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 Sunday at 10:07 PM 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 Sunday at 11:20 PM 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 Monday at 04:21 PM 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!

[JuggernautJ]

It was Christmas time (2004 or 2005) and I was in a now-defunct computer chain buying a surprise present... a laptop... for my wife with my Christmas Bonus.

I was also picking up a serviceable desktop computer for myself and at the checkout line there was a (first edition/release?) CoH game in the bargain bin.

 

I was a computer novice, had never played a computer game other than Civ II and had no idea what an MMO was but I was a hardcore comic book fan and figured what could I lose for a buck?

 

A day or so after I got the computer home and set up and figured out how to get online I loaded up the game and logged in for the first time.

I created a Dwarf Warrior based on one of my favorite D&D characters and logged into AP.

 

As I said I'd never been in an MMO before and had no idea how to move about or interact.

I'd been in-game about a minute and found myself stuck in one of the many fountain/pools in AP.

I didn't know how to jump so I couldn't get out.

Someone sidled up to me and said "lol... need a little help there?"

His name was Shane and he was playing a toon based on The Digger from Mystery Men.

(Hey Shane... if you're out there say "Hi!")

 

He helped me out (literally and figuratively) and we became friends.

I've often wondered what would've happened if the first person I met had been a Troll and/or a Bozo or otherwise unpleasant person. I probably would've quit and never tried another MMO as long as I lived...

 

But instead I've had a half a lifetime of playing CoH and hanging with the best online community EVER.

And that is what has been keeping me coming back all these years.

You and the best friends a Super Hero (or Villain) could have.

 

I lost track of Shane and a lot of other folks in 2012 (Angela Moda, Smokeshift, Ianmon... you out there?) but having CoH comeback (and stay) has been one of the 2 best things to happen to me in the past 10 years. Thank you all, for the comradery and adventures!

 

Edited yesterday at 08:00 AM by JuggernautJ

[Xalon]

Amazing responses everybody! We get to learn a little more about each other, how we started and what we love. Brings us all closer together as a community. I'm gonna try and have more open posts with questions and see how we do 🙂  GJ! Keep em coming!

[UltraAlt]

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

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

 

I started about a week before Issue 2 dropped.

 

I saw an AD for City of Heroes in a comic book or maybe someplace else (as well).

As soon as I saw that AD, I was working on saving enough money to build a computer that could play it.

I bought the game either as soon as it came out or as soon as I learned about it was able to get to a GameStop to buy a copy of it. And, yeah, I had the game, was reading the book, and planning the characters that I would make before I even had a computer built that was able to run the game.

 

I had already been a long time comic book fan and RPG player (what people call these days pencil-and-paper or table top). I used the Traveller system to run super-hero game before Champions was released, and then I started running superhero games or playing in super hero games run with the Champions system (though I did have a character that was pulp "mystery"/"masked" man in a Call of Cthulhu game as well). So I already had characters that I wanted to play in this new format.

 

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

2 - What do you love the most about CoH?

 

The versatility, replayability, and, of course, the superhero genre.

I have to say that teaming with other players is part of what I love about THE CITY as well. 

 

I have characters that roam the streets of THE CITY that aren't really part of the "superhero" genre - fantasy, horror/supernatural, and martial arts characters in the mix, but that just goes to the versatility of THE CITY.

[Verfall]

On 9/21/2025 at 11:17 AM, JKCarrier said:

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.
 

I came from the same place. Freedom reborn forums. Jumped in about 2 weeks after launch. Made a lot of online friends.

 

I guess what made this game a love for me was I was in a bad space at the time. Had a big medical issue, and basically was lost in limbo addicted to painkillers for over 5 years till I could have surgery. This game, and a lot of you people, probably kept me alive in my twenties. Some of those people have unfortunately passed, as I was one of the younger ones on the FR forums and amongst my friends on here. But this game coming back has allowed me to enjoy those memories and the few good times I had in that dark time. I guess nostalgia is a drug.

[Clave Dark 5]

I don't like computer/video games, just waste of time when I might be reading, watch something, doing anything else.  At least playing dominoes or cards of any variety with friends is about the time spent with friends, not "did I get an ace?  I got an ace, go me!" 

