed that in a year, perhaps two, there would be a playable version of the game to play once more.

 

Then...the SCORE revelation hit like a bomb in mid-April, and within a week of that happening, there was a live, playable server up and running.  My world was rocked, and in a good way for a change!  I have been here ever since.  The game I was playing occasionally at the time, out.  Playing/experimenting with SEGs builds, not once since Homecoming went online.  CoH has once again become the only game I play, the only game I want to play, and the community that I support in any way I can.  I have been able to successfully donate twice to the Homecoming effort, so far, and will keep trying every month.  When I play, I try to savor every moment, remembering what it was like to only dream of playing again.  Watching Youtube videos of Task Force runs from days gone by, and wishing I could do that once again.  Well, now I am, and I can only hope that will be the case for years to come!

[Sidious]

I never realized how much I missed just going around the city using Ninja Run.

 

So nice to have the game back.

When the score news broke I was all over it (even have a copy of the released code somewhere safe). Then within 48 hours of the code release, a server was up. I don't think I slept at all that weekend.

When it was taken down the following Monday I was crushed. Within 48 hours Homecoming was up and I've been here ever since.

[Skyhawke]

I tried filling the gap after COH had its sunset with various mmos, but none clicked. A friend got me into Neverwinter on the ps4 and it was fun until it became the log in merely for the daily grindfest thing. He will still say "logging in to do my dailies".  To me, that's a chore, not fun. COH is fun. Whatever mood I'm in, I either have or can create a character for it. Totally agree with this thread: this game is a long missed and happily welcomed back breath of fresh air.

[The_Cheeseman]

Hear, hear!

I played CoH off-and-on from launch to sunset, often leaving for another MMO, only to come back later. Nothing else allows the depth of customization or originality of character building combined with enjoyable, non-grindy gameplay. The game isn't so hard that you feel compelled to build your character in a certain optimal way, but you can make it hard enough to challenge yourself as much as you want and actually receive extra rewards for the effort. I also love that I can play my favorite character with anyone I want. Sure, I'm vet level 71 and they're level 23, but the games doesn't care, we can all go blow up some council goons together and feel like we're contributing. CoH never made me feel like playing was a second job, which most other MMOs usually end up doing.

[MisterK]

Refreshing is a good description....

 

I played from launch until real life intervened 5 years later and had no time anymore.  I kept my subscription until sunset, though, and occasionally checked in with my old toons.

 

After it was gone, I would keep track of the various efforts to resurrect CoH, and logged into the recreated empty Atlas a couple times, but it was too sad to see the empty city which had once been so vibrant.  I did, however, have countless precious memories....dinging 50 with my first toon about a month after release, a stone tanker (I realized later that stone was pretty gimped at the time), doing the Terra Volta trial the first night it was live with my SG (how cool it was to be able to finally respec a character!), and just joking around with friends after a team wipe, and on and on.  I made some friendships with cool people from around the world.

 

I eventually picked up Guild Wars 2 and played regularly for about 5 years, up until about 3 weeks ago.  The funny thing us, I never, ever teamed with anyone, and except for world events, I played completely solo.  The idea of teaming never appealed to me after those wonderful CoH times...how could they recreate the joy of being in a warehouse somewhere in Bricks, surrounded by Freaks, shoulder to shoulder with flashily dressed heroes, superpowers flashing, sparking, smoking, flaming and crackling all around!  The occasional faceplant, the shared joy at having survived a hairy encounter, the constant banter and wisecracking as we helped each other tame Paragon City.

 

Then, 3 weeks ago I did one of my random check-ins on the sad history of City of Heroes....and you know the rest....

 

I'm home...

[biostem]

I bought a lifetime subscription to Champions Online as CoH was nearing its shutdown, and while it offers more in the way of character customization and has some very nice features & mechanics, I found its storylines to be uninteresting and the villain groups uncompelling.  CoH just scratches that itch for me, where very few other games managed to do so.  I've tried DCUO, Tera, and many others, but to no avail...

[RikOz]

This has been literally the only game to make me quit WoW. Twice.

