Your MMO History

[Pixel Mayhem]

I'm one of the few who never played CoH back in the day so I thought I would share how I eventually ended up here.

 

My first MMO was Dungeons & Dragons Online, being quite the fan of the table top game it was the natural choice for me. However I soon found myself bored with it. My time zone made getting a party together to run a dungeon was a tad difficult, and there were a lot of group dungeons at the beginning of that game. This will be an ongoing theme for me, the troubles of living in Australia. However, I would hop back in every now and then, when I was bored, and they have made most if not all those dungeons solo-able since. Still couldn't bring myself to play it again for long however.

 

Still I had found what I was looking for when Neverwinter Nights by Bioware came out as I had found a persistent world on the online multiplayer part of that game. It was like a mini MMO and though the player base was small, no bigger than 90 at peak, I still played on that server for a very long time. Even when Gamespy went caput the creators of the persistent world moved to their own private server, kind like what's happening here albiet on a much smaller scale.

 

My next big MMO was EVE Online, it looked interesting and so I thought I would try it... And I swear I gave it a good go but it was soooo complicated I could never really make head or tails of it, even after playing it for a few months. Still, that the game was, and still is, very much heavy on the PvP, and after getting ganked a few times I had decided to stop playing. This experience would turn me off of PvP all together as when you died in that game you pretty much lost everything and had to start over, unless you had the foresight to keep a backup ship.  I've heard some players send you a new ship when they kill you if you're a newbie, but I wasn't considered one as I had been playing for a while at that point. Either way, I've never liked PvP since then.

 

My next foray into the MMO space was when Lord of the Rings Online went free to play. I really liked this game and ended up playing it for a few years. Made a lot friends there, I would say the majority of the player base is comparable to here, well, minus the WoW trolls that would often log in and start claiming WoW was the first MMO. Like they always said that, it was like they had no imagination for real trolling  ;D Anyway I stayed with LOTRO untill a new game came out...

 

And that MMO was called Rift, I really liked this game too. Its dynamic event system was new to me and a lot of fun. However, some time after the launch the server purge began and the one I was on was deleted and so I had to transfer but when I did I lost my character name and this... Well it <Bleep!> me off and so I quit that game as I was upset about it and didn't play it for two years, some would say I get too attached to my character names. However, curiosity would eventually drag me back again. I was playing LOTRO again during that time. When I did come back to Rift I started over and created a new character named Mupi on the Faeblight server and became somewhat famous, or infamous depending on your take because I would constantly be totally silly in chat, emoting letting off glitter bombs will do that. :P I would try many other smaller MMO's at this time, (only noteable one here would be STO) but didn't play any of them for longer than a month at the most to as little as a week. Most of these were Asian MMO's of some type but I would eventually go back to Rift.

 

It was during this time when I met someone in Rift whom I shall not name who would lament about CoH often. They had talked it up so much that my interest was piqued, not that I could do anything about it back then though. Still I did occasionally do a search on YouTube and see if a could gleen what the game was like way back when. Found one Youtuber who did a lot stuff on CoH so I subbed to him, (shout out to Positive Gamer!). Any way, it was through him I learned of Paragon Chat, as this was the best thing that could be done at that point so I checked it out, but as the name does indicate it was just a online chat client, if but a really fancy one. ;D But of course it wasn't long before the private servers went up and that brings me to today.

 

So... I did take quite the long journey to get here but I am happy I did, still... That is my MMO history  :o

 

TL:DR? I tried a lot of other MMO's before coming here  ;D

[justicebeliever]

I'm 46, and CoX is the only MMO I have ever played.  Never felt called by any other game.  Lifelong comic book nerd and CoH was my dream, wish, fantasy fulfilled.

 

A friend introduced it to me (Issue 1), and I bought it right after Issue 2 came out.  Played until close to shutdown when I realized I wasn't in a healthy place playing the game (too much time online, not enough time spent in RL).  So I never jumped into Champions, Marvel, or DC's MMO's

 

Never played one since.  I saw on Easter a friends posting about something in a facebook group called CoH Survivors talking about big "reveal".  I waited 2 weeks just to be sure NCSoft wasn't going to shut it all down right away, and now I am back.

