New efforts!

[Brigadine]

There's part of me that wants to kidnap codewalker and lock him in a closet till he remakes CoH top to bottom....

[Vee]

There's part of me that wants to kidnap codewalker and lock him in a closet till he remakes CoH top to bottom....

Which part?

Actually, don't answer that, nevermind.

[Brigadine]

Which part?

Actually, don't answer that, nevermind.

LOL

[MWRuger]

I guess you had to be there.  Yes, I believe I23 CoH was in every important way superior to Issue 0.  But at the time the playerbase itself was totally ignorant.  Completely, utterly ignorant.  There was a time when Fire/Kin wasn't a thing, and literally no one really knew what it could do.  We didn't all burst out of head start running those things around.  It was AR/Dev blasters and Ice tankers.  Ice tankers, man.  When everything is new, everything seems completely different.  I remember debating the relative merits of running an all toggle-SR build verses perma-elude in I2.  Perma-elude.

Sure, most Gravity controllers looked the same because all you had was power-10 SOs to play with, but then again if you've never even *seen* a Singularity before, that's not a big concern (and the game didn't even launch with Singularities in the first place: those were added to the set after launch, so people who only knew the game from reading the manual literally had no idea what those things were when they first encountered them).

Put yourself at Issue zero, and then take away Mids, take away paragonwiki, take away all the guides.  No Arcana to tell you how the powers work; no TopDoc starting measurement threads; no BuffyASummers even listing what the powers are.  No patch notes besides what the devs happen to post, that you might not see.  No powerset debate threads because no one has played enough of them to even compare them.  No idea what pets do.  No idea how mez works.  No idea what attacks the critters have.  No real numbers.  No tohit rolls.  All you have are people like Snipefu and Pulsewave saying essentially "I recommend total focus because it stuns bosses, yo" and something called the "Brawl Index" that people are trying to make that has like twelve powers in it.  How much diversity is in the game?  More than you could possibly navigate through, and more than everyone you know could describe to you.  Enough to make every replay through the game something you've never played before, never seen before, and never even heard of before.

Here's one of my earliest memories of the game.  I'm on my main, aka the only character I've rolled up to this point.  I'm a level 11ish energy/energy blaster.  I'm jogging through Atlas when I happen across a blinking box on the ground surrounded by what appears to be a soap bubble.  I can target it.  I creep towards it.  It doesn't shoot at me.  I take a shot at it.  I miss, but it still doesn't shoot back.  So I decide to open up with everything I have, which is not much.  I shoot at it for what seems like five minutes, run completely out of endurance, and its still sitting there, blinking.  I shoot it, I punch it, I'm basically completely drained and yet it just plain ignores me and continues to sit there, blinking.  Eventually I just give up and move on.

A couple weeks later I'm a level 17 energy/energy blaster, fighting a new enemy called the Sky Raiders.  Oh.  So that's what I wasted ten minutes of my life on.  Someone's level 23 Sky Raider ambush left a present, and I spend ten minutes stalking and five minutes shooting at a completely worthless shield generator.  I *know* there were players that saw that and thought "why?"  'Cause duh, that's why.

For all that I loved how the game improved itself over time, and for all that I think the newer players had it so much better than we did who started basically from launch, there is a part of me that thinks those players missed out on something.  They missed out on coming across a shield generator, and not knowing what it was, not literally but metaphorically (I'm sure I'm not the only one that happened to).  That game fundamentally didn't exist past about I5 or so, when we all got not just too smart for that, but too smart to let anyone else fall for that.  Unless you played the game completely solo, never read the forums, never teamed with anyone, never read any in-game chat at all, and never read any of the outside information sources, then maybe.  Even then, you had to know that what you didn't know, lots of other people probably did.  There was a time when no one really knew anything, and what you were seeing was relatively novel.  That's a unique experience.

I think you did have to be there. Even if they brought it back as Issue 0 it wouldn't be as you described. I wish I had been there, but I think all the people who would play know too much about the game and we would know what we were missing.

Other than for the nostalgia of it, I think people would be disappointed in very short time.

[Brigadine]

I think you did have to be there. Even if they brought it back as Issue 0 it wouldn't be as you described. I wish I had been there, but I think all the people who would play know too much about the game and we would know what we were missing.

Other than for the nostalgia of it, I think people would be disappointed in very short time.

I had a buddy that always went on and on about issue 0. I never could figure out if he was describing CoH lol. I joined at issue 12, just for the sake of relevance.

[LateNights]

I had a buddy that always went on and on about issue 0. I never could figure out if he was describing CoH lol. I joined at issue 12, just for the sake of relevance.