 

The first time was in September 2011. I'd been playing WoW since 2008, starting during Wrath of the Lich King (I had wanted to play in 2004, as I had played and enjoyed all of the WarCraft RTS games previously, but I didn't get a computer capable of running it until '08, my shiny new iMac). Then the Cataclysm expansion came out, and it turned out they'd listened to all of the elitists and the "raid or die" mentality set into the game. Leveling through the expansion was great, but then I got to max level and, since I wasn't a raider, there was really nothing for me to do. So I leveled six more characters to max level, and then they had nothing to do either. I was left with running the exact same round of daily quests on seven alts, every day, and was bored out of my mind.

 

I complained on a forum somewhere about my boredom, and mentioned that I'd love to try other MMOs, but they were all Windows-only. And somebody casually replied, "City of Heroes runs on Macs."

 

Whoa, really? Why haven't I heard of this before? Downloaded the game, made an account, saw it had gone F2P, but I opted for the paid VIP subscription. Then after six months of paying subs for both games, I realized I was hardly ever logging into WoW, and cancelled that sub. Nothing but City of Heroes for me from now on!

 

*sigh* And then, six months later, NCSoft pulled the rug out from under us.

 

I reluctantly had no choice, still playing on a Mac, but to go back to WoW for my MMO fix. As luck would have it, this coincided with the release of the Mists of Pandaria expansion, which I absolutely loved. I was very happy with it, and it felt like Blizzard had learned something from their mistakes with Cataclysm. Then I played through Warlords of Draenor, where they made a whole new bunch of mistakes. Followed by Legion which was mostly awesome. And finally the current expansion, Battle for Azeroth, which is a weird combination of great and terrible, and of course the thing I liked a lot about it turned out to be something the elitists hated, so they decided to not take that thing any further. And so I was back to doing the same pointless grind every day. Ultimately, the best thing about BfA was that it forced me to upgrade to a new computer. I still had that same 2008 iMac, which still used OpenGL as its graphics API. It wasn't able to upgrade to the latest version of Mac OS X, and so couldn't use Apple's new "Metal" API. Blizzard had basically been holding their OpenGL support together with duct tape, and it showed. They warned us that BfA wouldn't support OpenGL, in fact wouldn't even launch with it. So I finally switched to Windows and bought a new gaming PC well before BfA launched. And then I played BfA.

 

Of course, now that I was running Windows I decided to check out a bunch of those other MMOs I'd been missing out on. There wasn't a single one that could make me quit WoW.

 

And then, Homecoming happened. This time it only took me three days to cancel my WoW sub. And it only took three days because I happened to get Homecoming installed three days before my WoW sub expired anyway. It was effectively instant WoW quit.

[Grumps]

I am loving reading all these stories from you guys who are feeling the same way, thank you all for sharing.

[Techwright]

I've played a lot of MMOs, but though I enjoyed things like Lord of the Rings Online, and World of Warcraft, there's only 3 games I ever felt like playing for a very long time.  

 

All three shut down.

 

Of them, I can only re-enter City of Heroes.  I've heard nothing of a rejuvenation of either of the two others, and they were both incomplete in some way, more or less sabotaged by parts of their development teams, leading to their demise.  (Tabula Rasa & Firefall)

 

Though I wish for the best versions of the others to return, CoH is the one I thought about consistently when it wasn't available.  Besides, CoH has the nicest community of any MMO I've played in the past 15 years.  That's worth the price of admission.  Well, when there was a price.

[AboveTheChemist]

I have not played a lot of MMOs, but two that I have loved playing are Everquest and City of Heroes. I got my chance to relive the glory days of EQ on Project 1999, and have played that regularly for the past 3 years, joining a great guild and making several great friends along the way. We were discussing MMOs on Discord last year and while my friends all agreed that EQ was their one true love, I told them without hesitation that if I ever got the chance to play CoH again, I was all over it. And when I heard the news in April about the CoH server going public, I logged off P99 and have not looked back. Even though I only played CoH for the first 4-5 issues, it always held the fondest memories for me and I am quite thankful that it's back.