How did you first start playing CoH? What do you love the most?

[Xalon]

Hey all! I've come across some great stories from other players and think it would be awesome to have everyone post how they first started playing. 

 

 

1 - When did you first play and what/who introduced you to CoH? 

 

2 - What do you love the most about CoH?

 

 

 

 

When CoH came out, I wanted to play it sooo bad! This was before I knew about WoW or other mmorpgs. But I did not have the right computer to handle it, so I had to wait. A few years later, having a new computer, WoW became my first mmorpg. And then a year or so after that, I played Champions Online. Once I did, I had to play the game I always wanted to and the game that came before CO. When I played I loved it, but the graphics took a while to get used to. But once I got used to them, everything was awesome. But I never played more than 20 levels so it always felt like it was just open maps and doors and not much variety. 

 

So years go by and I find out about Homecoming (last year) and I played again and everything clicked. I guess it was the right time because I have loved every second since I started playing again. And now that I have more time, I'm trying to play at least a few hrs most days. What I love the most is the stories and the flying. But also the community. Everyone is so genuine it seems and want to help and teach others to love the game they surely do. It doesn't matter what our difference are because once we log in, we are all swept up in the love we have for this amazing gameworld and all it contains. 

 

What about you?

[Greycat]

1. Introduced - I seem to recall seeing the website early(ish) and/or hearing things, and it looked interesting, but having other things to deal with it kind of passed out of mind. 

 

Meantime, some friends and I had been playing (tabletop) Silver Age Sentinels. Had fun with it, but one of our younger members joined the army so the game was on indefinite hold. I'd been having fun with the character from there, though. Tried recreating him, sort of, in Freedom Force, but ... eh. The game just didn't really do it for me. Walking through Walmart, I ran across the City of Heroes collectors edition box. Had two thoughts, 1, who'd keep paying for a game after they bought it? and 2, eh, month free, lets see if this scratches that itch. (Box had the Statesman heroclix figure, PVP mini comic, code for the Prestige Power Slide and Cape of Four Winds when you created your account.) That was in Issue 3. I kept playing - with one small break when the (new-ish) incarnates content and attitude towards it was "Yes, you now must GRIIIIIIND these trials! Single player content for it? Pfft. GRIND!" - until, well, now. 

 

2. Love most... that my characters are mine. I've only run across (unplanned) similar costumes in the game.... once that I remember, *maybe* one other time. But I do mean both in look and variety - and how open it is to RP. As opposed to being "Fighter #8490753" which has the same gear all the other fighters of your level do because you need to have that to do stuff that level, so you look the same, fight the same, and need to grind (as opposed to doing what you'd actually LIKE to do) to get cash for the next yes-you-do-need-it upgrade in gear that every fighter gets at THAT level. Also that it's not *competitive* - it's not "the guy who got the first hit on the world/area boss gets the credit, now wait an hour for it to spawn again so you can finish the quest that's holding you up." And that you don't need tank-DPS-healer to do stuff, most any composition can handle most any standard content. 

[Scarlet Shocker]

I'd been seeing adverts in my weekly comic pics for the game all through 2004 and 2005 and I was already tempted but I was mistrustful of online billing... but eventually I committed to buying the game (you could buy it in shops then on disks) and that got me hooked

 

The original world builders created an amazing environment and rich story in which to place their city and that's proven to stand the test of time. There may be a few dodgy missions or quest lines but ultimately you're a hero in a City of Heroes and that's fucking amazing! 

[Maagic]

I honestly can't remember HOW I learned about CoH or when I started playing. I do know it was before Issue 1 came out because I remember the level cap being raised to 50 from 40. I gladly paid my $15 a month and even played on DIALUP and had a BLAST. I played on Freedom with my SG The League of Extraordinary Avatars. Why do I play/keep playing? The community, honestly. I can't say it's the BEST community because I don't play other MMOs, but I can't imagine a more nicer, welcoming and helpful group of people. Thank you so much to the Devs/GMs and everyone else who keeps the lights burning. 

[Skyhawke]

1. I don't remember exactly how I found out about COH, but I hopped on the train when all we really had was a website, some promises and cryptic posts from alpha testers. I got into one of the early beta tests and that was all it took.

 

2. As for what I love about it that still has me playing decades later? Pfffffff...where to start? I'd only ever played Everquest before (and had a bad time because I tried to solo and no clue what I was doing) and this game not only was pretty easy to pick up, but a fun superhero game to boot! I do miss playing with my old guild that kinda dispersed in the mid 2010s, but this game still has one of the best communities of any gaming fandom I've seen. Solo or teaming, it's a blast!

8 minutes ago, Maagic said:

 I gladly paid my $15 a month and even played on DIALUP and had a BLAST.

