I Have Come to Watch the World End

[rowyn]

koogrr IM'd me earlier today and reminded me that City of Heroes was shutting down tonight. Koogrr planned to be there, to hold a torch for CoH one last time. "I'll be on Virtue, in Atlas Park 33. When NCSoft first announced they were shutting City of Heroes down, so many people logged into Virtue to protest that Atlas Park reached instance #33. They have kept that instance going ever since."

Even in City of Heroes' heyday, it was extremely rare to see more than two instances of a zone; normally, there was only one.

I canceled my account in January of this year, because the truth was that I had not played since October 2011. Even when the game went free-to-play, I didn't come back to look at it. Not even when they announced they were canceling it.

But at 10PM tonight, I decided to go in.

kagetsume was on too, so I chatted with him for a bit -- we haven't talked in ages. I couldn't get to Atlas Park 33 -- it was full -- so I went to Atlas Park 6. I didn't know where to go, so I flew up to the top of the globe that rests on the giant shoulders of Atlas's statue. There were three other people up there. One of them was DJing a tribute to CoH on Dimensional.Net, so I tuned in. His selection was broad, including instrumentals and a wide range of rock and eras. Almost all with a theme of heroes, rescuing, etc. Related to the theme.

Lut suggested I get some screenshots, so I brought in different characters, my favorites from across several servers. Virtue kicked me several times and crashed once. The queue to log in at one point was over a thousand.

I hadn't meant to stay to the end -- it's three hours past my usual bedtime -- but it's only 24 minutes away now, and oddly I am not sleepy. The music and taking screenshots, getting shots of Lut's characters, talking to people, has kept me up. I logged out Kasadya to bring on another character, Alice Bocor, to get screenshots of her. It's ten minutes to the end now, and I am in the queue to log Kasadya back in after getting kicked. I got back in, and got kicked again in less than a minute. Five minutes to go, and Virtue cannot bear up under the weight of its players' grief, the thousands who want to be there in the end. I am position 84 of 370 in the queue for Virtue, and it's 2AM CST, midnight Pacific: closing time.

At 2:03AM, three minutes after the servers were set to go down, I reconnected with Kasadya. She rose into the air and broadcasted a triumphant "I'm still alive!" An instant later, the server went down for the last time.

But you know, I cannot believe this is the end. Even if NCSoft never sells the game or resurrects it, when I think of all the bootleg WoW servers out there, I have to believe that somewhere, someone -- some hacker or dev who managed to sneak it out -- is running a CoH server. Paragon City is still out there, even if I can't visit it now.



Farewell, City of Heroes. You were the best of the MMOs; I fear we will not see your like again.

Comments

[xyzzysqrl]

I logged in the first character I ever made, eight years ago. Wavestate. She parked on a building overlook Steel Canyon, close to Valkyrie, and saluted the ... well, it was going to be the sunset, but it turned out to be the moon.

I always really liked Steel Canyon.

I'm -really- going to miss that game.

[rowyn]

It'd been over a year since I played, but I was more upset to see it go than I had expected.

What bothers me most is that the thing I loved most about City of Heroes -- the sidekicking/mentoring system -- is something no other MMO has done or plans to do. CoH made it so easy to play with my friends. I played with so many people I knew from RL -- people who played every night and people who only showed up a few times and people who didn't even have characters on my server but who made one just to play with me occasionally. All those different playstyles, different levels of commitment -- and CoH made it not only possible, but easy for me to play with them.

And no other first-person action MMO gives a crap about that. Every other one is "YOU SHOULD ONLY PLAY WITH OTHER PEOPLE WHO WILL KEEP EXACTLY THE SAME LEVEL OF COMMITMENT YOU DO." It's depressing as all hell. Why is this what people want? v_v

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

You said it. The first thing I thought of when I saw this post was that City of Heroes is the MMORPG I wish that Gwendel and I had spent time on. When we first signed on with World of Warcraft, ostensibly it was so we could play with our friends, and even each other, but Gwendel ended up shooting ahead, and I was always behind (since, ya know, I have to work during the day rather than doing the "level-grind"). The first 20 levels, when everything was brand new and shiny? Fun. After that? Not so much fun.

City of Heroes and its system of letting people participate who weren't at the same level -- Good grief, but I wished that was the NORM for MMORPGs. I don't wish I'd spent more time playing MMORPGs. I just wish that of the time I spent on them, it had been with a model like that, because I think it would've been a lot more enjoyable -- and more social.

I never played CoH, but I'm still sad to see it go. Too bad there's no model where if a bunch of people have a copy of Game X, they can just connect online somewhere and PLAY, whether it's a game that came out 10 years ago, or the brand-new shiny one that just came out this week.

