90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Last Day (91)

I didn't take the day off, and therefore I didn't make it home for the first hami raid, which was at 3 PM my time, which is also when I get off work.  But I live close to work so I made it home and logged in just in time to join the redside hami run.  I don't think Virtue has run a hami raid redside in at least a year, but this one went off without a hitch, we had a large group of people show up.  I was on Squiddy Kitty, one of only two level 50 villains that I have right now (the other being AE Baby of course).  Everything went smoothl, we did what I guess is a 50% push, so cleared mitos, took hami to 75%, cleared mitos again, then killed hami.  Easy, smooth, awesome.

Right after that they formed a Mothership Raid that Shimmer ran -- he's been running raids for three years.  This time he wanted every level 50 to solo and grab a bomb.  We actually set all 18 bombs possible.  I had fun doing this too, I brought Megami Hime my Titan Weapons/WP brute who is softcapped to smashing lethal and energy/neg energy.  I took on one of the far gates solo, then killed every single rikti that attacked me, then finally set the bomb and joined the raid.

The only thing that marred it slightly was that once I got back to the raid they'd already pulled U'kon Grai, so I joined in fighting him, but then Shimmer started cussing people out for killing him.  I just want to be clear on one thing -- I showed up just as the raid was starting so I didn't see any pre-instructions, and he said nothing during the actual raid so far as I saw, until after U'kon was dead.  But as someone else said, it's our last night ever, no need to fight over stuff that won't matter in a few hours anyway.  The rest f the raid went very smoothly.  I had fun.

I took a break to try and get some writing done.  Ultimately I cheated a bit on NaNoWriMo to reach 50,000 words, I was about 800 words short but I'd rather spend my last hours in City of Heroes and finish up the writing tomorrow.  Anyway, they kind of encourage you to cheat a bit, and I have done really well on it.

When I logged back in I first logged in Fidel From Hell and Union Girl, two characters who had been logged out for 3,120 days.  They finally got their day in the sun!  One of them was in Outbreak, so I chose to go to Galaxy City and I logged out there.

Then I got a screen capture of Dog Aggro at his current level of 16 with pets, and switched to join an ITF with friends.  My last ITF ever.  :(  I brought Sparks Fly for this, one of my most fun and most destructive toons of all.  CA and Jane were no the team and we had fun destroying ITF one last time.  We really destroyed it too, it wasn't very fair to the Cims.  We ran at +1 and stomped everything.

After that they'd decided to run a hami raid again, so I switched to Nina Ballerina who was already parked in the hive and soon we were going at it.  We cleared mitos, took hami to 75%... or were supposed to... but apparently some people took him to 50% because we wound up with a double mito bloom.  Our hunt phase had been very quick, and I'd sold a bunch of my EoEs earlier when I realized I'd mised the "last" hami raid blueside, so I only had one on me.  When that was gone, I died.  Then I hit the hospital and immediately DC'd (which had happened to me during the ITF too -- Virtue is in the red tonight, and is not very stable).  When I came back, I saw this:

Eventually I got in, and we did what Exx called a 100% push... but I'd call it a 75% push because we cleared the opening wave of mitos, then killed hami.  That's pushing through the wave that spawns at 75%.  Anyway, hami went down and it was awesome.

They wanted to run a redside hami again too, so I switched to AE Baby.  This time though, things went wrong.  First of all our hami tank either died or didn't do his job because people were getting pounded by hami and dying left and right... once we got through that, we cleared the first wave, then on the 2nd wave we had to regroup at the safe rock because people were dying all over the place again, hami was unleashed on the league.  While waiting to restart at safe rock, Virtue crashed again.  :/

Hit Streak told us it was being worked on though:

Har har har.




Up to the mapserving it's been an amazing and very sad night.  Lots of people who haven't been around the last three months have logged in tonight.  People are running all kinds of TFs and raids and events.  People are constantly saying goodbye.  It was like one of the best nights of teaming ever, coupled with one of the saddest nights every as people said goodbye and logged off for the last time ever.  Now I'm just waiting to log back in again, with less than an hour left to do anything anyway....