 

High five to a fellow former dial up player! ✋

[ZamuelNow]

1. After seeing ads about the game and thinking it was cool but never making the jump, it was the retail box for the Mission Architect edition that finally pushed me to join.  Was talking to a professor and picked his server to join--Victory.  That professor almost never logged in but I enjoyed the game enough for it to not matter.  So, I14 is when I joined.  I joined Homecoming after the NCsoft announcement.

 

2. While imperfect, I genuinely enjoy the flow of the gameplay itself.  It may be that my views are skewed both because I wasn't here in the beginning and that I'm not a min maxer who plays 24/7 but I'm usually not jaded towards the game.

[JKCarrier]

1. I don't recall exactly when I started...it was sometime after City of Villains was added, but before Going Rogue. I'd never played an MMO before, but I was active in the Freedom Force community, and lots of people there were super into it. So I gave it a try, and once I got the hang of the basics, I was hooked.

2. Besides the general superhero theme, I like that it's solo- and casual-friendly. I can pop on for an hour, run a few missions, and feel like I've made meaningful progress. Side stuff like costumes, bases, and AE are fun little mini-games in their own right.

[lemming]

Not sure if I heard about it solely from friends, but some were in beta and I wound up joining as well.   Played Champions Tabletop for years and was a tester on their first try at a PC game (Only Heromaker came of that), so a superhero game was welcome.

 

Customization, etc... was what got me to stay.   I couldn't build my old RPG chars exactly, but the spirit was there.   Played thru sunset, though I did take breaks here and there, once while concentrating on developing a different game.   One of my breaks was just before sunset.  (I think I came back, bought a sub for a bit and then sunset got announced.)

 

Knew about the secret server fairly early via a friend's son, but didn't bother looking into it.   RL was a bit busy.   When HC got announced and I noticed how much easier it was to get it to play with WINE, welp, here I am.

[Psyonico]

I got a free week (or maybe 2 week) trial to the game toward the end of i6.  Before the trial ran out i had purchased both CoH and CoV.  I played on Liberty at first because that was the server at the top of the list when I first started playing. 

 

I played for about 6-7 months without getting a 50 because I kept making new toons and deleting ones to be able to do that.   I lamented on the official forums how I would never get a 50 and as luck would have it,  I got a PM from another player who introduced me to Repeat Offenders.   Seeing that play style, I fell in love with the game all over again.

 

Before  City, my only MMO experience was Runescape and Guild Wars. Both of which I had played a lot of,  but neither was the experience I had with City and RO.

[Techwright]

My young step-nephew was visiting in summer 2004, and I had taken him over to meet my life-long best friend.  BFF and I had grown up as 1st generation video gamers with about 3 decades console, arcade, and early pc games experience at that point, but I'd never seen an MMO played until that day.  BFF showed us multiple games, and while my nephew was fascinated by a baseball game, it was CoH that caught my attention.  (BFF and I had always liked superhero stuff, and he even owned a small comic shop for a time.) Fast-forward a bit as I had to upgrade my PC of the time, but I ended up joining him in the game at the start of the first Winter Lord event at the end of 2004.    Things are a lot easier now, but we had a blast chasing down Winter Lords in Kings Row.  As our characters were so low, we ended up roof searching by running up and down fire escapes.  Hilarious, as I think back on it.

 

It's hard to pick a single best "like", but it's probably the PUGs.  At first, my BFF and I were shy and uncomfortable teaming with anyone else, and we played for quite some time as a dynamic duo.  It wasn't until some time in WoW, and joining a casual guild there, that we had any interest in running with a PUG team here.  But the results were so much nicer here than in WoW.  The (usually) pleasant community of CoH, just made the PUG experience so much better.  I like to tell the story of one PUG where we entered a large room that often spells doom for a team, only to find it largely wall-to-wall Tsoo sorcs, which were much nastier in groups back then.  It took us 3 hours and a huge hospital bill to clear that room, and the team did it without rage-quitting and even with a fair amount of humor.  Overall, definitely a better experience than other MMO  PUG teams.

 

 

[Archaeological_Hawk]

I remember seeing the game at Best Buy and buying a copy. After rushing home to install the game, I discovered that my PC wasn’t powerful enough to run it. That devastated me. Back then, I was a teenager, and I couldn’t afford a good computer. So, for several years, COH collected dust until it was lost during a move. Then the game was shuttered and I thought my chance at playing COH was gone for good. Now that Homecoming exists, I can finally experience what I missed.

 

What I love most about COH is the nostalgia. Memories from yesteryear are my fuel, and I miss my physical copy so much. The discs are useless today — but man, I would love to still own a piece of video game history.

Edited 19 hours ago by Archaeological_Hawk

[biostem]

On 9/20/2025 at 5:49 PM, Xalon said:

1 - When did you first play and what/who introduced you to CoH? 

