Goodbye City of Heroes

Today was the last day of the City of Heroes MMORPG (Massively Multi player Online Role Playing Game). I started playing online in 2004 after my roommates Javier suggested I try it out. For years, I played various characters as "Heroes" in a virtual world with thousands of other players. Often times working together to accomplish goals like stop a virtual "Bank Robber" from robbing the bank or more complex missions such as story archs called Task Forces that could take 5 or 6 hours of gaming. My very first character was Andesha, a "Scrapper" on the Champion server.

It didn't take me long to realize that I didn't enjoy the Scrapper archtype as much (a lot of up close hacking and slashing) and rather preferred the Defender archtype and created my first defender; Sailor Moon. Unfortunately, due to copy rights, I had to re-name her to "Nice Heals". I leveled her all the way up to level 50 (as high as you can go). I took this and many other pictures of each of my characters tonight, before the servers came down. This is where Nice Heals will eternally rest, atop the Paragon City Hall next to the American Flag.

I created a character for each of the core Sailor Scouts (Mercury, Mars Venus and Jupiter) and one outter scout, Pluto.  They were all a lot of fun to play. But after Nice Heals my second favorite was probably Frozen Defiance, an Ice Tanker. I also leveled him up to level 50. Ice Tanking was such a blast!

I took a video of Medic Mary Jane loading into Atlas Park and then running over to Lady Liberty (the first Hero you meet, where you level up as a beginner).  The video is just so-so because I was holding my iPhone recording it and trying to also navigate around on my computer- not easy to do!  But I wanted something I could watch and listen to after the severs were taken down.  I got my favorite audio- the Atlas Park loading song, I'll always remember this!

I took all the screenshots, played my last Rikiti War Zone mothership raid, took out Hamidon with Control Queen (Javier) for the last time and then walked through some bases players had built.  I hung in there with Nice heals in Atlas Park right up to when the server went off line two minutes after midnight and thousands of online characters were silenced- forever.  It was very depressing- and sad for lots of people.

Over the years I certainly made friends in the game and it brought me a lot of enjoyment. I created over 30 different characters in all of the different archtypes available (Defender, Controller, Blaster, Scrapper, Tanker) in most of the different power types (Fire, Ice, Mind Control, Healing, Swordsmanship, Plant, etc). May they all RIP in the computer code bit heaven. I'm noting some really special characters I had here.

Septic Revenge (Level 50 Fire/Radiation Controller)
This was definitely my go-to character. When I just wanted to play and have fun and not worry about leveling up, this was my guy.

Medic Mary Jane (Level 50 Empath/Blasting Defender)
Trista's Charge (Level 43 Illusion/Kinetics Controller)
Stone Bubbler (Level 50 Earth/Bubbles Controller)
Freezah Netics (Level 49 Ice/Kinetics Controller)
Villians: Knight Fade, Phalick Symbol, Sylus Rebel, Reculuse's Right Hand