 

Then in 2005, a roommate moved in for a bit who was playing World of Warcarft and CoH.  WoW looked just as dull as any other game, but say, that City of Heroes looks sorta neat... it's like getting to design your own superhero action figure and then getting to play with it doing cool stuff...

 

And that was that.

[RikOz]

I didn't get a computer capable of running any kind of MMO until 2008, when I got a brand new iMac. I'd already been a Mac user since 1996, and had long accepted the fact that very few Windows PC games had Mac versions. So I was more or less locked into Blizzard. I played Diablo II, as well as the WarCraft RTS games. So when WoW came out, I naturally wanted to play it, and signed up in 2008 as soon as I had the new iMac. I didn't bother looking into other MMOs, just naturally assuming that none of them would run on a Mac.

 

And I really enjoyed WoW, coming into that game shortly after the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I ended up playing mostly solo, as the bulk of the playerbase were veterans who were busy with the new expansion content at high levels. But I absolutely loved the exploration aspect of the game and spent countless hours going everywhere and doing everything. I spent so much time exploring that I only managed to get one character (Eilyssana, my human retribution paladin) to max level by the end of WotLK. I'll admit a bit of frustration with the open-world questing model, as it was designed at the time. I could see that it was designed with the idea that players would be forming teams to complete quests, but by the time I joined up leveling had evolved into a solo activity because everybody's goal was to get to max level as quickly as possible to experience endgame content. So I was quite happy when the next expansion (Cataclysm) completely revamped the "old world" and made it more solo-friendly. The veteran players complained endlessly about "dumbing down" the content, but I could see it for what it was: Blizzard acknowledging that most players now leveled solo, and realizing that it was discouraging to new players when, every time a solo, low-level player attacked a gnoll, they were beset by seven more of that gnoll's closest friends and would die because they didn't have the tools at those low levels to deal with big groups of enemies.

 

But the Cataclysm expansion, as much as I enjoyed it, introduced a new problem for a soloist like me: At max level, there just wasn't a whole lot to do if you weren't a raider. (The job I had at the time, working as a cook in convention catering, had an extremely irregular, unpredictable schedule, so I couldn't commit to a regular raid schedule.) I got seven characters to max level in Cataclysm, but with nothing interesting for me to do with them after that, I started to get very bored.

 

I was part of a WoW discussion thread on an unrelated forum, and in that thread I expressed my boredom and my wish that there was some other MMORPG that would run on a Mac. Somebody replied, "City of Heroes has a Mac version." Well that was cool. I hadn't even heard of City of Heroes. (Well, actually, I had a few issues of the comic in my collection, and I think my comic book guy may have mentioned that it was tied into a game but, being a Mac user I didn't bother to check into it (see above).)

 

So I checked into CoH. Sure enough, it would run on a Mac, though as far as I could tell it wasn't really a "Mac version". It seemed to be the Windows version running in a Wine-like wrapper that let it run on Macs.

 

Suffice it to say I was instantly hooked on CoH. This was late 2011, so after Freedom. I chose to pay the $15 monthly sub for the VIP access rather than one of the FTP options. My first character was Flaminatrix. Her basic appearance (sans costume) was based directly on the basic appearance of the aforementioned Eilyssana from WoW: red-haired human female (which is pretty much my first character in any game that allows customization). But I made her a fire blaster, more or less emulating my #2 WoW character, a draenei fire mage. I suppose Titan Weapons would have been a better set for more closely recreating my main WoW character in CoH, but I can't recall why I didn't notice that set at the time. Was it only a purchasable PS at the time, not available by default? Or not yet introduced?

 

Anyway, I continued to play both WoW and CoH for the next six months but realized I was spending a lot more time in CoH than in WoW and decided it was silly to keep paying two subscription fees, so I canceled my WoW sub and played CoH exclusively. I had a lot of alts in WoW, but my altoholism really kicked in with CoH. I eventually had 93 alts ...

 

...  and then NCSoft shut down the game. I was heartbroken, and I had only played for a little over a year. I can't imagine how the longer-playing veterans felt. In the leadup to the shutdown, I did take the precaution of screenshotting the costumes of every single one of my 93 alts so that, in the extremely unlikely event that the game somehow came back, I could recreate them (turns out that paid off!)