It's a sad way to end with the server crashing so hard.  I'm glad that I got things that I wanted to do done before tonight... I'd be frustrated trying to get anything else accomplished tonight, and some people are definitely trying to do that, earn that last badge or document that last trial or document those last characters.  It's looking like some of those plans aren't going to happen.  As I write this it;s 11:05 PM and the server has been down for almost 30 minutes.  :/

----

So I managed to log back in, but there was only about 50 minutes left.  The 2nd redside hami raid was done for.  Some people were trying to run one last ITF or something quick... I decided to log into Princess Ozma and hang out on the steps of AP2 and wait for the end.  I never had one character that was my main or was "me".  Mouse Police was the closest, she was my 2nd 50 and my main badger, but not really my favorite character.  Organica was my name on the forums but she wasn't me, and really she was just a lesser version of Mouse Police.  I had various characters with the name Shinobu, which was my global... Shinobu Eden may have been my favorite, and Sailor Shinobu had been my favorite a few years back.  But ultimately, my favorite characters the last couple of years were Sparks Fly, AE Baby, Nina Ballerina, Tiffany Blackheart, War Maid, Huntress Midnight, Megami Hime... I had quite a few of them.

But I've always loved the Oz books since I was young and I loved the look and background story for Princess Ozma.  Staff Fighting on a brute was only okay, and Energy Aura was only okay (and obscured the character's looks, something that always annoyed me in a defense set).  But overall I liked the character quite a lot because of the concept.  So that was who I picked for my final moments in the game.

People were saying their goodbyes and stating where they were for the final minutes.  Zombie had both of his accounts up, one in AP and one dancing in the Hive.  I decided that it would be good to have Nina on my 2nd account dancing with Zombie in the Hive.

The game, unfortunately, had other plans, as Virtue crashed hard for the third time tonight.  I managed to get Ozma logged back in right at Midnight, and some of my friends got back in.  Others were on other servers.  My 2nd account was logged into Maiden Knight on Justice, just in case I couldn't get back onto Virtue.  And probably a lot of people were still trying to log back into Virtue... and then, about two minutes after Midnight, the actual shutdown came.  On Justice I got the message that I was being forcibly disconnected because of server shutdown, but on Virtue I just got the mapserver message again and everything froze... forever... with Ozma dancing on the steps of City Hall.

Goodbye forever all my characters and friends in City of Heroes!

I want to thank all the people I've played with in the last few years... Wild Cards Virtue (my first ever global channel, just a few friends really), Hero Force, MG's Taskforces, Antebellum Revolution, Radio Virtue, ROBOKITTY, Whisper X, and especially my friends in the Brickhouse Chat channel.  You were better than any supergroup!  Anything I did with people from Brickhouse Chat was done the right way, with powerful characters and players who knew exactly how to do things, and how to have fun without arguing, and how to do things in the way that I found to be the most fun, as in our "smash everything" last ITF that we ran tonight. You guys all made this game worth playing!

I don't think I'll ever find a game that had what this game had -- the ability to look like I wanted to look like, to travel any way I wanted to travel, to play the way I wanted to play, to solo if it suited me or to team in a way that made teaming really fun, where there was no holy trinity and almost any combination of ATs could work, and where your level almost never mattered, you could always find things to do with your friends regardless of who was what level.  I don't know why other MMOs don't get these things, or why people put up with less.

I don't know what I'm going to do with myself now.  :/

Thanks for the wonderful ride, and farewell.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 90

(Luckily there are actually 91 days...)

I find myself running out of time.  Everybody does, but in my case I'm also trying to complete my NaNoWriMo attempt by Midnight Friday as well, so tonight after work I spent a good amount of time writing.  I logged in late, and then I spent more time PLing One Divine Hammer.  Not exactly an exciting way to end my time in the game.

After a break to exercise, I returned to finish my PLing... One Divine Hammer was going to be 50 one way or another!  But I wanted to maybe stop shy of 50 and find something else to do for when I actually hit 50... something more epic  than a Council Earth farm.

Whisper X wanted to start up a mini Mothership Raid, so I said I would join.  I stopped PLing just shy of completing my last bar of experience.  It was actually about 118,000 experience to level, so while we were waiting on people I killed some rikti and got it down to 22,000.  Then we set off on our big adventure.

I say this because when Whisper X said "mini raid" I had no idea how mini.  We had only five people -- a tank, my mace/shield scrapper, a bots MM, a blaster and a corr (if I remember correctly).  The others were Whisper X, Grimrose, Evi, and SubZippo.  And I wasn't sure if it was fair of me to bring a sub-50 character, but One Divine Hammer has about 55% defense to two positions and 48% aoe defense, so she's pretty tough already.  I was able to tank hoards of level 54 rikti, with the aid of inspirations (I had a bunch already bought so I was using /ah to grab them as needed).

