Fifty Fifties -- 03 Shinobu Valentine

03 Shinobu Valentine

I have to confess that, after naming my first two 50's, it becomes very hard for me to remember the order of the next 45 or so.  But what I do know is that, about a year after coming back to the game, I picked up a second account, and my first 50 on this account was Shinobu Valentine.  That name was also the global name for my second account (the first account being @shinobu).

Shinobu Valentine was a potentially very powerful character.  illusion / radiation controllers were said to take on GMs.  I just never really warmed to playing controllers, and so after hitting 50 with her I mostly used her to market and only occasionally played her.  She wasn't one of my favorite characters, and I never really overhauled her build in the way that I could have.  She had a decent IO build, but not a money-is-no-object build which is how most of my other characters were designed later on.

Fifty Fifties -- 02 Mouse Police (Virtue)

02 Mouse Police (Virtue)

When I returned to the game after a year and a half absence, I picked Mouse Police on Virtue to be my next character to play to 50.  She was a katana/regen scrapper and therefore a duplicate of Organica, my first ever character who for a long time remained on Pinnacle stuck at level 37.  I played Mouse Police to 50 and continued to play her for a long time after as my main.  She was the first character I IO's with set IOs, which I had to do several times over as I learned how to actually do it right.  I tried for a defense-based build but ultimately went to a recharge-heavy build, which suited regen with its four click heals.  She had about 15% melee defense though, and with the katana parry could push that to 45% in two hits in just a couple of seconds.  She was not one to tank or take on hoards of enemies, but she was really very tough and exceptionally good at dealing damage.

She was also my main badger.  I fretted over this a bit, because she didn't have one of the early anniversary badges (the first, I think) that Organica and Jalia and a few of my other characters did, but ultimately I shrugged that off because she was now my main.  Later it became more of a problem again as I grew disenchanted with katana/regen and ultimately didn't play her for a couple of years, so I was way behind on my badging before the final three months and was still missing badges that would have been easy to get if I had more time.

I gave her many costumes over the years, but the one above wound up being my favorite.  She finished the game at 1251 badges, which I was happy with, though I could have added more than 100 more.  She was about 98% complete on one of the last day job badges she needed when the servers came down.  I left her parked at the hospital in First Ward, working on that badge.

Fifty Fifties -- 01 Black Unicorn

01 Black Unicorn

My first character ever was Organica -- but my first level 50 (and only in the first year and a half I played) was Jalia, on Pinnacle, who later became Black Unicorn on Freedom.  This was in the days when fire tanks were giants and could heard and burn down anything.  Organica was already in the 30's when I decided I really needed a fire tank, and I created Jalia and went to town.  It was a slower road to 50 back in those days, even with massive PLing and farming going on, which I did participate in.  At the time Jalia hit 50, I had never had a top-level character in Everquest or any other game I played outside of Toontown, so it was fun to feel like I was now part of the elite crowd.  I did two old-style hami raids with her, but there really wasn't a lot she was good at in the old school hami raid.

She was a fire/axe tank because I thought the way tanks tossed their axe from hand to hand when taunting was cool.  She was very short though, which became a problem because with all of my fire shields on I was nothing more than a ball of fire.  I had a long hatred of defensive power sets that made it hard to see my character -- one of the great things about the game City of Heroes was being able to look like whatever you wanted to look like, and it was important that I could see my character and others could see me.  Ultimately this is why my stone tank Obsidian Butterfly and my stone brute Rocker never made it past about level 32, having to use Granite really sucked, and although I had a level 50 dark armor brute I didn't enjoy playing her, and I wasn't such a huge fan of kheldians for the same reasons.

I moved Jalia from Pinnacle to Virtue but still never played her, then moved her to Freedom so I'd have a level 50 for hami raids there.  I think I took her on one or two hami raids total on Freedom -- these were the new style ones.  After that I had gotten my scrapper named Jalia up above 45 and used her for Freedom hami raids.

