I Washed Up On Your Shore...Any Room?

...and a universe, several in fact, ended. Not with a bang, but a whimper. But after a short mourning period, it is time to play God again.

Hi, gang, my name's Steven Pott and I'm another of your hurt but surviving CoX refugees, known there as Decorum. Before we start, I need to make one thing perfectly clear...

I AM NOT A GAMER! I AM A SUPER-HERO GEEK! :biggrin:

I care not for other types of MMOs. My only goal for joining one was to virtually fly through the air with a virtual towel tied around my neck.

I was born in 1960. Yes, I am older than the Fantastic Four. When I was about 4 I discovered my grandmother's big box of "sit down and shut up" comic books, and a life-long love of the super-hero and the comic book medium in general began. I have WAY too much knowledge of all comics (up until 2006 when I could no longer afford them and switched to "living" them) through the eras, although the Bronze Age '80s stuff is still my best "wheelhouse". I did take a few breaks over the years, during the "Dark Ages" of the late '80s - to mid-'90s, but the rest of the time I was a pretty steady buyer.

In the '00s, I had several financial difficulties change my life a bit. By 2006, I couldn't afford comics any more, and wasn't really enjoying a lot of my old faves going through the changes at the Big Two of that era (Civil War, Infinite Crisis) and so I decided to call it a day. Many people could have just gotten a few of the really good indies, or just their favorite character, but alas, I have a junkie mentality when it comes to comics. One is too many and a hundred's not enough. Besides, I still had the over 15,000 comics in the next room, so it's not like I had to go without, right?

On the other hand, I'd remembered some friends years before talking about this game that, at the time, I had neither the hardware nor internet connection to handle so I'd put it out of my mind. I had been a Villains & Vigilantes player for a short time in the '80s and created whole universes of characters, so you can imagine how thrilling the concept of creating them as far more than some numbers on paper in a City of Heroes would be. I joined up in Feb. of '06. It was painful. I was using a laptop with integrated graphics with 256 RAM on dial-up with a sound card that masqueraded as a modem. I could solo, badly, but teaming up crashed me. I wanted it badly, though, so piece by piece, upgrade by upgrade, I was home, a lifer in Paragon City. My experience was made all the greater by being steered to the fantastic super-group on Victory server, The Legion of Valor (**shouts out to the homies**)

Well, sadly, we all know how that ended up. I have 6 years of great memories and a woefully unupdated website (I'll get to it, I SWEAR...as well as add a Champions section), but we all have to move on when there's no other choice.

I was in the Beta of this game, and to be honest, didn't really care for it. A large part of that was because I didn't think it was ready for Beta...so many things simply didn't work. The movement was clunky, targeting was difficult, and it was too much a "twitch" game for my tastes. But frankly, that was when I had options. And my early explorations of the game seem much more promising than I'd hoped for, although explorations of the boards leave me a little guarded. I too have been in a game run by Jack Emmert and Cryptic that they didn't want to spend money on and run by a skeleton crew, so I do feel your pain (regardless of recent events, NCSoft buying CoX was the best thing that ever happened to it).

Good lord, I hope you're skimming this rambling by now! I do go on, don't I? Aaaaaaanyway, I'll be starting a thread over in Costumes and Concepts detailing my characters as I go along, because, among other things, I'm a huge show-off and attention *****.

Let me just thank those of you, in-game and on the boards, who have been welcoming and helpful to those of us cast adrift, and bear with us while we try to work the "second-choice" mentality out of our minds.