One Year

A year ago City of Heroes came to an end (a year ago last night).  I spent most of the next few days posting to this journal.  I still need to post my "Zero to Awesome 2" thread, which I have, which I really don't know if anyone cares if I post it but I saved it and I intended to post it here.  That would be  pretty much my last post on the subject of City of Heroes I suspect.

I'm feeling kind of depressed tonight, and it has nothing really to do with City of Heroes but remembering that it's been a year adds to my bad mood.  Mostly I'm feeling down because my lease is up at the end of the month, and they want to raise my rent by almost $80.00 a month.  I've been here for years -- for nearly all of the time I played City of Heroes, in fact, nearly ten years -- and my rent's gone up several times, but it's getting to the point where I finally have to just move.  I hate having to move, but I can't justify shelling out an additional $960.00 a year for this place when I'm already paying too much a month in rent.  And I especially hate having to move in December, but these people have a policy of only allowing 11-month leases (which lets them raise your rent a month sooner), so even though I originally had a lease that was up in the summer, it's now up in the middle of winter, as it moves up a month each year.

But back to City of Heroes.  I did not immediately jump into a new game -- in fact, I've been mostly free of the MMO bug for years, outside of City of Heroes, which had that special combination of things that really grabbed me.  No other MMO comes close.  Before City of Heroes I had played EQ for three years and tried other games like Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, etc., but I was actually playing Disney's Toontown Online before I was convinced to try City of Heroes.  I had friends in Toontown -- it was a silly but fun game with a surprising number of adult players (many of whom were parents, of course, and had not played MMO's before Toontown).  If you played on the test server there was a mostly-adult population, and I'd found out how to make friends so that we could talk to each other (being a kid's game, the default is that you can't speak to others unless you pass each other a code, this is meant to allow you to talk with people you already know only).

But then I joined City of Heroes, and that was it for me for a year and a half, until all of the nerfs got to me and I left just before the release of City of Villains.  I just wasn't having fun anymore.

I've done Second Life on and off for years, so I hung out there for a while again.  One of my friends in SL convinced me to go back to City of Heroes more than a year later, and I wound up getting addicted again, making a lot of new friends, and having the time of my life for several years, right up until it closed.  I was seriously addicted, I played every day.  I did not get a lot of other things done -- such as my writing.

In the last year I've written (or finished writing) five or six Tai-Pan stories, wrote over 60,000 words on my Ranma 1/2 fanfiction epic (in length if not subject) Girls School, and I've written more than 90 stories in my Grandpa Anarchy universe -- and most of those don't suck!  So I know full well that staying away from MMO's makes me more productive as a writer.  As it happens,  my least productive portion of the last year was from May through July, when I was playing a lot of EQ again.  But I haven't logged into any MMO since August.

And obviously, if I'm going to move at the end of the month, I don't have time to play any games.  :p

But if City of Heroes were still around I'd be playing it.