 

On the plus side, the CoH shutdown roughly corresponded with the release of WoW's "Mists of Pandaria" expansion, so I went back to WoW (still because of the lack of Mac support for other games). MoP turned out to be a really fun expansion that I thoroughly enjoyed. The following expansion, "Warlords of Draenor" was kinda "meh", but the leveling/questing experience was still a lot of fun, and I managed to get at least one character of every class to max level by the end of that one. Then the "Legion" expansion was completely awesome. But toward the end of that expansion, Blizzard announced that they were finally ending support for the OpenGL graphics API, which meant that, as of the next expansion, the game would no longer work on my old iMac, which was ten years old at that point. I understood their decision; they'd been holding together OpenGL support with duct tape and gum for a few years just to keep it working on Macs, and it had reached the point that OpenGL could no longer handle what they wanted to do with the graphics going forward. My old iMac could not upgrade to the newer Apple graphics API, and I couldn't afford a new Mac, so I reluctantly bought a Windows gaming PC. I probably would have had to anyway, at some point. I'd spent the last few years gradually lowering and lowering the game's graphics settings to keep it playable on that old iMac.

 

Getting the new gaming machine made it feel like I was playing a whole new game, because everything suddenly looked and worked so much better. I took the opportunity to finally try out some other MMOs, but could not find any that I liked as well as WoW or CoH.

 

WoW released the "Battle for Azeroth" expansion, which I mostly liked, but it featured some prime examples of one of my frustrations with Blizzard: They introduce innovative new things that are actually fun for casual, mostly-solo players like myself, then the obnoxious, hardcore raiders complain about being "forced" to do this content they don't like, and Blizzard stops developing them.

 

And then, I found out about the "revival" of City of Heroes. I was led to Homecoming in May 2019, signed up immediately, and promptly canceled my WoW sub, and I've been here ever since. I did take a break from CoH during the Covid lockdowns--playing one game 16 hours a day inevitably burned me out a bit, especially since I was rolling so many alts and doing AP/KR/StCan over and over and over. I resubbed to WoW during that time, mainly to see the end of the BoA expansion and check out the new "Shadowlands" expansion. Shadowlands finally killed any remaining fondness I had for WoW. In all previous expansions, regardless of the overall quality, I'd always found the questing/leveling experience enjoyable. Not so in Shadowlands. Questing was boring and frustrating. And then at max level it turned into "start grinding multiple currencies" to unlock new power. I quit and haven't looked back.

 

I've played CoH exclusively since then. I'm up to 142 alts, ultimately hoping to have alts with every powerset combination for the ATs I play. Though for the time being I'm mostly holding off on rolling new alts to focus on leveling up the ones I already have (currently working toward my 52nd level 50) and getting my existing 50s fully T4 Incarnated (currently at 13) and fully IO'd (6).

 

Here's hoping that Homecoming sticks around for a long time, as I can't think of any other game I'd rather be playing!

[ivanhedgehog]

I got a copy of the game during I6, had made a character and was running around atlas. My wife looked over my shoulder and wanted me to install it on her computer to try it out. After 3 days of "I'm still looking at it" I went and got myself a new copy. Thats why her sub was a week older than mine. We were running in the Hollows soon after and got invited to a frostfire team. That was what hooked us for good. We were on Infinity and got invited to a guild. Stayed until shutdown.

[madicen]

Way back when one of the people working for Cryptic played EQ/DAOC/SWG with me and the boys. After work they would hop on Teamspeak (maybe it was Ventrilo, or Mumble, or Roger Wilco...the voice coms timeline is a little fuzzy 20 year later) with us to game. When they game got to a place where they could invite other to test it out we got a bunch of keys. CoH was just one of those game that immediately clicked with my friend group. When the game launched our guild was heavy into SWG but CoH became our downtime game, something we could all just chill and have a good time with...rather than the "serious business PvP" game that SWG was for us. I loved it, still love it, for it's simple but addictive gameplay loop, innovative systems, and just plain fun factor. Thats the short version of that story :)