 

I'm still in a good place right now with the appropriate balance, so hopefully that sticks around...

 

Anywho, that's my MMO history

[PaxArcana]

I'm 48.

 

City of Heroes (and in time, Villains) was my first.

 

I played World of Warcraft briefly, back in Vanilla.  Hit the wall where soloing was no longer possible, hated that, and walked way until the last few weeks before Wrath dropped.  Played off-and-on through Warlords, when the "no flying anymore" nonsense-circus ticked me off enough to walk away forever.

 

City of Heroes/Villains, meanwhile, was my go-to steady game, up until just before i14 (IIRC).  Then, I had a .... problem ... with forum moderation that prompted me to walk away.  (A moderator publicly leveled a personal attack at me - I remember other posters commenting on that in surprise - and when I filed a complaint, it was me who got the axe; the Community Manager at the time, LightHouse, decided that the best response was to comb through their database simply counting how many times my name showed up among the removed threads .... without any context.  For those who weren't around back then, CoX used highly obsolescent forum software; removing an offending message ALSO removed any messages posted to the thread AFTER that one.  So you could post something not-at-all-rule-breaking two or three pages after the "bad" post, and yours would get deleted too, right along with the offending post.  He held THOSE against me, and gave me a one year ban ... despite not having actually broken a rule at the time.  No-one higher up was willing to even look at the issue, so, I decided NCSoft wasn't getting any more money from me at that point.)

 

Meanwhile, Champions Online was a thing, and during the open beta it was a glorious thing.  I bought a Lifetime subscription, even!  But, the Day One Patch happened, and flat-out ruined the game.  :P  Instant buyers remorse, yeah?

 

Since then, I've dabbled in a few MMOs of one sort or another, trying to find one I could like long-term.  Haven't found any, and recently had begun to feel especially nostalgic about CoX.

 

So imagine my delight when I found out, it was back ...!

[Healix]

CoH was my very first ever MMO game, and I fell in love with it. I attempted to play Aion, WoW and CO after Sunset but got no pleasure. Aion seemed a dull knockoff, WoW was to much work and stupid stuff and CO was just bad to me. I didn't play long on any of those. After that, I realized that nothing would ever take the place of CoH for me. The longing for my favorite game never diminished. Little did I know that a young man and his helpers were working secretly for 6 years, without pay, to bring the game back. (In secret so there would be no legal actions while they toiled over the work entailed to reverse-engineer the code.) Why? Because he LOVES the game as much as we do. And now, here we are, able to do what we all thought we'd never do again...we are back HOME! I am loving every minute of it, and my gratitude to Leo and crew knows no bounds.

 

[Call Me Awesome]

My first was CoH which I started in issue 2.  Over the years I briefly tried WoW (hated it) and Champions Online (meh, nothing special at all).  When Shutdown happened I tried several others without ever finding what CoH had.

 

Secret World was the first I tried, it was fun for awhile until I reached higher levels and ran headlong into the "Gear Snobs" leading to my exit from that game.  After that I played Star Wars Old Republic for awhile and while the game had it's points it was very obviously a single player game with some MMO mechanics grafted on.  The biggest downer of it was that many missions were forced single player only.

 

After SWTOR I left MMO's and played various other games when I had time, the Mass Effect series being the most noteworthy of them.

 

Now that we're back here I'm finally playing an MMO again.

[FenrisWolf44]

44 years old.

 

Started off on Ultima Online. Played that from 1997 to 2000. A classic, one of the very first MMO's. Still going I think.

 

Then I played Neocron from 2000 to 2001. Was short lived, but a very good game. Fascinating world.

 

Played City Of Heroes from 2005 till it was closed down. Was there at the final moment as the server was shut down for the last time, hundreds of players, torches held aloft around Atlas.