Freakylicious had a fire/axe tank and encouraged me more than once to IO Black Unicorn and use her to farm, which he did with his tank.  But to the end, she remained my one level 50 who was entirely outfitted with SO's (and a few hami-O's.).  I never found the time too rebuild her or play her again.

Characters that Never Made It, part 2

Characters that Never Made It part 1

Electric-Knight (I think it was) had a post on the forums in the last few days before the end detailing characters of his that he created but never played.  I posted a bunch of screenshots of characters of my own that I really liked something about them -- the costume, the name, the back story -- but that I hadn't played much or at all.  I'm reposting them here in my blog for posterity:

After the Apocalypse part 2

Me and MMO Gaming

In the nineties my friends Jeff and Sky would often drop by after work unannounced and say, "Let's go to Kiko's (great Japanese fast food -- awesome curry rice) or "Let's go to Kinokuniya's" or whatever it was that was on their mind.  And I'd jump in the car and go with them.  Those days were a lot of fun -- we don't live close enough to do that anymore, we don't work the same schedules, things are never that spontaneous.

So one day in the spring of 1999 I think, they showed up and wanted to hit CompUSA in search of a game they'd heard about called Everquest.  I'd never heard of it, I wasn't a gamer, I was just coming along for the ride.  We tried a couple of stores.  Nobody we talked to had ever heard of a game called Everquest, but we eventually found it in a Best Buy I think, or maybe it was a Circuit City.  Anyway they found the game and each grabbed a copy.  There was one copy left, and when I picked it up and looked at it and read about it, the game sounded really, really cool.  So I bought a copy too.

The rest is history.  ^_^  My own history anyway.  My friends played the game off and on over the next couple of years, but neither got a character much further than maybe 15th or 20th level.  I found that the game wouldn't play on my computer, so I upgraded, and then I was hooked.  M roommate was hooked as well -- he watched over my shoulder for two or three nights before we managed to get a copy of the game running on his own computer.

I played Everquest for about 2 or 3 years.  In the end I played mostly on the Test Server, and made a lot of friends there.  My main character was a barbarian shaman named Jalia McMarrin, and I was in a guild called The Grove, because most of the members had met on a message board for druids before we all moved to Test so we could play together.  We had a great time, and The Grove message board still exists today (and sees a handful of posts a year, if that).

But I eventually got tired of Sony Entertainment and of the game Everquest.  My character reached the mid-fifties, but ultimately I was working at night and playing when nobody else was around, so progress was slow.  Shamans were good at soloing, at least, and I bought a second computer and second account so I could duo by myself and keep a merchant up at other times selling potions and stuff I crafted, but I finally decided to move on.

(And the funny thing is, right after I moved on, my friend Sky finally became addicted to the game that he'd hooked me on.  He played Everquest constantly for a while after I'd quit.)

I tried a lot of other games -- Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Asheron's Call 2, etc.  The two that stuck were very different from Everquest:  I really enjoyed Second Life, and I also really enjoyed Disney's Toontown.  I ultimately played Toontown for over a year, making a lot of friends in the game.  Many of these were parents with young kids who had never played any other MMO, but when City of Heroes came out, a group of them were ready to try something new.  "It's just like Toontown, but better!" they said.  Which was funny because it was nothing like Toontown.  I decided I wouldn't buy the beta version of the game (you could join beta if you bought the game ahead of launch), but the week the game came out, I picked it up.

And... it was a lot of fun.  It became my new addiction for the next year and a half.  I said goodbye to my friends in Toontown and only played City of Heroes, but around the time of all the nerfs (issue 5, before City of Villains launched), I became disenchanted and decided to quit.  For one thing, I was happy to not be so addicted to an MMO -- when I'm really addicted I play far too much.  Instead I logged into Second Life a lot more, and for a year and a half that's all I did.