 

2 - What do you love the most about CoH?

1.  I can't recall if I saw it on a website or in some video game magazine, but it was one of the two.  A friend may have also mentioned it coming out soon, (at the time), to me.

 

2. Hands down the character customization, (including AT and powerset choice).

[Jiro Ito]

I was chased out of Star Wars Galaxies by the NGE update (new game enhancements) at the end of 2005, tried WoW for a bit but couldn't stomach the grind and found a new home here.  It was after Issue 6 so I never knew the game pre-ED, and I think sometime before Issue 7 dropped in June 2006.  I started with only CoH, but once I saw myself sticking with it for awhile, I bought the Villains expansion.  I even still have the box and all the stuff that game in it like the PVP comic, poster, TCG, manuals, discs.  Sadly, the Issue 13 changes to PVP drove off most of my SG and other friends and I left sometime between issues 14 and 15.

 

The character creation and ability to modify your builds and slotting to make your characters personal to you are top notch and continue to be a huge draw, but for me there's no question it's the friends I've made here that keep me coming back, year after year.

Edited 18 hours ago by Jiro Ito

[Oubliette_Red]

1. I think I read an article in a PC mag or something and was interested enough to go buy the box, this was about a month before the first HeroCon in 2008. I would have gone to that but it took me about a month to look up the forums. Very uncharacteristic of me. I knew zero people playing CoH at the time and after I finally made it into the game one of the first people I encountered gave me 250k. I thought that was a lot back then 😄 and though it was very cool of some random stranger to do so. 

 

2. What first hooked me about the game was the character creator, pretty sure I spent 2-3 hours in it that first night. And to this day I still spend a considerable amount of time in the CC. What continued to draw me in though was the people I met, I found some RP'rers on Protector out of the blue, don't even recall how, I think it was Vulpy who was always in character when he was on and I was on my very first character Angel Red, who actually had a back story. Also came across some folks in the Fun & Games section of the forums that I palled around a lot with like @El D and @kyothinks. The wild af thing was they all knew each other in-game and RP'd together. So I ended up joining them and RP'd with them up almost up until the game closed. Is was all great fun. Although there was that one time I Confused Scirocco during the STF and caused her tank to lose agro and Kyo's "WTF!!?!" over Skype... oops... granted it was funny as hell when Scirocco beat on Ghost Widow for a good 3 seconds. needless to say, I took Confuse out of my rotation during that portion of the STF after that.

 

Sad to say, I lost my wind for RP and playing when the shut-down was announced and I never really could get back into it when I came back in to HC.

 

[Uun]

I used to hang out on a tech support forum and a bunch of the regulars started playing CoH. I got it for Christmas in 2004 and joined them. Several of us are still active and play together on Monday nights.

 

What I really like is that CoH doesn't follow the DPS/Tank/Heal template. I enjoy the strategy of deploying debuffs and controls, which doesn't exist in most games. I played SWTOR for several years after sunset and even with all the classes, you're still shoehorned into one of those roles. 

[Force Redux]

I don't remember specifically how I heard about the game but I ended up joining a super group that had formed even before beta. The City of Heroes website at time was still showing independent power selections, before the power sets and archetypes. So pretty early in the design phase; of course things would change much by the time of launch.

 

The whole superhero concept and the idea of lots of customization was very appealing. My previous experience with MMOs was EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Asheron's Call, and a few others.

 

So I started with beta and continued until sunset. I never knew about the secret server, but as soon as I got wind that it was opening up I joined 6 years ago. I don't even remember how I heard about homecoming. 

 

I stay for a couple of reasons, one, the game content itself is very easy to fit a lot of different concepts in: want to play a vampire cyborg? How about a punisher style mercenary? Or a golden age flying superhero? Plus the game lends itself very easily to casual gameplay compared to many other games where grinding and elitism suck the enjoyment. I've done that before no desire to do that again.

 

The other major reason I stay is because of the community on the forums and live in the game. Even though I PUG 100% of the time and haven't been in an SG since live, it's overall a very welcoming and supportive group of people, with fantastic ideas and great imaginations, ready to lend a hand to others. I played in many many MMO communities, and even after the snap and the relaunch, City of Heroes community still is tops.

Edited 1 hour ago by Force Redux

[Display Name]

1) Friend of mine.  I was around and had means when it first came out but money was a little tighter than I felt confident in investing in CoH at the time.  Joined Homecoming in July 2019, I believe.  A friend in table-top RPG gaming turned me on to it.  He and his friends had been playing since Live so it was cool.

 

2) Badges.  I keep coming back to the badges.  Money?  Power?  Meaningless.  These are but tools to farm those badges!