[rowyn]

It's not even just the level-difference -- Star Wars: the Old Republic is, if anything, even worse than WoW about segregating the player base and keeping them from playing together. Almost all of the quest lines have to be started together, so even if you're the same level as someone else, if you're not at the exact same place in the quest chain, forget grouping. There are some exceptions -- the content that's aimed at groups is repeatable, but story-lite -- but even so. Geography also works against you in so many MMOs, where it can take 20 or 30 minutes -- more if you keep getting jumped by hostiles -- to cross unfamiliar terrain. In City of Heroes, it was maybe 15 minutes TOPS to get from anywhere in the game to any where else in the game. It's not that CoH was "small" -- it had tons of zones and lots of detail -- but it had plenty of shortcuts and the travel powers were awesome.

*sigh*

Oh, and yeah, I remember Koogrr saying that he hardly ever played with his friends who played WoW. I think I played with every friend I had who had a copy of CoH, including ones who didn't have their main characters on the same server as me.

[(Anonymous)]

I spent most of my time thrashing, getting on the server and falling off.

When I was there, I saw poignant farewells, people apologizing for being griefers and an amazing solidarity and friendship.

I couldn't get Johnni to Atlas Park 33, because I'd kept her a villain. Someone was desperately running alignment missions, trying to switch back to a hero before the game closed. I had my alternate catperson, Gunkatta, and while he's male I used one of his character slots to duplicate Johnni's costume long ago to simulate her borrowing his squad of thugs for RP purposes. So, Johnni was there, holding a torch, until one of the disconnects put me in a different Atlas. Someone was broadcasting a Matrix room in Peregrine. I'd been there once, on some mission, a bright blue circular room with a pillar of light in the centre. Perhaps not the most visually thrilling place, but appropriate, although the AE buildings would have been better.

I'll miss... everything. Flying, knockback, pets than can talk, the costumes, the crazy plotlines. That they were willing to make massive changes to their canon, that at the end, players were canonically equivalent or better than the game NPCs. A far, far cry from grinding to level 95 in WoW and 'finally graduating' to a basic unit popped in Warcraft 3 along with a dozen others each turn. Even the NPCs that taunted with praise as you walked by, referencing your last mission. The zones, everything.

In a small way, the Aztecs were right. The world ended in December, 2012, just not this one. City of Heroes/Villains will always be in my mental space.

- Koogrr (who is having password troubles right now)

[rowyn]

Being able to group any character with any other character. That's what I will miss more than anything else. They got so much right -- everything you said and more -- and I suppose I won't see most of that in any other game either. It doesn't seem like it should be so much to ask.

Superjump.

I spent at least 20 minutes in Steel Canyon last night, just jumping Tabitha Cat around like a superball. Best travel power EV4R.

Sigh.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I was at D+D, and my laptop didn't have CoH on it anymore, but a couple people in the room were logged on until it shut down. Mostly, they were playing with snowballs to put out peoples' torches. q:3

[rowyn]

I am not sure whether using snowballs to douse torches is funny or being a jerk. Both, I guess. :D

[kagetsume.livejournal.com]

It hit me a lot harder than I expected it to. I played it since issue 0 (So, over 8 years), and for the reasons you note. It made it /so/ easy to play with your friends. Any level, just about any group setup. The game adjusted, and made it fun. It was a game you could log into for just 15 minutes, and you do something fun. It was a game that inspired people to do good things, RL. It inspired a group donate more to charities, and encouraged others to do the same. It inspired people to actually try to be heroes, even in small ways.

I've never played another game quite like it, and that's saying something given I have played games since 1982 when I first got Zork 1 as a gift. I'm going to miss it. BoingDragon and I couldn't get back onto Virtue in time for the shutdown after it mapserved us with 5 minutes to go. So we logged into Exalted and took to the skies in Talos. There we shot off fireworks into the night sky until the server disconnect message came. We were the only two in that zone on that server. It really was like watching a world come to an end.

At this point I have quite a loathing for NCSoft. They handled the shutdown very poorly. The game was doing fine; it was a positive revenue generator for them. Not huge profit, but there was profit. The message came quick, and heartless. I honestly thought it was some sort of hoax the first time I read it. But no, it was all too real. I will never play another NCSoft game; I will not reward the behavior they have shown; a complete lack of concern for their own customer wants. Frankly, I hope they go out of business.

[whitefangedwolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hope NCSoft goes out of business, too, if only for the hope that the CoH IP could then be acquired by someone who actually gives a damn about their customers and would bring the game back.

[rowyn]

I do hope someone is able to buy CoH off of them. Such a waste to have it just sitting on a shelf getting dusty. :(

[rowyn]

Yeah, it's depressing because some of the things CoH did best -- like the whole sidekicking/mentoring thing -- are things that no other game is even trying to do. It's like every other MMO designer thinks that stratifying the player base and making sure they can't play casually with their friends is AWESOME. :(

I don't really know much about the shutdown, but I have a hard time hating NCSoft over their treatment of the game because I remember how much good they did for it after they bought it from Cryptic. Sigh.