I also tried WoW, but few of my friends were playing it and those that were I never saw.  The game was okay but didn't hook me, so I quit after a few months.  And, of course, once again as soon as I quit, nearly all of my friend started playing -- but that didn't get me back into the game.

It was a friend in Second Life -- Kitsy, I think -- who convinced me to play City of Heroes again.  She was playing it and having fun and telling me about it, and I told her about how I used to play it.  There was also a person in my writer's group who was an avid City of Heroes player who would talk about it -- she was a major roleplayer, usually playing male characters -- and I remember talking about the game from the perspective of "that game that I don't play anymore".  Some of my other friends in Second Life had become very addicted to WoW and I rarely saw them, so one night in early January not long after Kitsy had asked my why I didn't play anymore, I reinstalled City of Heroes and logged back in.

I will forever blame Kitsy for this, not only because she got me hooked again on a major addiction, but because she only played for one week more before quitting the game.  None of my other friends played, I really wasn't friends with any of the people from Toontown that had gotten me into the game in the first place (they were "people I knew" from Toontown, but my real Toontown friends had stayed there).  Previously I'd been in a Super Group with the Toontown people, who had turned out to not be the kind of people I got along with well, and then I'd been a member of one of the big cross-server Legion of Catgirl super groups, but I didn't know any of them all that well either.  I'd played on Pinnacle and Guardian before, but I started over on Virtue solely because that's where Kitsy was when she got me back into the game.

Over the years I convinced a lot of my friends to try City of Heroes, but most of them weren't hooked like I was.  I remained the only person I knew well who played it.

If I hadn't run into a good group of friends, that might have been where it remained.  But I played Mouse Police up and began teaming with the same people every night.  I like to say that they powerleveled me to 50 -- they were all fire/kin controllers, whereas Mouse was a katana/regen scrapper.  Anyway we had fun together but as we approached 50 we weren't sure how to stay in touch.  Fire in the Disco formed a global channel called Wild Cards Virtue, which only had about six members total, but ultimately he and I and one other person were the only ones that continued to team regularly.  Another of the members, whose fire/kin was named something like Hot Stuff or Hot Little Number, I forget, had a pattern of making a new character and playing them all the way to 50, then making another, so it didn't work out teaming with them very much.  Another member of the group moved on to a different server, and then eventually they all stopped playing except for Fire in the Disco, who played less and less but would still log in occasionally.

For a year or so though, I continued to play even though I didn't have a lot of in-game friends.  I still liked playing on Virtue, where you could always find a PuG.  I joined Pickup Groups constantly, and derided those who were afraid to play with people they didn't know.  I also played on Freedom a lot ,getting three characters to 50 or close to 50 there, and playing with people from the Marketing forums in various theme-specific Super Groups like Midlevel Crisis, whose goal was to level lock characters in the middle levels specifically to earn or random roll mid-level recipes to supply to the market.  And I played on Victory for a month or two, getting Mouse Police on that server to 50.  I had an idea that I was going to get Mouse Police on every server to 50 someday.  I made some good friends on Victory, but since I went back to playing on Virtue afterwards, we eventually lost contact.

It was when the person I'd known as the fire/kin "Hot Little Number" (I really can't remember the actual name) came back to the game again that I entered what I would call my final phase of gameplay.  Up to that point, I'd been playing without a super group or without a global channel other than the obvious big ones like Virtue United.  I didn't have a lot of close friends in the game.  At the time I was working on my new project, the buffbot girls, Sonic Girl Seven, Bubble Girl Six, etc., and my friend who'd returned to the game was playing as various characters all named "Multiple Girl II".  This became MG's MO for the rest of his playing time.  MG liked to run task forces, and after running into him and talking to him I wound up joining the super group Hero Force.  This gave me a group of people that I gamed with on a regular basis, so I started making  more permanent friends.  Later MG formed the MG's Taskforces channel, and I began to meet other players that way.  MG would log in every night and run several TFs in a row, and would always invite me.  I was becoming a big marketeer, I was learning how to outfit my characters to the gills, I was having more fun in the game than I'd ever had.