 

I played WOW on and off and on and off over many years, with several year gaps in between from 2006 unti last year. Deleted all my characters so I wouldn't be tempted to ever go back, felt they ruined the game I once cared a lot for.

 

Played Vanguard: Saga Of Heroes for a short time before it got shut down. A broken but richly rewarding game, which still had the best music in any MMO I had.

 

Played Star Wars The Old Republic for about a year, was a good game, but once you'd done all the stories once it got stale fast.

 

Played Guild Wars 2 for about a year, another good game until they messed around with it far too much.

 

Dabbled with Eve Online and Elite Dangerous for a few months here and there but lost interest, although I still read the novels from both, rich universes for fiction.

 

Which brings me back to this.

 

 

[Pixel Mayhem]

Wow, hello old people. I'm right up there with you, 47 and still kicking  ;D

[Healix]

I have underwear older than all of you...my YOUNGEST son is 52

[justicebeliever]

I have underwear older than all of you...my YOUNGEST son is 52

 

Ewwwwww.  Do we need to start a gofundme for you to get new underwear?

[Healix]

Nope..I take good care of my stuff. That's why it lasts so long :)

 

[Zumberge]

Fallen Earth and Champions Online, open betas.  Ragnarok Online, private server.  Warframe for two extended periods of time.  Not gonna throw any of them under the bus because that's not what I'm here for.

 

Fun RO story, though: Head of the RO clan/RO chapter of the inter-MMO warband went by the handle of Tyr One-Hand in-game.  Ran afoul of one of the moderators so she decided to turn his character sprites into several things over the course of time, including a merchant cart, several different types of scenery, and eventually changing the character to a woman.  When things settled down she offered to turn him back to normal and he just said, "no, this is fine."

 

Fairly sure you could punch that up a little and present it as an Norse tale and people would buy it.

[Rinwen]

Pretty much played at least a few months, if not years, in most MMOs that came out.

 

Actually other than WoW, I played at least 6 months on every game in this list

 

Don't really remember the exact order.

 

I'm 51.

 

EQ1

Asheron's Call

Tabula Rasa

Eve Online

EQ2

SWOTOR

Vanguard, playing on that emulator now too... it's public.

Asheron's Call 2

Neverwinter Nights

Dungeons and Dragons Online

CoH/V

Champions Online

Star Trek Online

Neverwinter Online

Fallen Earth

Auto Assault

DCUO

Rift

Defiance 2050

ESO <-- longest played for several years still playing

FFXIV

Skyforge

Warframe

Runes of Magic

Marvel Heroes Online

WoW <-- if I logged a month in this game I'd be shocked. I hated it

 

A lot of these games I'd play concurrently.

 

[srmalloy]

My first was CoH, joining about May 6 of 2004 on the recommendation of a coworker who'd been in the beta. I played CoH straight through until shutdown, playing on the first character I'd made after signing up in the bowl during a Rikti mothership raid when the shutdown hit, just as if the game was going to keep running.

 

During that time, I tried and dumped both Tabula Rasa and Aion, the former for a number of balance problems that didn't get addressed until shortly before NCsoft screwed Richard Garriot over, and the latter when I discovered how emphatically Aion adhered to the fundamental premise of Asian MMOs -- that once you were out of the starting area, the game pretty much required you to be in a group to have a chance of surviving the quests you got handed (and outleveling them wasn't an option because running around solo 'street sweeping' got you killed because of the size of the spawns, which almost always required groups to handle).

 

When CoH shut down, I picked up SWTOR, and played that solidly until it became intermittent when I picked up ESO right around the release of Summerset, and played both until I found out about the Homecoming servers, at which point both of them have been mostly kicked to the curb as I came back to CoH.

[Man_From_AUNTIE]

49 Here.

CoH was my first MMO.  Before I played this game I swore I would never pay a month fee to play a game I physically bought.

 

CO was next, and I got bored with that fast. I think I made it to level 10 before I uninstalled the game.

