Yeah, I was one of those friends! That was "The Agents" group if memory serves.
Our agents group was on Infinity and fairly far into CoV's timeline, if** I recall correctly. I'm pretty sure that group followed our VEAT group, because that's when some of the folks started drifting away to other games. Side note: 8 VEATs on a team is so very much fun and practically untouchable (until cascading defense failure, anyway). For that matter, a team full of AR/* corruptors was awesome sauce.
Anyway, I'm talking about my time on Justice before I moved to Virtue. That was issue 0 time frame, or close enough thereabouts.
** Correct recall is not guaranteed. See below.
AR was not proliferated to Defenders until Issue 16. Not sure what you're talking about. AR was only available to Blasters, then Corruptors came out with AR as a base set with Issue 6/CoV, then Defenders got it in Issue 16.
Wait... what?
So that means that I created a Emp/??? character...
Which means that I thought it was good enough just to put on the suit to be in the "theme" group. And also that Empathy was important enough that missing AR was acceptable.
That makes me sad. Just how lame was I, anyway?
However, faulty memory and a false claim to Emp/AR defender does not invalidate the fact that I have had effectively zero fun playing as an empath and... ah, whatever.
The good news is that I was reading the forums and learning how to play the game. Now I'm all nostalgic. I'll have to describe some of CoH's painful early lessons for me. Not now, though -- I'm still sore over claiming the wrong powerset. Soon (TM).
If it was a Corruptor in Issue 6, not a Defender at game-start, then I have no idea what they could be mistaking for Empathy, since the closest thing would have been...
Okay, now you're just being mean.