If COX comes back, anyone have thoughts on Roleplay concequences of shut down?

[Kistulot]

If they don't get the character data, that makes it easy. The new server is an alternate reality with the same buildings, but not the same people. No continuity with the originals at all. The originals are still out there, somewhere, going about their business as they always have.

While I'm going to be bringing out a new main toon come the relaunch, I know a loooot of people are really not going to want to abandon years of character development to start anew. But that idea does work out pretty well for some concepts

[Brightfires]

I won't be rebuilding any of my old characters, so there's no backstory to worry about. As far as anyone new is concerned, it'll be their world just like it's always been.

My old crew? They exist as fiction now rather than game characters. To them, the shut-down never happened.

[Cailyn Alaynn]

While I'm going to be bringing out a new main toon come the relaunch, I know a loooot of people are really not going to want to abandon years of character development to start anew. But that idea does work out pretty well for some concepts

Something happened to toss them into the new universe, and they can't get back! Wouldn't be a first time. CoH's Multi-verse is infinite lol.

[rojahdom]

The Villain is a part-timer. The once powerful God of Crime sees a flash of light, and is instantly put on a world that has been reset. He has been stripped of his powers and no one remembers who he is .Vowing to regain his power , he works at the Donuts shop in Fault line, plotting  world domination on a minimum wage salary.


   

[MWRuger]

Well, I'm putting out there that I would like to do some RP. I'll do a new character so If Virtue is still the RP server I'll play there. I heard that Union has open RP so it may be more laid back. So I guess whatever the group I RP with decides to do. If they acknowledge it fine or if we just start from scratch, also fine.

[Arcana]

Well, just before shutdown I wrote an entire story outline dealing with my version of what happens to Primal Earth.  Given the scope of that story, whether we get the data back or not, I think I'm covered either way.

[Davy]

Assuming Union isn't a casualty of some attempt to thin out the server list... I'll go with whatever the general consensus is. Some people (At least those that migrated to the IRC) have shown interest in starting fresh.

Even with Union's Continuity I imagine someone just has to declare their character is a fresh start and their will be no further problems. Such is the benefit of a smaller tighter nit community I guess.

[Kistulot]

Well, I'm putting out there that I would like to do some RP. I'll do a new character so If Virtue is still the RP server I'll play there. I heard that Union has open RP so it may be more laid back. So I guess whatever the group I RP with decides to do. If they acknowledge it fine or if we just start from scratch, also fine.

Virtue had lots of Open RP. The general rule was that if you acted mature, and if you butted in you did so politely and accepted if someone was busy/not in the mood, you were cool. This was never written, but I had plenty of neat open rp experiences, one which lead to a player making an alt to roll in our SG

[Safehouse]

It's amazing to me how disconnected I was from the community when I played. I had no idea that Virtue was the RP server. I didn't even know that there were folks who enjoyed RP. Most of my characters were kind of RP characters; characters with rich, in depth backstories that were brought to Paragon for various reasons. I often recreated characters from my stories and novels in CoX. And yet, I never bothered to engage.

Definitely, if this game comes back, I need to rectify my shyness/disconnectedness.

[MaidMercury]

Im not roleplaying the shutdown..

Me, either.
Yes, it made no sense......NCsoft had some ulterior motive for discarding CoH, but I don't know what it was.

I just regard the shut down like a cease printing of a comic book series.

[srmalloy]

This.  I refuse to allow NCSoft's bad decision interfere with my characters' stories.  If I must I will assume my character's just did their things while I was away.

I was playing Pakfront, the AR/EM Blaster that was the first character I created back on May 8, 2004 when the shutdown occurred, down in the bowl with her teammates in the middle of a Rikti mothership raid, just as if the shutdown wasn't going to occur, so there was no reason not to carry on with her normal heroic activities. If we can get our characters back, I intend to have them resume their activities as if events had simply progressed.

[Little David]

My main will have something about jumping into the champions universe, and so forth. Some of other characters that I will be bringing back will have some kind f story about what they were doing between the end of the world and the resurrection

I'm taking this route. RP-wise, Little David (my signature hero) was involved in Tower of Animus, a roleplaying game based initially on LiveJournal and then moved to Dreamwidth.

The premise of that game was that something was killing entire universes, snuffing out all their stars, killing all life on their planets, and leaving nothing but cold dark worlds in its path. Every character in the game came from a universe killed off this way, so I used NCSoft's shutdown of City of Heroes as the impetus for Little David's appearance in the Tower.

That game recently ended, with the cause of the universe-killing phenomenon discovered, dealt with, and (most importantly) all of those dead universes restored.