 

DCUO was meh.  I liked running up the buildings, that is what sticks with me with that game.  Made it to like the mid teens before it was uninstalled.

 

SWTOR I played for a good year, almost made it to level cap on all the alts, almost finished all the story arcs.  Got bored.  Uninstall.

 

Rift was play for a few months and that was it.  Once more uninstall.

 

Various others that I can't remember.

[EggKookoo]

I'll be 50 in November.

 

CoH is my first MMO. I was aware of EverQuest but I had never played it. Most of my PC gaming experience was in things like the Blizzard games, and FPS games like Unreal Tournament and Mechwarrior, and lots of the party-based D&D comp games like Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate, and Icewind Dale. Oh, and stuff like Knights of the Old Republic. Pretty typical stuff. I also have years of tabletop RPGs under my belt.

 

On one of the various BBS forums I frequented at the time, someone mentioned they got into the beta for City of Heroes, a superhero-based MMO. I was a comics fan from way back, so I was intrigued. A number of us asked this beta tester all sorts of questions, and her responses got a few of us interested, including another poster who I was slowly developing a long-distance friendship with. When the game went live in April (was it?) 2004, I signed up. So did my friend. We made a point of teaming up as often as possible, and played nightly. I didn't think of it like that at the time, but we basically began dating in CoH.

 

We got married in 2009, and will be celebrating our 10-year anniversary in August.

 

When Blizzard announced WoW I was intrigued but skeptical. I mean I loved Starcraft and the Warcraft RTS games, but I had trouble visualizing how they'd turn WC into an MMO. When they opened up their stress-test beta in the weeks before going live, I signed up and was, well, underwhelmed. The game felt unfinished and rough, and it did things differently than CoH, which was my only real standard of comparison. I didn't like it, and I didn't stick around long.

 

About the time CoV came out in 2005, my brother had become a big WoW player, and convinced me to try it again. I did, and it was better, but WoW still felt strange to my CoH-informed sensibility. I hated that I couldn't queue up attacks or spells, or the weird mix of not auto-turning to face my enemy and the ability of that enemy to walk right through me as though I was a ghost. I liked the "large world" feeling and some other elements, and overall the game was good enough now that I could spend some time playing it. But I held on to CoX for a while.

 

Eventually real life pulled me away from CoX and WoW and I spent some time away from them. When my PC died I also decided to switch to a Mac, which at the time had changed to using Intel processors, so I could run Windows in another boot partition. But this was before CoX had a Mac client, and it pretty much signaled my move away from the game (WoW, on the other hand, played natively on Macs). I played a lot of WoW and also cast around for some other games. My future wife and I got into Tabula Rasa for a while, which was cool but not super-compelling. We tried Champions, which oddly ran great on my Windows partition, but we found the game to be disappointing. By this time we were moving in together and dealing with much real-life stuff, and in 2011 we had our first child. A year later, CoX was shut down, and we both felt that gut-punch that meant it was gone for good. We hadn't played in years, but I think we also thought of it as something we could get back into eventually.

 

We both played WoW for a little bit more, but ultimately let that go once the baby was no longer a baby. From there, it was a slow decline in gaming, as we both had Macs at this time and the Mac gaming landscape -- which was never lush by any definition -- seemed to be dwindling even more. When Blizzard announced Overwatch (itself, intriguingly built off the framework of a superhero-based MMO called Titan), we were shocked that they weren't making a Mac version. Blizzard had supported Macs for years. It was a signal, and when the time came to get a new computer, my wife got a high-end gaming PC. She got into Overwatch. A month or two later, I did the same thing. But even with PCs, the gaming market seemed bleak. Pay-to-win seemed pervasive. We kind of came to terms with the notion that we were out-aging the game market, which seemed geared toward younger kids and mobile games.

