90 Days to the Apocalypse - Day 2

I got up early again and got to work on my brute Princess Ozma.  I ran the third SSA arc, 3.1 that starts in Founder's Falls.  After that friends wanted to run an early morning ITF, and even though I'd just run one the night before, I joined.  Nothing like an ITF for getting experience, and it seems to be the one thing my friends want to do in these last weeks of gaming.  I popped an XP booster and by the time we were done, Princess Ozma was 39.

After that I spent a bit of time PLing Forest Goddess, from 28 to 32.  I want to get her to 35 as well, so I can join ITFs with her too.  Anyway I'm not going to PL my wal all the way to 50, but pushing them into the mid 30's sounded like a good idea at the time.

I spent some time taking pictures of my characters -- I did some of that on Saturday too.  It's an ongoing project, I've got three months but I don't want to wait until the last minute, and I also don't want to try and do all of it at once.

I spent some time IOing out Forest Goddess and then ran SSA1.4.  That was it for me gaming on Sunday, I went out to dinner with an old friend and we saw a movie (Madagascar 3 at the cheap theater).  It was good to get out of the house and do something else besides dwell on the ending of CoH, but the sad thing was I missed the usual Sunday afternoon CoP raid.  I even forgot to ask how it went.

Characters, Part 3: The Buffbot Girls

Ever since the Architect Entertainment system was put into City of Heroes, players have used it to try and get the most experience in the shortest amount of time.  There were boss farms (only bosses -- they gave a lot of experience), "meow" farms (rikti communication officers, also a lot of experience), "bubble" farms (hami healing mitos, lots of experience and they don't fight back), farms with nothing but little spiderlings (easy to kill, lots of xp) or mastermind minions (also lots of xp).  I remember one farm I was on where every enemy group had a captive Lord Recluse, who was, of course, worth a lot of experience.  And there were the CEBR farms, where you made a claw/electric brute with a damage aura and damage aoe (spin) at very low level, and you loaded up on inspirations before diving in and went to town.

And right up until the end there were fire farms and smashing/lethal farms designed to cater to a player's strengths.  Those were probably deemed less of an exploit per se, though they were certainly leveraging the game as much as you could in your favor.

In many of these early farms you had captive defenders or corruptors who would follow you and buff you after being rescued, so that you would eventually have an army of buffers following you around, making it that much easier to kill stuff.  Often they were scantily-clad beautiful women.  I ran one particular farm of this sort quite a bit and it entered into my head to try and create a character who looked like one of these buffbot girls -- maybe one who had somehow escaped from AE.

And so, Sonic Girl Seven was born.  I played her for a couple of weeks and designed several costumes for her, and I absolutely fell in love with the whole concept -- so much so that I had to create one of each possible buffbot girl.  Their names were Rad Girl One, Kin Girl Two, Fire Girl Three, Dark Girl Four, Empathy Girl Five, Bubble Girl Six, Sonic Girl Seven, Ice Girl Eight, and Pain Girl Nine.  For a while there was a Mastermind named Poison Girl Ten, but I eventually deleted her.  Most of these characters I PL'd to about level 20 or 22 before I started playing them.  Empathy Girl Five was just my old empath from Pinnacle, Jalia Genie, with a new name and look.  The majority of these characters I never actually played (I created ten of them in one go -- how could I play them all?) but three of them wound up at 50 and the original Sonic Girl made it to 45.  Much later, still in love with the look and costume of the various buffbot girls, I created an ex-buffbot girl named Scrapper Girl One, who had traded in buffs for melee.

There was never a Time Girl Eleven or a Nature Girl Twelve, although possibly there should have been.  ^_^  I never did a Storm Girl either.

Each girl had the same first four costumes.  When  they got a fifth costume at level 40 they got to do something unique for themselves.  For the most part, I had trouble coming up with a fifth costume that I liked, although the one I made for Bubble Girl I liked quite a bit.  Each of them had essentially the same back story, but I rewrote it each time so that each one was unique to that character.

If I remember correctly, at the time I created all of these characters I did not yet have a level 50 defender.  But eventually I not only had three level 50 buffbot girl fenders, but several other level 50 fenders as well.  I'm glad I did this project, I learned a lot about what all the different defender sets could do.

My Original "Big Five" (Characters, Part 2)

Back in the old days of the game, getting to level 20 or higher was quite an accomplishment.  By the time I'd played for a year and a half, I'd only managed to do it on nine characters.  Six of those were my original toons on Pinnacle, the ones I considered my most important/main characters:  Jalia, my fire/axe tank and my first level 50; Organica, who I got to 37; Shinobu, who was a fire/kin flavor of the month 2-3 years before it really was a FotM (by accident, I had no idea of the synergy of the set); Mouse Police, a dark melee/invul scrapper; and Jalia Ice, an ice/ice blaster with a name I truly did not like.