I really didn't know what to expect from such a small force on an MSR... but we planted five bombs, and then pulled U'kn Grai.  This led to a team wipe because we had too many Magus around, but after hitting the hospital we regrouped at the edge of the ship and Whisper pulled U'kon all the way there, and we too him down!  ^_^

I hit 50 just after we landed n the ship, of course.  All in all a more-than-suitably epic encounter for my last level 50!

One thing I keep forgetting to mention:  Mouse Police hit 1251 badges two days ago.  I haven't actually done any badging on her in several days, but she earned the 7 days remaining a hero after changing alignment badge automatically, as I'd planned.  So I'm satisfied, that's one more thing I accomplished.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 89

I didn't do very much tonight, but I had two major accomplishments:

1)  I backed up the entire "Zero to Awesome" thread.  I can post it in my blog later, maybe something to do next week.  This is something I've been wanting to do for the past three months though, so I'm glad it's finally done.  I sort of had plans to also document/back up my other marketing threads, specifically the one where I random rolled 1 hero merit a day for 30 days... but I guess that won't happen now, I don't want to waste one of my last two nights in the game doing that.

2)  I PL'd One Divine Hammer from 43.5 to 47.5.  I am going to hit 50 one way or the other, even it if it essentially meaningless at this point because there's virtually no time to enjoy playing her at 50.  Still, I wanted her to be my last 50 so I'm gonna do it.  Kinda sad that I'd spend one of my last three nights in the game PLing, but then again, it's what I want to do so no regrets.

That was about my evening.  It was very quiet on Virtue, with a lot of people either not on or busy trying to finish up whatever their goals are.  Jane was going hero, Sunlover wanted to be vigilante again but realized he didn't have enough time, various people doing various things.  There was a RWZ mothership raid that I didn't join, and there was an ITF that was about done when I logged on (they failed to complete it -- Rageycat and Kali were talking about it).  But mostly it was a quiet evening, a good time for me to be antisocial and PL my character I guess.

Hoping to get some writing done tonight, I'm over 47,000 words for NaNoWriMo but haven't completed a story in a couple of days.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 88

Tonight was a good night.  First, I finished documenting all of my characters.  All I have left is a new one of Dog Aggro and one of One Divine Hammer if I happen to make it to 50 on her.  Everything else is done!

Second, I logged on to Eternal Sweeper and joined a Penelope Yin TF.  This was fun and I gained some experience.  Near the end Hit Street was spawning tentacles in AP33.  I was too late to see it or join in on the fun -- or was I?  AP33 was full, then tentacles spawned in AP1 and that filled, and there was an AP2 up.  I made it into AP33 and I thought, hey, he'll probably come back to AP33 and spawn some more if he's still doing it.  And he did!  Take a look:

I didn't manage to get a title -- AP was lagging so bad that in that second photo you should see a bunch of people standing on the steps with me and probably Hit Streek handing out titles, but I couldn't see another soul, and they couldn't see anyone else either.  Was very weird.  Anyway once I was on a league I could see the people on my league, and I spent a while killing tentacles.  But there were tons of them and it got old, and it's not exactly fantastic experience, and friends were starting and ITF and I figured, hey, I'll let someone else get into AP33 and have some tentacle fun.  I got my pictures, I got to fight them for a while.  ^_^  (And Eternal Sweeper, who cleans up after the elder gods, was a very nice choice to fight them!)

So we ran an ITF.  Good old ITF, always a great place to get experience.  I hit 49 in the first mission, and 50 partway through the last mission.  So Eternal Sweeper is not 50 -- my 2nd and last 50 stalker, and possibly my last 50 in City of Heroes, though I think I will push to get One Divine Hammer to 50 as well.

Here's all of the characters of mine that have hit 50 just since Sept 1st:

I could have wished to get a few more to 50 -- never got my PB or Crab or Bane or Fortuna to 50, never got a dual blade to 50, etc. -- but I think I did pretty good all things considered.

My analysis of Staff Melee:  great on stalkers.  Only so-so on brutes.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 87

I spent about 1 1/2 hours on Monday just documenting old characters.  I have just a few left to do now -- Freedom on my main account, and then a few scattered characters, mostly on Virtue.  I need to document my 1st Zero to Awesome thread next.

In-game I logged in long enough to say hello to people and to run Mouse Police through five tip missions and confirm hero alignment.  I thought this would lead to a badge I didn't already have, but it didn't.  After that it was past 8 PM, and I wanted to get some writing done as well so I called it a night and logged off.  So I didn't get very much done last night... well, technically documenting about 40-50 characters was getting something done.  ^_^

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 86

I had plans yesterday to try and PL One Divine Hammer closer to 50 and to actually get Eternal Sweeper to 50, but those didn't materialize.

