I got in way early. I was never into the swords and sorcery RPGs out there, so I didn't get the point of online gaming when people talked about Evercrack. (I still largey don't, but CoH is an exception) I bought a disc back around issue 2 and played a bit, but the Hollows Slog burned me out on the game along with several of my friends. When the City of heroes/City of Villains combo pack showed up on local store shelves, I eyeballed it, but left it on the shelf and went home, the taste of a dozen toons stranded in the hollows still bitter in my mouth.
I looked up the game online though, and saw the blurbs about how they had done away with the mandentory group mission runs, how the hollows had been reworked, and how there was new stuff like Supergroups and the invention system, and of course, villains! So I went back and bought the full special edition Good Vs Evil DVD package with my VIP pass to Pocket D, my wall map of the zones, etc. I enjoyed the tweaked game a lot more in its new balanced out modes, and played it on and off for two more years. Finally, though, my PC could no longer launch the game as the graphics got reworked and surpassed my aging hardware (Gee, maybe if I'd been spending those monthly fees on savings for a new GPU and some more memory?
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A few years down the road, I heard the news... City of Heroes and Villains was going to go F2P! I had a new-to-me laptop which more than met the minimum requirements, my old login information including my Pocket D Pass, and I started counting the days! I logged in. Sadly, while my old account worked, many of my old toons had been erased over the years. Oh well, a chance to start anew, right? And man the changes! I stopped playing before the Going Rogue options for alignment change appeared. And I stopped playing before some key rebalancing, so my old playstyle of Tank in and let everyone follow no longer worked so well. And I stopped playing before Oroboros was anything more than "that wierd time travel mission for level 40 characters" Plus... holy crap, where are all my contacts? Who is this guy standing around asking about his dead wife? I don't go downstairs anymore? Oh my God... I don't even have to go to the hollows at all now?!?!?!
I quickly fell in love with the new early-stage missions and the writing involved with the stories for Mathew Habashy and then Twinshot. I love their backtories and tried to play them with every toon which I made even when power-leveling. And the inside joke that Matthew's wife was too good for him, or at least too hot. And I dearly wished they'd added more twinshot missions later in the game, because once you left Atlas, the stories just began to lose some of their detail and intimacy as you ran from contact to contact. I spent quite a bit of my disposable income either on game time or on options in the shop... I must have worn out those Vanguard weapons props on all my toons...
I loved playing back and forth across the alignment lines, and even did a mission or two in Praetoria though it was not my favourite. And the Arenas... those had been THE hot new thing the last time I'd played... and now, only one was left standing. I was a total toon whore, building and deleting charactersleft and right save for a few special ones. sometimes the only thing that saved a toon was the ability to gain a costume slot at level 20.
And then... August 31 2012... NCSoft took the broadsword out of Jeanne Darque's hand and rammed it through my heart. We'd just gotten the incredible new staff fighting, and were supposed to get an entirely new haunted astoria zone and mission set... and... its dead... the staff has been fired, and the game was going to coast on on automatic for a couple of months so they could rake in money from the paid custmers accounts and then... the cold, lonely, empty death of a game client that wouldn't connect any more. The only online game I had ever played more than five minutes... had played for years... gone.