I've already listed Organica, who eventually made it to 50.  She was my first character ever.  But before I got her to 50, I was enthralled by what fire tankers could do with burn.  I was also enchanted by seeing an axe tanker toss his axe from hand to hand when he taunted.  And so, Jalia was born.

I actually have a picture of her in the tutorial.  She didn't look like this for long, but she was always very short.  And the problem with a fire tanker that was short was it concentrated all of the fire effects, and what you usually saw of her was this:

I made it to 50 on Jalia before burn got nerfed.  That hurt me a lot.  I understood that burn did too much damage, but the solution to something like that is to make it do less damage, not make it completely useless.   Which it was until they fixed it again years later.

When I moved to Virtue I paid to transfer Jalia over, but I had to come up with a new name, so I chose "Jalia Dragonfire" which I really came to dislike.  Later when they offered free transfers I moved her to Freedom, renaming her "Black Unicorn".  She's been there ever since, one of my only 50's I've never IO'd properly.  I had thought to turn her into a decent farmer but never got around to doing it.  She still has her original SO/Hami-O build.

Shinobu was another character I started up after seeing a SG buddy of mine with a very powerful fire control/radiation controller.  I went with fire control/kinetics, largely because I had seen someone propel a hellion all over Atlas Park and I wanted to be able to do that.  I had no idea that fire/kins would be the FotM for many years to come.

The initial Shinobu was a Lum clone.  A friend of mine had a Lum clone with the name Lum.  Since that was taken (and since I was a bit wary of being generic'd) I used the name Shinobu for my character, who happens to be Ataru's girlfriend when Lum shows up in Ursei Yatsura.

Later I changed her looks -- again and again, just as I did with Jalia.  I had trouble settling on a look that I liked for those two characters.

Shinobu somehow became my global name, which I've kept ever since.  Shinobu was also my main Winter Lord baby -- I took her from about 12 to about 29 or 30 on Winter Lords in just a few days.  I don't regret a thing either!

When I moved to Virtue, I transferred Shinobu over, and had to change the name.  I went with "Shinobu Dragonfire", but hated it.  A couple of years ago I went ahead and changed her name again, this time to Prisstina, which I was lucky to find available on Virtue.  This past spring I finally got Prisstina to 50.  :D

The fourth of my original six was Mouse Police, a name I borrowed from a Jethro Tull song, and which I liked enough that I went out and tried to claim that name on every server.  I wasn't able to do this on the Champion server, however.  Anyway, Mouse Police began life as an Invulnerable/Energy Melee tank, but I was not enchanted with the kind of damage a tank did, so at level 19 I deleted her and remade her as a dark melee/invulnerable scrapper.  I played her on Pinnacle to 29.

I did eventually get Mouse Police on Virtue to 50, and Mouse Police on Victory to 50, and I got a Mouse Police on Infinity up to about 24.  But the original Mouse Police sat languishing on Pinnacle until I finally transferred her to Justice, where I eventually got her to 45:

For a while Mouse Police was in a catgirl super group.  I have a lot of pictures like this of her fighting or dancing with other catgirls.

Next we have an ice/ice blaster named Jalia Ice.  This is yet another character that I hated the name and keep changing her look.  I liked ice blast, however, and got her up to 27, and eventually transferred her to Freedom where she became the Mouse Police of that server.  And I managed to get her to 42.

My other three 20+ toons were an empathy/psi defender on Virtue named Jalia Genie, who I never managed to level past 25.  She's currently known as Empathy Girl Five on Virtue.  I had two toons on Guardian who were part of the catgirl SG there, and ice/ice tanker and a warshade.  I don't remember the original names of either.  The warshade wound up being transferred to Victory and renamed Mirror Moon, but she's still 24.  The ice/ice tank wound up on Exalted as Bell.  I really wanted to play her up higher, but it never worked out, she's still 25.

90 Days Until the Aocalypse - Day 1

Saturday I got up early. logged on, and ran five tips plus the morality mission to confirm hero status for Princess Ozma.  I wasn't sure why I was doing so, except that it was something I'd started Friday morning so I decided to finish it.  But afterwards I decided that Princess Ozma would be the character that I used to play through all of the SSA arcs one last time.

I have a plan to get at least Princess Ozma (staff melee/energy brute) and Forest Goddess (nature affinity/water blast defender) to 50.  Those are four sets that I've never played at 50, and two characters I happen to like a lot.  And I decided, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to need to work fast.  We may have three months but there's no telling what state the game might be in only a month from now, or how many players will still be around.