Thwe first thing I did was to check on my main account to see who I had left to document.  It turns out I have a bunch of servers full of characters that I haven't documented still --Liberty, Champion, Protector, Infinity, Guardian, Justice, and Freedom.  I did a couple of the others Sunday morning just to narrow the list to the above.  I'm going to have to do at least one server a day every evening to make sure everyone is done.

Then I logged in and started setting up to PL, but Freaky was running a Sarah Moore and couldn't find an 8th, even someone to fill so they could start.  So I switched to One Divine Hammer and joined, since it's only 40+.  I didn't really take any pictures, but there's not that much to see about a Sara More.  I'm surprised I didn't get the AV though.

Later in the day was the final Cathedral of Pain runs by Feaky and Pyro's Total PWNAGE super group and Jane and CA's villain group Stars Haven.  Both runs went off perfectly!  And it was photo day on Virtue, so we paused for a photo after each CoP, and in between we had a  Brickhouse Chat photo session in Rikti War Zone organized by Maressa.

(Blue Side CoP)

(Brickhouse Chat photo.  I used Sparks Fly, one of my most-played characters.)

(Redside CoP photo)

Afterwards CA and Jane ran a Numina and I joined, again on One Divine Hammer, who finished the evening  at level 43.5.  CA was using Jungle Kitteh, who I'd PL'd a bit last week and who earned Task Force Commander.  I'd promised to help them out today since they had wanted to run this Saturday.  We had a pretty good run, but were interrupted by rikti raids of course.

The last thing I did that evening was run Mouse through five hero tips including the "Unstable Trigger" one in which you face off with Maelstrom.  This earned me another badge.  Surprising really that I'd never got that one before, but that puts me at 1249.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 84/85

I didn't actually play on Friday, at all.  I was still at my parent's house and the laptop experience is pretty lackluster.

Saturday I headed home early so that I could participate in the final Saturday Hami raid on Virtue.  Got home about 2:40, logged in, people were already in the Hive.  By the time 3:00 PM rolled around the Hive was nearly full -- then it was full, and we had a Hive 2 with people waiting for a second raid.  That hasn't happened in... well, maybe not in all of 2012, I can't remember.

I joined on Nina Ballerina.  We were really melee heavy so I considered switching, but I've done most of my Hami raids with Nina and I wanted to use her.  Zombie picked Zombie Fryer for the same reasons.  In any case, once the zone filled it would have been difficult to switch without missing out on the first raid completely.

Mr. Trilby missed out on the first raid... he and several others were waiting in Hive 2.  Our full-zne raid went so well that we did a 75% push, only clearing once after the initial clear.  Or is that a 50% push?  We killed hami through the 50% and 25% mito spawns anyway, and did it very easily.  Then we gathered in Hive 2, and with fewer people -- about 35 or 40 this time -- we did it all again, and again did the push through two mito spawns.  We rocked!  ^_^

Afterwards people wanted to take group photos, and Zombie stayed behind drumming.  Hami is one of his favorite things and this was probably the last one on Virtue... Exxxcalibur said he'd try to run one on Friday though.

After, I switched to Storm Girl Ten.  Two of my remaining goals are to get Storm Girl Ten and Eternal Sweeper to 50... and maybe One Divine Hammer as well. Storm Girl was 49 but needed a respec since I'd misplaced one of my slots.  I headed to AP33 and started my respec.  Halfway through, I lost connection to the server.  I logged back in -- luckily it remembered where I'd been, and finished.  Then I clicked "all done" and the game crashed on me.  :/

I logged back in and did the whole thing again, this time successfully.  I was thinking, 'Do I really need afterburner?  it's mostly good for running shard TFs, and I'll never run another of those."  But of course, does not taking it make a difference?  Nope.  So I just stuck with my build.  And as soon as I was done, I saw Freaky advertising for a Faathim the Kind TF, so I joined.  ^_^

Since Megajoule is a forum poster, I have to mention that we were on the same team again.  I took a picture of V E R B to prove it!

It was a good thing I brought my fender too.  The entire team was melee -- three tanks, a brute or two, a scrapper -- no stalker though.  I was the only non-melee until our last member joined, a corr, but they quit after just a few missions.  I spent a lot of time healing with my little O2 boost!

As it happens, Faathim is one of the best TFs to have afterburner, because near the end you do a tour of Storm Palace touching stones to prove you were there.  Or something.  In any case, I was useful!

