Friday, November 30, 2012

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.

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