So I spent day 1 of my last 90 days... farming.  PLing, using the Council Earth map that I've used for the last year or two.  But really, I kind of like being overpowered and able to jump into large groups of enemies and then anihilate them, and it's not something I'll likely be doing in any other MMO, so it was fun to do it one more time.

Princess Ozma was 29 when I started, and I took her to 35.  From there I spent some time IOing her out.  Then some friends wanted to run an ITF, so I ran over to Night Ward, got my Midnight Club badge, and joined.  And things went very well, I had fun.  ^_^

I also spent the morning running Signature Story Arc 1.1 (twice, for the hero merits) and in the evening SSA 1.2.

Later in the day Exxxcaliber ran a Hami Raid in The Hive.  There were people there who had never been on a raid before, or even been in the Hive before.  This also went pretty well.  I used Nina Ballerina, my flying Martial Arts/Willpower scrapper who is alway my go-to girl for Hami raids.

That was about what I accomplished on my first day after the big announcement.  I spent a lot of  time reading the forums and being sad.  :(

The Grandpa Anarchy Tales - Doomed

Meet Grandpa Anarchy.  He was originally a character I made in the early days of CoH, sometime in 2004. I made him on the Infinity server, but I later made a new version of him on Virtue as well.  For some reason the character always appealed to me, even though I didn't really play him.

I had a whole slew of things he could say, keybinded to the nine number pad keys, so I could toss them out as he fought.  I had fun with that.

Years later I wrote some stories about Grandpa Anarchy and read them to my writer's group.  They're short and meant to be silly and over-the-top.  I've never published them or shown them to anyone else, but now seems like a good idea.  So without further ado I give you:

Doomed

M A Davis

Dressed in his usual gray suit and fedora, Grandpa Anarchy sat behind a wooden desk that looked like it might have been previously used as a battering ram.  Piles of stained paper covered the surface, amid which could be seen several mugs half-filled with coffee and an overfull ash tray.

Beside him was a young boy in glasses and a form-fitting suit of dark blue.  Faintly visible on the suit were mathematical formulas, etched in a glowing script.  He was working feverishly at a small laptop.

In front of the desk stood a strange man with green hair and a purple lycra outfit.  Stitched on the chest was the image of a clock.

“The world’s full of heroes, son,” Grandpa Anarchy said.  “Are you sure I’m the only one can do it?”

“That’s right,” the clock man said.  “Nobody else.”

” Seems an awfully long way to come, just to find me....”

“I had no choice.”

“Isn’t there... you know... another... someone like me....”

‘He’s dead.  You’re our only hope, now.”

Grandpa Anarchy glanced to his left.  Four people sat on a nearby couch.  One wore a form-fitting mirror-like silver suit that covered everything, including his hands and face.  Another was dressed like a wild west gunfighter, and a third was a tall and very skinny man in a suit of green and purple plaid.  The last appeared to be in every way a Victorian gentleman, save for the fact that he was a gorilla.

Beyond the couch stood at least a dozen more oddly-dressed men and women.

“Wonderful,” Grandpa said.  “That's just great.  Fantastic.”

“So then you’ll do it?”  The clock man looked hopeful.

“I’ve... ah... got a few prior commitments....” Grandpa began.

With a soft “pop”, three more people appeared.  One of them stepped forward immediately.  He was a soldier in a very elaborate dress uniform of pink and orange, like something out of an Ozian fairy kingdom.

"Grandpa Anarchy, I presume?” he said briskly.  “My name is Lord Kip, and  I've come on a mission of utmost importance."

"No, don't tell me,” Grandpa said.  “Let me guess.  The universe is going to end?"

The strange soldier blinked in surprise.  "Why yes, how did you know?

“Just a wild guess,” Grandpa said.  He turned to the next person, who also looked like an otherworldly fantasy soldier, albeit a soldier of Hell itself.  His uniform was black and red, with many bright silver spikes.

The hellish soldier bowed low.  “Greetings, Sir Anarchy.  I am Baron-Who-Cares-For-Pets.  I am my world’s foremost science villain.”

“Science villain?” Grandpa asked.

The man nodded.  “In light of the current threat, I have set aside my grievances.  I come here as a representative of my entire world….”

“Kind of a funny name for a villain, ain’t it?”

The Baron’s eyes flashed.  “You have not seen my pets.”

“Oh, very well, so your universe is doomed and only I can save it, right?”

“Succinctly put, Sir.”

Grandpa nodded.  He glanced to the third new arrival, a woman completely encased in ocher slime – or perhaps a slime creature that was attempting to female.  “Your story’s the same?” Grandpa asked.