It's funny, when the old timers talk about the old issues they never tell you how PACKED the servers were.

I remember Atlas park during the first winter event - imagine Frosty spawning several times over the map with multiple teams taking him down at all times of the day - on Guardian!!

The only time Atlas would have seen more people was the 33 event...

It had its moments - but the game was better at the end.

[Arcana]

I think you did have to be there. Even if they brought it back as Issue 0 it wouldn't be as you described. I wish I had been there, but I think all the people who would play know too much about the game and we would know what we were missing.

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.themarysue.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F05%2Fwill-smith-neuralizer.png

[Arcana]

It's funny, when the old timers talk about the old issues they never tell you how PACKED the servers were.

I remember Atlas park during the first winter event - imagine Frosty spawning several times over the map with multiple teams taking him down at all times of the day - on Guardian!!

The only time Atlas would have seen more people was the 33 event...

It had its moments - but the game was better at the end.

Part of that was that there were a bit more players, but I think most of it was that in the beginning the majority of those players were not instanced.  When the best and most interesting way to level was street sweeping, you had a lot of people in the shared zones.  When running story arcs became better, the shared zones emptied out.

But events always made the servers seem more packed because it drove players into the shared zones.  Every zombie invasion was pretty packed.  The council war was pretty wild.  The first Rikti invasions were pretty packed.  When the turnstiles launched it was clear to me the players were still there, they were just mostly invisible in the latter part of the game.

The all time craziest lag-fest in the history of the game has to be the end of that phase two beta test for CoV when the devs invited the players to come kill them.  If Hamidon turned the client into Powerpoint, that unoptimized lunacy was like playing the email version of City of Heroes.  I was traveling on that day and tried to log in with my laptop via hotel wifi.  I think it is possible my Stone brute is still in the middle of a windup to hit Recluse from 2005.

[Biz]

I think it is possible my Stone brute is still in the middle of a windup to hit Recluse from 2005.

And that's for a "Jab" animation

[JoshexProxy]

There's no doubt in my mind that Codewalker and buddies can do that.  But how long would that take and how expensive that would be in time and resources, I couldn't say.  If you locked Codewalker and a couple knowledgeable friends in a room and shoved pizza under the door and took bets on whether they would be able to generate a CoH-compatible game engine in a year, I would probably take the under.  But we all have lives, and that includes Codewalker and most of the developers on the various reboot development projects.  And that also includes all the people involved in the licensing negotiations, on both sides.

I think you'll need more than one pizza. per day per person. that and a few dozen pots of coffee daily to wash it down.

[Codewalker]

Coffee with pizza? Eww. That's cruel and unusual right there.

[LadyShin]

Coffee with pizza? Eww. That's cruel and unusual right there.

What? Best of both worlds....Pizza for breakfast plus coffee...Breakfast of champions!  8)

[Codewalker]

Cold pizza is one thing (I'm still not sure the flavors are compatible), but with hot pizza, a cold drink is the only way to go. Beer, Coke, margarita... that kind of thing.

[Biz]

I think you are mistaken...the kidnapped guys LOCKED IN A CLOSET do not get a vote on what gets slipped under the door. You take what we give you and be happy for it.

[Pyromantic]

I had a buddy that always went on and on about issue 0. I never could figure out if he was describing CoH lol. I joined at issue 12, just for the sake of relevance.

I joined early in Issue 6, which in some ways I think was the best time.  I never had to make the adjustment to the Global Defense Nerf or ED as they were already in place, but I had the experience of playing relatively early in the game's life, seeing the early days of CoV, IOs, etc.

I think I could go back to playing I6 quite happily, though I doubt anything before that would feel like home.  Not that it really matters; if we see anything it seems pretty certain to be I23, and I'd be perfectly happy with that.

[Solitaire]

I'd be happy with any Issue if we could have the game back  :(

[robo40]

I remember running around with an electric toon on release, helping random people and hitting a programmed "No charge for MY power!" after each fight.  Finally someone asked "Is there a charge for making you go away?".  That's when I learned about kill-stealing.   :-[

[LaughingAlex]

Coffee with pizza? Eww. That's cruel and unusual right there.

If I do that, I always make the coffee into an affogato.  Then it's more like Pizza and ice cream :).

[CrimsonCapacitor]

If you locked Codewalker and a couple knowledgeable friends in a room and shoved pizza under the door...

I had no idea this was an option.

[Arcana]

I had no idea this was an option.

Sure it is.  Many thin crust pizzas will fit under an interior door.