Oh, Storm Girl Ten hit 50 too.  Pretty early on in fact.  I was able to slot the full set of Ragnarok that I was carrying around.  ^_^

Right after this I joined a group of friends who wanted to run Halloween tip missions.  I had one saved up on Mouse -- I didn't need the badge, but I was happy to help others.  Sunlover and Grimrose wanted all of the badges, and Evi too I think.  She had the mission on one character, and Ragey Cat had it saved on several.  We ran four straight Halloween tips and got all of those badges for a couple of people.

Following this we decided to get some of the arena PvP badges for those who needed it -- and Mouse needed those.  This was a lot of work, but it was a very impressive collection of characters we had doing this.  There was Whisper X's Diana X, Colbolt Avenger, Jane's Lamera Lang, Ragey Cat, Evi, Grimrose, and Skippylabs.  I think nearly every character had over 1000 badges already, and some -- most notably Skippy's Screamrr -- had nearly every badge possible.  Screamrr had only two badges left to get -- Pentad Victor and Tournament Victor.  We got those, and Screamrr had 1390 badges and was officially done forever!

I hadn't been down where the monkey pit fighting is in Pocket D in years.  It's actually a very cool looking place, with windows on all sides open to the void, kind of like the carriage portion at the bottom of a zeppelin or something.

For Pentad Victor you need 10 people in a two-team match.  We overbalanced things, 7 people on one team, 3 on the other, and let the 3 die.  Then we did it again making sure that the three who died were on the large team this time.  That gave everyone the badge.

For Tournament Victor, you need a swiss draw match of 8 people that pits 4 matches of one on one, then two matches of one on one, then a final match of one on one.  We'd do that with a designated winner, so everyone who fought that person would die, and everyone who wasn't fighting that person would quit.  Then after three rounds the designaated winner got the badge, and we'd set it all up again for the next person.  This took a very long time, but eventually everyone had their badge.

Colbolt was very ruthless and killed a defenseless Mouse Police!  I yelled help, police brutality! and I'm being suppressed!  Now we see the violence inherent in the system!"

I got my revenge on some of the people that killed me... but I didn't get to kill CA.  :/

The last badge we did was Arena Survivalist, which is a 3 person free-for-all, and the one that survives gets the badge.  That was easier to set up.  Once I got that badge, I also had Arena All-Star, so that's 4 badges for Mouse Police, which put me at 1248.  Only two from my goal!

At the end of the night we ran a quick Eden.  I used One Divine Hammer for this.  Not a lot of experience in it, but it's a fun trial with some of the coolest maps in the game, and there were a couple of people on the team that still weren't very familiar with it so we had fun.

That wasn't actually the end of the night for some people, they were planning to run something else, but it was late for me so I logged for the night.



I'm extremely grateful for all of the people on Virtue who have stuck with the game these past three months.  Exxxcalibur with his hami raids, Mr. Trilby, Zombie Fryer, Colbolt Avenger, Sapphire Jane, Ragey Cat, Melissa, Skippylabs, Dale-Man, Megajoule, Freakyliciousss, Whisper X, more people than I can possibly name.  I had a lot of friends who quit either immediately or within the first two weeks after the announcement, but I've had lifetime's worth of fun in these last three months.  I have no idea what I plan to do next -- really, I'm going to try and write more and exercise more and not immediately start playing another MMO.  I still have a Second Life account, which is the absolute opposite of an MMO really, and I've barely logged in more than six times in the last two years but I still have friends there, so I may hang out there a bit.  But I don't regret anything, and I'm very glad I've continued to play for the last three months that this game has existed.

Also of note:  I finished "Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom" last night.  In the end it doesn't really have anything to do with Sister Flame or the Sibling Rivalry arc, but it has a disco troll named Four Door and a disco dance competition!

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 83

I didn't get to play much on Turkey Day.  I wrote in the morning, then drove 2 1/2 hours to my parent's house.  Here I'm stuck on my laptop and my Dad's crappy modem so gameplay isn't so great, and I'm busy doing other things as well (I did more writing in the evening, finished two short Grandpa Anarchy stories yesterday).

But I did get time to log in in the evening.  I played Eternal Sweeper solo, and I ran through Sister Flame's "Sibling Rivalry" AE arc.  I wanted to run through that one more time.  It's fun.  The story itself is not especially compelling, it involves a couple of side missions that don't directly relate to the main story, but actually the villains in the two side missions are what I love about the arc.  You get to fight Fudor the disco-loving troll, and his band of disco trolls, with names like "Smooth Operator", "Raging Fro" and "Boogie Buster".  Clicking on them  to read the descriptions is half the fun.