“Doomed my race is,” the slime woman replied.  “Come you must.  Only hope you are.”

The boy with the laptop wrinkled his nose.  “Ew, she’s all slimy… and she smells….”

“Now, Kid Calculus,” said Grandpa, “as heroes we should never judge others, no matter how disgusting they may be.”

Placing his palms on the desk, the clock man leaned forward.  Stained pages drifted to the ground.  "Grandpa Anarchy, I must insist!  This is a matter of life and death!  Not just for me, but for...

“Your entire universe,” Grandpa replied.  “Yeah, I heard ya.  My advice, Bub, is you sit down and relax."

"We have no time!  We must travel to my universe now!"

“You don't say?  Take a number, kid."

The Victorian gorilla smiled and held up a small piece of paper.  “I must insist that I was here first,” he said.

Grandpa turned to Kid Calculus.  “How many is that so far?”

“Forty-seven,” the kid replied.  “And that’s just within the last hour.”

“Forty-seven?” the clock man choked.  “But... but there’s no time....”

“You’re the genius here, kid,” said Grandpa.  “How many can there be?”

“Logically speaking,” said Kid Calculus, “there are an infinite number of universes.  However, only a very tiny fraction could possibly be in danger of imminent destruction, where you are the only person who can stop it.”

“Good,” said Grandpa.  “That’s good.”

“Not really,” said Kid Calculus.  “A fraction of infinity is still an infinite number.  Its quite possible that the number of universes that require your help is infinite.”

“Tarnation,” the gunfighter said.  "We’re all plumb screwed, aren’t we?”

“Not necessarily.”  Grandpa Anarchy stood.  “Okay, monkey,” he said.  “Time’s a wastin’.  Let’s go.”

The gorilla leaped to his feet and saluted.  “At once, good Sir!  And may I extend my thanks from the citizens of my entire world.. nay, my entire universe....”

“Grandpa,” Kid Calculus said, “I don’t think you fully grasp the….”

“Nonsense, kid,” said Grandpa Anarchy.  “There’s only one way to save an infinite number of universes, and that’s one at a time.”

With a soft “pop”, Grandpa Anarchy and the Victorian Gorilla vanished.

Baron-Who-Cares-For-Pets stepped forward.  “I’ll take a number,” he said.

“But,” the clock man said.  “It’s not possible....”:

The Baron raised an eyebrow.  “To save an infinite number of universes?  Of course it isn’t.”  He held up his piece of paper.  “But I’m only number 48....”

FINI

Characters, part 1

This is the first character I ever made in City of Heroes.  I don't remember the name -- I was just playing around with the character creator, and deleted the character within a few days.

And this is my first "real" City of Heroes character, a katana scrapper named Organica.  She began as a katana/dark armor scrapper, then at level 17 I got sick of dark armor (it was an endurance hog in the old days, especially before Stamina and before IOs existed).  I deleted and rebuilt her as a katana/regen scrapper, and this turned out to be a great move because back in the day regen scrappers were nearly invincible.

I created her on Pinnacle, the server I used to play on.  When I came back to the game I started playing on Virtue, and at the time the name Organica was taken there.  Later on I discovered that the name had been freed up, and I was able to transfer a level 37 Organica over to Virtue, where I eventually got her to level 50.

This is Organica currently.  The bio is the same one I came up with way back in 2004.  One of the things I want to do over the next 90 days is take pictures of every one of my characters with whatever bio they have -- and if they don't have one, I'm going to add something.

There are some people in the game that have logged 2,000 or 5,000 or even 6,000 hours on one character.  I've always been too much of an altoholic to manage anything like that -- but I have about 2,000 hours between Mouse Police and Sparks Fly, my most-played characters on my first and second accounts.

I'm going to be posting a lot of these bio pictures, for my own benefit if nothing else.  I think some of the bios are quite fun to read.  ^_^  Mouse Police was the character I played when I came back to the game.  The original Mouse Police was one of my original four or five characters on Pinnacle, but at some point I made a Mouse Police on every server except Champion, where someone else had claimed the name.  Each one was a different AT/powerset, and the one on Virtue just happened to be katana/regen like Organica.  I played her up to 50 -- my 2nd 50 in the game ever -- and spent years working on her build and working on badges.  She's got over 1,000 badges, my only toon with that many.

I haven't played this character much in the last few years though.

This is Sparks Fly, probably my all-time favorite character.  I specifically designed her to be an electric melee/shield defense scrapper because it was a "flavor of the month" build and known to be very powerful.  I built her when I joined Hero Force originally, she was my "Hero Force" toon.  Eventually I wound up as one of the leaders of Hero Force, and then one of the people who stuck around when everyone else went away. I wasn't a great leader but I was there when the other leaders weren't.