 

I tried a few other games. Star Trek Online seemed promising but the gameplay was just dull. I tried Champions Online again, very briefly. I tried DCUO but it spamming me with in-app purchase upgrades during initial character creation was a slap in the face. We developed a mantra: "Why can't someone make a game like CoH again?"

 

One day just about a month ago, I was browsing Facebook mindlessly, and I noticed it suggested a group for me. I had mentioned CoH often in my FB feed, so apparently some algorithm decided to point me to a new City of Heroes group. Curious, I checked it out, and I saw people talking about Homecoming. Everyone was excited that CoH was back. I had trouble understand what it was at first. I thought maybe it was like Paragon Chat or some costume-creator app, but the more I read, it gradually sank in that people were actually playing the real game. With uncharacteristic disregard for computer security, I grabbed Tequila and ran through the setup instructions. My brother still rolls his eyes at me about that.

 

The first time the game loaded up on my screen, with the classic CoH intro music, my wife looked over with a "wtf is that?" expression. That was very satisfying.

 

We play nightly again (and sometimes during the day if I can sneak it in between meetings). We recreated our original characters (heroes and villains) and are now in our low 30s. I even showed my oldest, now 8, the character creator. She's a little young to really get into the game but she loves making costumes.

 

And, well, that's that. So far...

[Private Ed Venturer]

Dark Age of Camelot --> from April 2002 to April 2004

 

City of Heroes --> from April 2004 to November 2012

 

SWTOR --> from December 2012 to June 2013

 

Marvel Heroes online -->  from June 2013 to November 2017

 

Guild Wars 2 --> from December 2017 to April 2019

[justicebeliever]

On one of the various BBS forums I frequented at the time, someone mentioned they got into the beta for City of Heroes, a superhero-based MMO. I was a comics fan from way back, so I was intrigued. A number of us asked this beta tester all sorts of questions, and her responses got a few of us interested, including another poster who I was slowly developing a long-distance friendship with. When the game went live in April (was it?) 2004, I signed up. So did my friend. We made a point of teaming up as often as possible, and played nightly. I didn't think of it like that at the time, but we basically began dating in CoH.

 

We got married in 2009, and will be celebrating our 10-year anniversary in August.

 

+1 for an awesome love story!

[WumpusRat]

Gosh, I've played so many freaking MMOs. Lessee...

 

Very first MMO I ever played was Asheron's Call in 1999. It was that or Everquest, and I decided on AC. Really fun game.

Played Dark Age of Camelot for several years. Also a super fun game.

Everquest for about 6 months.

Lineage-2 for about 4 months. Gave up after realizing I'd been grinding for like 4 hours straight and gotten half a level. And I wasn't anywhere NEAR level cap. Still had about 30 levels to go.

City of Heroes from 2004 to 2012. Occasionally taking a break for a month or two to try out other MMOs, but always coming back.

WoW for about a year and a half, then peeked in again around 2013. Quit shortly afterwards.

Guild Wars-2 for a while.

SWtOR for about 6 months.

Champions Online for...maybe 3 months. Then left because there was no content I hadn't done already.

A whole slew of Korean/Japanese MMOs.

Rift for about a year and a half. Fun game, but I eventually got tired of it.

Elder Scrolls Online for about a year.

Dungeons and Dragons Online. Played that for about 3 years. Still my favorite dungeons of all time, though when people got so buff that they could just sprint through traps on elite it got a bit boring, as I loved playing trap-hunters.

Various western MMOs that came and went or that I just lost interest in shortly, like Tabula Rasa, EVE Online, Vanguard, Age of Conan, etc.

And now I'm back to CoX. :)

[THEDarkTyger]

43.

 

Not counting early text MUDs, I started out with Everquest 1. I wasn't much interested in it, then one of my mom's ex husbands picked it up and had me play around with it a bit so I could explain it to him. I wound up hooked right away.

 

I met my ex girlfriend through Everquest and moved out to California to live with her. While there, I got into the CoH open beta. I happened to see that applications for this new game were up and decided to sign up on a whim. It looked amusing, but not like something I'd pay a monthly fee for. Hooked big time.