I want to write a Grandpa Anarchy story that does homage to them, so today's story is titled "Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom".  I'm not really going to use any of the plot or anything else from her AE arc though, or even CoH-style trolls, but they're going to be trolls that love disco, and their leader is going to be named Four Door, and they're going to invade a dance club called Under the Bridge, and there's going to be a disco dance-off competition, because I remember that Sister Flame wanted a dance competition to decide the outcome of the fight with the trolls, if only the game had allowed for that sort of thing.

One thing that was kind of depressing was that some of my friends were forming an Ice Mistral SF when I logged on (which I wanted to get on Mouse Police, too late now since she's a hero) and they even tried to spawn Caleb while they were waiting for everyone to join for the strike force (and Caleb was the other thing I had wanted to do on Mouse Police).  I didn't hear if they actually spawned and defeated Caleb though, and I wouldn't have been able to join them on my laptop and be at all able to contribute anyway.  It was just bugging me because those were t he two things I really wanted to do that I'd failed to do, and a day after turning hero, there's friends of mine doing both of them.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 82

So last night I wasted more than two hours trying to get Caleb to spawn.

I did this solo, and it turned out that I wasn't able to do that, even when I switched from Mouse Police to AE Baby.  I figured at the very least that a fire/kin corr with massive damage and massive recharge and incarnate powers could pull it off solo, and I would swear that I killed many more than the hundred needed during the day to get him to spawn, but I gt no message that he ever spawned.  I suppose I should have formed a league to do it, but my friends were all busy running TFs and I thought that if I could spawn him first and find him, I could get people to join quick enough to kill him.  Which probably wouldn't have worked either.

Anyway all of this kind of depressed me.  I pretty much ran out of time to get the few redside badges that I didn't already have.  I went and exercised, then came back and ran Mouse through five hero tip missions and the morality mission, and turned hero.  This netted me three badges immediately, pushing my total to 1244.  I still haven't killed Maelstrom either, so another round of hero tips with the "Destroy the Bomb Triggers" mission is in order.  I think there's a badge for confirming hero status that I never got too.  And then a badge for remaining hero for a week.

Other than that, I need to run the Twinshot arcs and maybe a couple of the newer hero arcs, and then all of First Ward/Night Ward/Dark Astoria.  There are still a bunch of incarnate trial badges I don't have too.

And I want to run Sister Flame's Disco Troll AE arc again, one last time.  ^_^  I need to get Storm Girl Ten and Eternal Sweeper to 50... 3 levels between them.  I don't think I'll get anyone else to 50 in the next week.

I might be on late tonight, not sure.  Travelling to my parents in an hour or so.

I didn't complete any stories in the last two days but I spent Thursday morning finishing up a story called "Dig My Grave" which is partially inspired by Doctor Vahzilok.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 81

I played too much last night.  I stayed up too late, I skipped exercising, I didn't do very much writing for NaNoWriMo.  I think I'm coming down with a cold, so I really felt the effects of all of that in the morning.

But what I did do was earn two badges on Mouse Police -- two of the last I need to get redside.  These were badges 1240 and 1241.  Time is running out for me to return to hero status and earn the badge for remaining a hero for seven days.  Also,  there are a few heroside arcs and things I've yet to run (I think).  So last night was redside arc night for Mouse.

I started off with five newspaper missions, and then the mayhem.  I did the arson right away and then tried to reset the mission a couple of times -- and while it was possible to reset the mission, it would reset everything *except* the arson.  Sigh.  Anyway, I completed the robbery and got Efficiency Expert Pither as a contact.  Although Badge Hunter is down and this makes it difficult for me to know which badges I'm missing, I remembered that I still didn't have one of the mission badges.  This, it turns out, is because you have to run all of Pither's missions to get the badge, and you can't run them through Ouro.  But they're 45-50 missions so it just meant getting the contact.

The missions are short but there's quite a few -- 6 missions and also a 3 mission arc that isn't needed for the badge, but you have to do things in whatever order he gives them to you.  When I was done I had my Efficiency Expert badge, and wanted to work on the arson badge.  After that firsts mayhem I was still only 3 out of 10 arsons for the badge.

Let me just say, these badges are especially nasty.  Not because doing the arson is hard, but because you need to do it ten times, and it only counts for one person on a team.  If a team of six friends all wanted the badge, that's 60 mayhems they'd have to run.  That's a really stupid, mean, vindictive way to set up a badge.