Eventually MG burned out a bit, and the Hero Force super group fell apart.  Power (leader of HF) disappeared for a long time.  He made a couple of comebacks, but mostly this confirmed that I didn't really like playing in someone else's super group.  But by this point I was a member of Brickhouse Chat and Antebellum Revolution, and eventually also a member of Whisper X and ROBOKITTY channels, and I had more friends on Virtue than ever, and there was always something to do.  So that's basically how the game went for me, right up to the end.  The people in Brickhouse Chat especially became some of my best in-game friends and favorite people to play with over the last two years, but I also had a lot of friends on the forums and just generally felt like a more integrated part of a large community, and that was why I really didn't want to ever leave.  As the game progressed it added costumes and new power sets and more things to do, and made it easier for people of any level to do them together, and just became a much more fun game than it had been to start with.

And now... I will probably log into Second Life and hang out a bit and say hi to the few friends of mine who are still around there.  I might log into Anarchy Online again, the game is on my computer, it's free to play, but I haven't done very much with it since I installed it six month or more ago.  I am going to try and avoid playing another MMO for a long while though, I'd like to try and get more writing done.  Which I guess is what I'm doing right this minute, although pouring out words into a blog hardly counts as serious writing in my book.  ^_^  I have a long-running Ranma 1/2 fan fiction story that hasn't been updated in at least two years, and I really want to get some of what I've started done on it and published.  And I want to write more Tai-Pan stuff.  So a new MMO isn't on my  radar at the moment. 

After the Apocalypse part 1

So it's morning and I can't log into my favorite game ever again.  I have a whole morning in front of me and I'm not sure how to waste it, because before today I would have wasted it playing City of Heroes.

I should get some writing done.  My goal for NaNoWriMo was to write 30 Grandpa Anarchy short stories in 30 days.  I started 30 and completed 24.  I still have a few to finish, including "Two-Fisted Christmas Ghost Story" which is an important one to complete since my friends host a Christmas Ghost Story writer's night every December.  I've completed stories for these parties before, usually ones set in the Tales of the Tai-Pan Universe.  Some of those I'm very proud of, and all of them have been published in issues of the Tai-Pan.  I also worked on a Yuleman vs. Anti-Claus story -- I read the first part of it one year, then a ear or two later tried to finish it, but the start was much better than what I came up with to continue it -- it was far too long and complex for what it needed to be.  It really needed to be like most of my Grandpa Anarchy stories, a setting, some funny lines and characters, and then get it over with quickly.  I might go back and finish it one day, but this year my entry will be a Grandpa Anarchy story.

But right now, all I really want to write about is City of Heroes.  So that's what I think I'll do.

***

Me, Comics, and Heroes

To begin with though, I want to trace how I came to the game.  And to do that properly I'm going to go waaay back to how I came to super hero comics.

Back in high school (Salem Academy) I was on Yearbook in my junior and senior years.  When I was a junior, one of the seniors was Greg Wadsworth.  Greg loved comics, especially alternative comics.  He was a big fan of Cerebus the Aardvark.  I wasn't into comics at the time -- to me, comics were what my mom bought us kids to keep us occupied on a long car trip.  I'd read golden key stuff like Scrooge McDuck and Richie Rich, Casper, Turok, various "true ghost stories" and Tom and Jerry and I don't really remember what all.  It was always random issues, I never read anything in continuity, my mom would just buy a collecting of bundled comics and we'd have something to read.

Greg Wadsworth started his own comic book.  This was back in the days before the internet explosion and before self-publishing was at all easy; I remember it was about $1,500.00 to publish the first issue, or something along those lines.  His parents helped.  His comic was called Ismet, and was a space opera story of anthropomorphic animals controlled by evil humans, and a dog who was out to liberate them.  And save his girlfriend, I think.  Here's an promo ad for it.