 

Over the years, I've spent time here and there in:

WoW

EQ2

SWTOR

Rift

Shadowbane

Horizons ( Good god, there was a game that could have been great but was released in an alpha condition... )

The Secret World ( Decent game, SEVERE performance issues. Graphics were not optimized anywhere near well enough. )

[Rokkeb]

Started in '99 with EverQuest.

Tried shadowbane, daoc they didnt stick with me.

 

Coh came out loved it played it.

 

All my friends jumped on to final fantasy online, so I left coh for that. That game while neat, was very lacking in fun. Back to coh.

 

World of Warcraft - went hardcore from vanilla to wrath. Raiding primarily with a smattering of pvp. Around cata back to city of heroes.

 

Then back to wow for pandas. Cause coh was done. :(

 

Totally done with wow after pandas. That game is dumb and so is everyone that plays it. 

 

 

Picked up gw2 lots of fun.

 

Picked up firefall and went deep into it. Totally different genre then coh, but the same epic feeling. Taking on swarms of aranya, or grouping up for giant monsters. A huge elephant monster that spawns randomly and the whole server comes together to beat it. Awesome!

 

Firefall gets nuked the new owners dont want an mmo they want the IP for an Asian marketed phone app.

 

Back to gw2.. but without any heart in it.

 

Get gifted wow legion.. play.. but dont really enjoy it. It's now just truly world of grind craft.

 

Find out everquest is still a thing. With new expansions... back to everquest. So lost, my characters were at one point totally stripped down and in had nothing. Start new on a different server. 3 box shadow knight, shaman, ranger to 105/105/100 as my accounts expansion accessible allowed. It's fun... but something is missing. Oh yes .. people, people are missing everyone just plays solo with their box armies.

 

Gw2 expansion pack is on sale get it, lots of fun.. gliders, mounts, open world raids. Fun.. but stagnant.

 

Everquest new time lock progression. opens.. get in, make a noob tons of fun grinding old classic dungeons for awhile but my interest dropped mid velious. Back to gw2.

 

Just logging in to log in at that point. Start playing heavily in overwatch.

 

Get competitive in overwatch, start being mad in overwatch? Why are there only ever morons on the blue team, and elite soldiers on the red team?? Wtf?!

 

Ok take it easy.. start playing single player games. Log into EQ or gw2 randomly looking for a place to be. Nothing sticks..

 

City of heroes is back, and I'm finally home.

 

 

Cant remember the exact timeline but I also tried and disliked these MMOs: champions online, lotro,  planetside 2, eve, aieon(sp?), everquest 2, age of conan, vanguard, dungeon fighter online was cool but seemed to be lacking something.

 

 

[THEDarkTyger]

Totally done with wow after pandas. That game is dumb and so is everyone that plays it.

 

Let's not insult people for liking a game that you don't.

[WumpusRat]

Horizons ( Good god, there was a game that could have been great but was released in an alpha condition... )

Oh man, I remember Horizons. That game could have been so amazing. I remember a bunch of us rebuilding a little town area, and we'd started repairing a huge broken bridge that crossed the river. The class system was interesting and cool, but suffered from a serious lack of content and like you said, kind of in alpha state.

[Rokkeb]

Totally done with wow after pandas. That game is dumb and so is everyone that plays it.

 

Let's not insult people for liking a game that you don't.

 

Obviously you don't get the burned out on a game joke.

[justicebeliever]

Totally done with wow after pandas. That game is dumb and so is everyone that plays it.

 

Let's not insult people for liking a game that you don't.

 

Obviously you don't get the burned out on a game joke.

 

Rokkeb, tone is lost on forums...it's hard to tell when anyone's joking.  If you call people dumb, they are going to be insulted, rightfully so. FWIW, I didn't get the joke either, just thought you were being rude

[Rokkeb]

Yes because obviously I would play a game for like 7 years straight if I thought everyone who played it was dumb.  ::)