The good news, of course, is that your hypothetical team of six need only run five newspaper missions to have six mayhems lined up.  And it finally occurred to me that if I really wanted the badge, then I needed to log in my 2nd account and double the number of mayhems I could run every five newspapers.  So, Sqiddy Kitty to the rescue!  I just had to make sure Squiddy was in every mission beore I did anything -- and I was only running "kill boss" and "steal object" missions, since I could stealth to the end of those.  But it was still an awful lot of work.

I got my Firebug badge around 10 PM, by which point I was tired and should have gone to bed.  But I also want to be ready to turn hero, and I don't want to count on getting the chance to do that on Thanksgiving, or trying to do it Friday when my window of time needed to earn the week-long badge is very narrow.  So I travelled to Peregrine Island -- where I'd robbed the bank 8 times already the same night -- and I ran five hero tip missions.

And THEN I parked Mouse back at the hospital in First Ward, where if I'm lucky I'll be at about 90% or 95% of the day job badge when the servers shut down.

I still need Caleb... and Ice Mistral... and the heroes in RV.  If I'm lucky, I can spawn Caleb Wednesday, and just forget about the other badges and turn hero.  Oh, and I don't have MoLRSF, but I never count on getting Mo badges, so that doesn't bother me.  But I wish I'd run Ice Mistral at some point.

I also documented all the characters on my last "extra" account... which took less time than you might think, since it's currently not a VIP account so a lot of them are locked.  I just took pictures from the login screen -- no bio.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 80

Last night I documented all charactes on 6 of my 7 "extra" accounts (I have 9 total -- yeah, I know, why?).  This isn't as hard as it might sound... none of those accounts have characters anywhere other than Virtue, and several of them are freebie accounts with only 2 character slots.  And one of the ones that *does* have 14 or so characters on it has a bunch of identical filler characters that I used to fill out a couple of my solo super groups... I have an entire SG populated by Sonic Girl One, Sonic Girl Two, Sonic Girl Three, Sonic Girl Four, etc.  I did not document these characters (who are all locked at the moment in any case).

That said, I still have three accounts  (aside from my two main accounts)  with 14-16 characters each to document.  I left one of them for Tuesday, and then I need to double-check my main account to see that I've done all of the characters on all of the servers there.  So far I've documented about 300 different characters, so it's a lot of work.

I logged in late.  Someone in the Robokitty channel that I didn't really know well had just returned to the game after basically not playing for a year and a half (he'd been back a few times to run some AE farms, but hadn't really played much).  He was upset that his IOs weren't working, but he had nearly 2500 points saved so an IO license was easy to purchase.  Of course, he can't do any incarnate trials, and he was very upset to know he'd just come back and only had two weeks to play -- but that's what we're all dealing with.

He decided he wanted to run a speed ITF "for old time's sake" so I joined on Megami Hime.  We finished in about 30 minutes, so not a bad run but not a super-speed run, especially since we ran at +2 for the first mission and +1 the rest of the way.  I prefer a steamroll ITF, but it's fun to zerg it as long as everyone knows that's the plan ahead of time.

That was pretty much all I did last night.  Jane wanted to hunt heroes in Recluse's Victory -- like me with Mouse Police, she wants to turn hero again in the next few days -- but nobody else was interested.  Instead we joined a MoDD that Whisper was running, but we were among the first to join and it was 30 or 40 minutes later when they were still trying to fill the last two slots that I decided I needed to log off and get some exercise in and writing done before I went to bed.

On the NaNoWriMo front, I completed two Grandpa Anarchy stories on Sunday and two on Monday.  ^_^

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 79

I had a lot of plans for what I was going to do this weekend.  I was going to get three characters to 50.  I was going to work on badging for Mouse.  I was going to do several other things.  What I managed on Saturday was to finish up what I wanted to do with hero-side SSA story arcs, and to work on leveling a bit.

Sunday I started out by working on the leveling thing again.  I spent the whole morning powerleveling.  I got Storm Girl Ten to level 49, then took Eternal Sweeper to 48.  At that point I switched tactics and leveled my  never-before-played beast master mind Dog Aggro up to 16 (one run of the Council map).  I would have really liked to get Eternal Sweeper to 49 and Dog Aggro to 22, and maybe even get another character up in levels, but there's only so much farming I can stand.

Afterwards I took the time to document every character on my 2nd account that I hadn't already documented.  So now I can be assured that my @shinobu valentine account is finished, I have pictures with bios of every character on the account, save for a few seriously throwaway characters only created to hold onto a name here or there.  Next step is to do the same for my primary account, and then make sure all of my extra accounts are documented -- which is much easier, all of the extra accounts only have characters on Virtue.