I rebuilt Sparks Fly about two or three years ago using a "very expensive" build posted by Fury Flechette. I loved playing this character -- softcapped defense, tons of recharge, could wade into piles of enemies and do massive damage.  This was my best farming toon, I never built a fire/fire farmer, but I really didn't need one.  Unlike some people I loved playing a character that was as powerful as possible, it didn't bore me at all.  I'll probably never play another MMO where you can dress like a school girl and fight off hundreds of nazis single-handedly.  The character was very powerful, and truly made me feel heroic and epic.

I learned a lot from Fury's build too, and went on to craft amazing builds for a bunch of my other characters. My last couple of years in the game were the most fun -- I was able to make as much money as I wanted and outfit all of my characters however I liked.  I built a fire/shield scrapper along the same lines as Sparks Fly, then a street justice/shield brute.  I built Invul scrappers and brutes with softcapped defense, I built Willpower scrappers and brutes with softcapped defense, I had untouchable widows and a ninjitsu stalker with massive defense and massive global recharge.  I had whatever I wanted, and I had a lot of fun.  ^_^

90 Day Until the Apocalypse -- Day 0

On the day before the announcement of the apocalypse I felt very tired and I went to bed very early.  I therefore woke up very early.  With time on my hands I logged into City of Heroes and proceeded to run five hero tip missions, with the idea of running another five on Saturday and confirming hero status on my character Princess Ozma, which would allow me to start running the Signature Story Arc missions.

Later at lunch I logged into the City of Heroes web site and saw that they'd released a bunch of costume codes (which allow you to look like different NPCs).  I applied one of the Talon Mistress codes to one of my CoH accounts and I was happy.  I usually miss such giveaways, I'm not very interested in clawing my way past other players to try to be first in a free-for-all, so I don't watch Twitter or Facebook religiously or wait in Pocket D for hours when they're doing giveaways.  I have a few of these NPC codes, and that's generally been enough to keep me satisfied, I never felt like I had to get them all.

Anyway, I was in a good mood.  It was the Friday before a 3 day weekend, and I'd recently updated my list of CoH goals so that I knew which characters I wanted to work on and who needed what task force to earn the Task Force Commander badge, and so on.  I was ready to have a good weekend.

And then, I logged on later in the day during my break and saw that the game was being closed.

I have friends who played Earth & Beyond, so I know a bit of what this is like.  Obviously I knew that City of Heroes was an old game and wouldn't go on forever.  But in the last year they've added so much stuff, the game has felt revitalized and active.  There were a lot of cool things coming down the pipes in the next few months -- several new costume sets, at least four awesome ones that I very much wanted to get my hands on, and new AT powers, new pool power customization and cool new pool powers, a whole slew of changes to the game that was going to make things even better.

So it was a bit of a shock -- enough that people instantly began spinning conspiracy theories, and repeating them over and over.  You repeat idle speculation enough times and it becomes hard fact.  But all you really need to know is that NCSoft is a big company that makes most of its money from other games -- Lineage, Guild Wars, Aion -- and it has lost a lot of money recently.  Like, six million in one quarter.  City of Heroes didn't lose that money for them, but it was the smallest game in their stable, one of the oldest with the least prospect of making big money.  And, apparently, although it's done really well in the last year, it wasn't doing so well very recently, with people trying out other games like Star Wars:  The Old Republic and The Secret World.  Also, Funcom had been very disappointed with sales of The Secret World and has decided to back off from the MMO market, and even World of Warcraft has lost a million players in the last year, so there's an idea out there that MMOs are a thing of the past, not a thing of the future.  They're a dying breed, or so it seems.

And Paragon Studios was developing a new one, which I'm sure would have required more investment from NCSoft.  So, basically, they cut Paragon Studios free.  You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain why

Anyway, I was very depressed the rest of the evening.  I spent a lot of time reading sad and frantic posts on the message boards.  I logged into the game and talked to friends, but I didn't play much.  Really, I expect that this will be a good thing for me in the long run, I'm too addicted to the game and play far too much.  But it's a sad thing to realize that you won't be able to log in and say hi to old friends and run an Imperius Task Force, and that all of that cool stuff that was coming will never arrive, and that all of your plans for the game and the characters you wanted to work on will be impossible to fulfill.

Anyway I do plan to stick with the game until it closes on Nov 30th, and thus I thought I'd try and document the journey, because I like to do that sort of thing.  I have this blog here on Google's Blogger that I've never used, so this is what I intend to use it for.