Greg was clearly inspired by Cerebus, and his art was crude, but at the time I was extremely impressed that he was actually publishing a comic, and I really liked it.  In fact, reading his comic is what got me to go looking for other comics like it, which lead me to Cerebus and Elfquest, two of the only independent comics in existence in 1981.  I liked both, but it was Elfquest that really captured my imagination.  I imagined myself as one of the elves in the comic.  I joined the fanclub.  Eventually I started a fanzine and convinced a lot of my friends to join, and we published for about 28 issues of Lone Oak Holt's Lone Oak Legends, I think.  I became a marginally better writer and met a lot of talented people, and had a lot of fun.

After I graduated high school my family moved to Longview WA, and the friends I made there were all into super heroes.  I'd never read super hero comics, but I was an avid gamer, and what they all played most of the time was a super-hero game invited by one of my new friends, Gene Breshears.  His Super Heroes game was created because at the time there wasn't anything else he could use -- GURPs didn't exist, Champions wasn't published yet or was just coming out, Villains and Vigilantes was out but wasn't really what he was looking for.  His system was a quick and dirty game similar to original Dungeons and Dragons in that you could roll up a new character in 15 minutes and join a game right away.  It's hard to stress how valuable that kind of thing is -- Champions was cool in that you could imagine whatever hero you wanted and then fit it to the rules, but it took 2 to 3 hours to create a character and required the aid of the GM or someone who really knew how the system worked.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun creating superheroes for Gene's game.  I drew pictures of them too.

Shadowstorm and his sister were the first two heroes I created.  I forget exactly what their powers were... they were twins who were supposed to look similar, but Shadowstorm was my character, the sister was just a background character that I wrote up in his backstory.

Schade, however, was my main hero for most of the campaign.  She was an illusionist... with a whip I guess. I just remember that she created holograms that could be photographed, could use this to appear to be different people, could remake an entire room or even create sets for a movie.  She had designs on using her powers in Hollywood -- she was a one-woman Industrial Light & Magic.

I drew pictures of a lot of my friend's characters too.  We had a super hero group that fought crime for several years every Saturday.  Members included Prospero (our leader for most of that time), Monsoon, Maelstrom, Livewire, Pulse, Eidilon, Flame Masters, Stealth, Force.  Gene's own primary hero from the early days of his campaign was The Shroud, a fencer in red tights and a cape with a black skull on his chest. He was kind of a throwback to the days of the Phantom, the Shadow, and old-school Batman I think.  One of Gene's friends from Longview was an excellent artist and did a beautiful oil painting of The Shroud running along a waterfront with his sword drawn.  It's pretty awesome, Gene still has that of course.

(One of my backup characters that I sometimes played -- borrowing a great deal from a certain storm god, heh.)

Anyway this game was the thing that really got me into super hero comics, and I started collecting comics finally.  I collelcted X-Men and Alpha Force and a few others, but I was always more interested in newer alternative comics.  Nexus and Grimjack were two of my favorites, and Badger.  I also got into non-hero comics like Albeedo and Usagi Yojimbo and things of that sort.  Usagi Yojimbo remains the only thing I still pick up at my comic shop that is an actual comic -- everything else these days is a manga volume or graphic novel, or dvd video.

But I still wasn't a super hero junkie.  It was something I liked, but not something that drove me.  I also wound up working on the Tai-Pan with friends due to my connections in Elfquest fandom and desires to do something different, and that brought me into furry fandom circles, but again this was something I enjoyed, but it didn't drive me.  When City of Heroes was about to come out, I wasn't seized by a burning desire to buy it instantly.  I didn't think, "Now, I can finally become the hero I've always wanted to be!"

But I need to backtrack a bit to explain how I got into MMOGs at all.  Playing MMOGs had certainly driven me over the years, and I wasn't exactly a huge gamer before I encountered them.