I found this character with a full bio that I'd forgotten all about:

I'd also forgotten about the weird solo super group that he's in:  Meat on the Moon - Ranch on Mars.  It still makes me laugh.  Meat on the Moon was a weird song by acapella group The Bobs, while Ranch on Mars was a goofy metal song by the Galactic Cowboys.

After this I joined a Numina Task Force that Kali was forming.  I brought Sonic Girl Seven in the hopes that I could get those last seven bubbles of experience and hit 50.  Alas, there's not really a lot of experience to be had on a Numi, so I wound up with only four bubbles.

We formed a Katie Hannon right after that though.  Zombie showed up for this one.  I hit 50 on about Mary #8 I think.  We had a great team, no problems at all.

I spent some time writing after that.  I had other things I meant to do, but I didn't get most of them done.  Instead I was back by 4:30 PM my time, just in time to join the blue CoP.  I was on Storm Girl Ten for this, but things went badly -- we didn't have enough damage and/or enough -regen and/or weren't fast enough taking down the cubes, and the AV would regen in between nearly to full health every time.  I had an Envenomed Dagger and I was using it, but it's hard to substitute for serious -regen.  We tried to pull back but kept aggroing wave after wave of rularuu.  And then several people had to leave for work or just outright quit, and it looked like we were going to fail.

We put out a plea for more people to come help, and three of us switched to /rads... I switched to Jennie Nova, my beam/rad corruptor.  .We were down to about 15 minutes to go before we were ready to head back in and try once more -- but this time the AV went down very quickly, in just two rounds.  Never underestimate the power of radiation debuffing!

Redside CoP followed, and as is somewhat typical, we had a hard time forming, took a long time to coax enough people to join so that we could make the attempt... and then we destroyed it in just a few minutes.  Redside just seems to attract more powerful characters, especially we had a lot of corruptors on the team.  (I used AE Baby as usual of course -- very powerful fire/kin corruptor.)

Most of my friends logged after that so I called it an early evening.  No badging on Mouse, and no getting a second or third character to 50 today.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 78

WARNING:  There will be SSA 2 spoilers!  If you haven't played these arcs yet... well ya got two weeks left!

This morning I did some PLing of Sonic Girl Seven.  I pushed her from 47 up to 49.3, within striking distance of 50 on a good Task Force.  I haven't played her in ages but I figure I should actually be playing her when she hits 50.

I paused in the middle of that to help CA take out Adamastor in Sharkhead Isles.  Afterwards he joined me for my PL session on a plant/nature troller and got about 3 levels or so I think.

Later I decided to do some of the things I've been meaning to do for a while -- starting with running Dilithium Flower through the SSA 1.7 missions so that I could take some pictures of her in space.  So here we go:

I got some nice full-sceen pictures too that I won't post here.  This post is going to be picture-heavy as is.

After this I ran SSA 2.3 and 2.4 on Princess Ozma, only pausing part way through 2.4 to join the days Hami Raid.  (The raid went super smoothly, I used Trinkets for this, my aoe-heavy fire/shield scrapper that I PL with, she's not especially well suited to fighting Hami, but I wanted to bring someone different.)

Anyway I'd run SSA 2.3 and 2.4 before but only as a team member of Pyro, so I wanted to run them solo myself and be the star.  I still like the big lab at the end of 2.4, and the big reveal.

I confront Mako (and then beat him up of course).

They really should have just let you kill her...

Fighting godling thingys.

Princess Ozma confronted by Nemesis!  Oh noes!


After this, I went straight to Beta and ran SSA 2.5.  Now, you may have heard me say before that this game doesn't have enough giant robots -- especially giant robots that move.  Everything would be better with giant robots!  Crimson's arc?  Painful, but you get a giant robot for a reward!  Synapse?  Also painful, but Babbage is awesome!  Sutter?  Lots of giant robots!  Yay!  Hess Task Force?  That giant robot needs to walk across Striga attacking people!  ITF?  It's an awesome task force, but those giant robots need to come alive!

So the ending of the second SSA arc gets a big thumbs up from me.  But first!  I defended Atlas Park with the Freedom Phalanx, and discovered that Back Alley Brawler is one of the worst aggro-maagnets in the game.  He runs across the map to attack everything he sees, it's a wonder he didn't die.

Positron, meanwhile, does virtually nothing but watch.

But then!  Final mission!  And what do we get?  A FREAKING HUGE NEMESIS ROBOT!  WOOOOHOOOO!

I took a lot of pictures, I couldn't help it!

I have absolutely no complaints.  ^_^