I've been lurking this thread for a few weeks now. Fingers crossed that CoX makes a comeback.
Figured I'd add my CoX story to the pile.
I don't remember what issue I started playing. But I started with the free trial of CoV. I couldn't tell you what kind of toon I played. What I can tell you, was that CoX was, and still is, the best MMO I've ever had the joy of experiencing.
I finished the trial and a few weeks later went out and bought the collector's edition. My main pretty quickly switched from the toon I played in the trial, to a Tech Stalker/Supersonic. I have so many vivid memories of exploring that beginning Island, sneaking through caves, shipping containers, and rooms to backstab mobs. I had so much fun in that first month. I got to about 20, and really started having trouble soloing.
I didn't have the funds to keep paying for game time, though. I was still a teen, and didn't have a job. So $15 a month was pretty difficult to keep up with.
Then I got a summer job about a year or so later. I noticed new releases of CoX, with the whole "Architech Entertainement" thing. So I paid up for more game time. This time, I stocked up on game time cards.
I remade the toon from when I played the trial and got to about 30 with some help of a friend of mine. Then we discovered AE and just started grinding to 50.
I got bored of that, so I decided to check out CoH. Boy, was I in for a treat.
My friend got pretty bored of CoH (he'd always been more of the "villains are awesome" type) and stopped playing. But I got hooked. Without him rushing through all the instances and just murdering mobs, I had time to read the story. I got absolutely immersed in my toon's storyline. It was amazing. For once in an MMO, I felt like I really connected to my character. I wasn't just some part of a faction or race, being told to take care of the pancakey menial work by my superiors; I was a superhero struggling to do good by a city that was overrun with bad guys.
It felt... Like I was playing a comic book, where my toon was the hero.
It was wonderful.
If I logged off in the middle of a quest chain, it wasn't so much "ugh next time I log in I gotta kill some boars" as it was "I can't wait to see what happens in the next issue!" Quests chains were arcs in my toon's story. I even remember certain arcs would be referenced in later arcs. It really hit home.
That was the summer Going Rogue was announced. I held off for a couple of weeks, and then caved on pre-ordering it for the new Powersets. Regrettably, my story ends more or less right after GR's release. I played a little bit, but then I was let go from my job. No cashflow meant no more CoX. I bought a couple of game time cards after that, but never got to use them because my videocard busted a capacitor. Combine "not enough money" and "this computer is bloody ancient and nobody uses PCI or AGP bus slots for videocards anymore" and you pretty much just give up on PC gaming.
My most cherished memories of CoX though, are all about how unique the game and the community was. No other MMO allowed players to be so creative. Out of the thousands of toons I saw, and the hundreds I grouped with, no two looked even REMOTELY alike. Every quest chain I did felt like it had meaning in my toon's journey. I even loved doing AE missions because of how great some of the player-made storylines and missions were. Combat was always fun and engaging. But best of all, there was no "definitive" powerset/AT combination. Yes, some were better than others (no MMO can truly be balanced) but I never saw anyone one say that someone else was "playing the wrong powerset" (or things along those lines). I even got into exploration by badge collecting.
I usually dread partying with people in MMOs. That's why I tend to solo. But in CoX, grouping with people was awesome. As a Scrapper (... or Defender... I really don't remember which it was...), I got front row seats to the awesome powerset combos other players had come up with. If they RP'd I got to learn about their character, too. It was always great to find a PUG that had space for an extra Melee-based toon and just help people complete quests (in keeping with the comic-book thing above, I kind of liked to imagine that PUGs were the one-off crossover issues).
Now, I have a shiny new dedicated gaming rig (with more than enough power to play 10 simultaneous clients I'm sure), a steady job, and a new batch of friends whom I'm sure would love to jump into CoX.
So good luck to IronWolf and his team. You can bet that when the servers come back up, you'll see The Exploding Condenser (more likely to be renamed "The Exploding Capacitor" this time) keeping the streets of Paragon safe again!
EDIT: I'm so sorry that this post is a huge wall of text... I just... Needed to let it out.
