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

[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.