Unfair Comparisons

I probably should have led my series of posts r/e Champions Online with this disclaimer, but oh well!  Better late than never, I guess.

So, I really REALLY like City of Heroes.
It's the only MMO I've unabashedly enjoyed, ever.  Yeah, I played an arms DPS orc to the cap in WoW, but that was basically an excuse to hang out with my pals on Ventrilo & get caught up.  I didn't dislike it, but once we all got to the cap we couldn't find a compelling reason to stick around.  I've tried a few others over the years, all doomed to the grim fate of uninstallation after a few scant hours of play.

So when I harsh on CO for this or that failing, keep my perspective in mind.  While I do try for objectivity, there exists in my mind a shining ideal of what an MMO should be, and only one game fits that template.


And speaking of CO, it just failed a pretty big personal test.

Last night circumstances conspired to bequeath unto me a fair chunk of unscheduled time- my son was asleep at the same time my wife was out having drinks with friends.  At the point where they were both out in their respective fashions, I confronted the question of what to do with myself.  The answer, when I'm in the throes of playing a new game I really like is obvious- PLAY A GAME.  It's an activity that can't exist in the context of family life, unless I'm doing it with my son on my lap (which, while it does provide peerless entertainment, rarely results in measurable progress through the content).

So when my brain answered "hey, you can finish that book you've been reading!" it was a hard blow to CO's future hopes.  When I thought it over I realized that I haven't once felt inspired to play CO-  it's just something I've been doing because playing the game I love seems to painful & emotionally fraught.

I've been playing CO like someone kicking cigarettes chews gum- not because chewing gum is itself a pleasurable act, but because it manages in some small way to take your mind off the overriding preoccupation of your addiction.

An inexact metaphor, as CoH is in many ways an anti-cigarette: a compulsive behavior that enriches your life and provides community rather than undermining it and creating social isolation.
But a rough analogy is the best I could come up with.  

Also, as welcoming as the CO community has been (and why not, when the diaspora of 50k-odd CoH will presumably shore up their own somewhat precarious bottom line) the fact is they could have been playing CoH and actually preferred the pale comforts of CO.

Which, you know, different strokes and everything.  And yet...
It's not an environment I can see myself getting comfortable in.  It'd be like a ST:TNG fan trying to get comfortable at a Babylon 5 convention.  Yeah, they're both space operas, but.....

Even in my brief dabblings on their forums (which are overrun every weekend like clockwork by spammers advertising college and NFL football streams) are more aggravating than anything else.  I'm trying to be a good guest, but it's hard (when you're me, at least) not to call our gibbering delusion when you run across it.  As when someone tries to defend CO's execrable faces by claiming CoH's selection lacked variety and character, and was in fact one reason he left the game.

And I'm afraid I'm going to be approaching future gaming communities with caution.
This is my first experience confronting the threat of having a game I love detonated out from under me.
All the others I moved on from organically...and actually, thinking about it, they all still exist.  One benefit to having previously restricted my gaming affections to user-made mods instead of big subscription based commercial offerings.

Anyway, I don't see CO working out for me.
Whatever happens, I will stay in touch with my fellow CoH refugees- maybe I'll join an expatriate SG, or get  involved in the Titan Network's budding efforts to create a nonprofit successor.

In the meantime, I have to force myself back in-game to finish cataloging all my characters- my VIP runs out sometime in mid-October and I'd hate to have them locked up.  So watch this space for screenshots and character bios...