With City of Heroes coming back, I might just play off the two year absence as a variant on the backstory for his apping into the Tower; that he was on a mission for PortalCorp and something happened, leaving PortalCorp unable to recall him back to Primal Earth--until he found his own way back, a year or two later.

[Night-Hawk07]

Depends on if they're able to recover the character data. For me, the worlds of CoH, CO, and DCUO were different parts of the same world. Part of my main's backstory involves his travels back and forth from Paragon to Millennium to Gotham/Metropolis. In his CO backstory, I only mention that some cataclysmic event (mass viral breakout, or some Portal experiment gone wrong, I don't know. I'll figure that out later) forced an evacuation of Paragon City and Rouge Isles, but never stated that it had been destroyed or anything of that nature. So that kind of does leave it open for a return as if nothing changed.

Should they not be able to recover character data, then I could go one of two ways. The first is that when I first brought him into the CO and DCUO games, I passed off his lack of abilities and starting off at Level 1 as him learning new fighting techniques. So when we get CoH back, it will be sort of the same. I'd just roll him as a StJ/WP Scrapper (which is more accurate to his backstory anyway, but we didn't have those power sets when I first started playing), then he actually would be learning new fighting techniques. The other idea, was that originally in his backstory I planned to make DCUO the "end of the line"; the point at which he would decide to hang up his cape (primarily after "meeting someone" on the job), and I would literally retire the character at that point. In this case, he would basically come out of his early retirement, but have to re-train himself all over again.

Now what to do for if/when CoH2 comes around...

[LaughingAlex]

I'm roleplaying my characters as seeing that the dimension was in a time stop.  Currently they are noticing that said time stop is coming to an end.  Potentially.  But I'm also roleplaying them as moving on from the champions universe, and also they see the champions universe as dying in a more permanent manner.  It's kind of a bleed of my suspicions that champions will be shutting down soon since they already did badly on some things, and even more they just blundered recently.(and a very laughable one to, but it's an unfortunate problem CO will have if it shuts down, there won't be bringing it back with the shoddy performance it had and underhanded strategies it's been relying on for years.)

So If I do roleplay at all in CO i'll just roleplay my characters as having spotted the android giving away the vehicles as being a faker who went nuts, stripped naked, and ran into downtown naked while rambling like an idiot.

Overall, i'll be roleplaying more the short term problems of alot of heroes missing temporarly when the time stop ends for them.

It does depend alot though, on things to.  The only consistency; my characters hated the CO dimension overall, and didn't enjoy the strange behavior of people worshipping them, sapphire singing the same song every hour for 2 weeks streight without sleep, and the general zombie-like nature of the game world.

Edit: The things they see in CO's dimension, is a very static world in that, events truely are not moving forward for everything there.  When it does, very strange, physics defying things happen that also ignore all sense of intelligent behavior of individuals to, including worshiping anyone in tights as a hero even if they never did anything or generally going far out of their way even when said caped person is in disguise.

[gypsyav]

If they don't get the character data, that makes it easy. The new server is an alternate reality with the same buildings, but not the same people. No continuity with the originals at all. The originals are still out there, somewhere, going about their business as they always have.

I like this idea, I think I might steal it. I've been working on how to explain my characters losing their powers but not having any luck.

[pmoyer]

My main was a dimensional visitor to Paragon City, so the shutdown to her was less distressing than it would have been for a native.  She evacuated back to her home dimension (rescuing anybody she could, since that's the sort of person she is), and the trans-dimensional peacekeeping force she's a member of would have been observing the situation in Paragon City's dimension all this time.  So, if it were to come back, it could be played as "we found an alternate Paragon City where the collapse never happened" or "this dimension -appeared- to experience a collapse but actually didn't collapse/came back/was hidden" and leave all the science types massively confused since that sort of thing doesn't happen for large realities.  Either way, she'd be back to scout out the landscape once again, to see if any changes had occurred.

[Twisted Toon]

Personally, I'm going to go with "The Doctor's TARDIS exploded and destroyed the Universe. But then, the Doctor rebooted the Universe, and now we all live in the Universe 2.0" sort of explanation for what happened.

Agent Standin experienced the winking out of the universe. But, then he's back like almost nothing happened.

Or, maybe, the Universe just blinked. You know how dry your eyes would get if you didn't blink for 13 billion years?

[Nadia Luma]

I've decided to retire my former toons. When I say retire I mean that I will no longer play as them any longer not that they don't exist. My new character may share lineage or some small connection to my former characters. The time gap(NC soft shutdown) won't really affect my new characters as they most likely won't have any knowledge of the event. If the subject is ever brought up my new character would simply ask "What really happen?" I'll allow the community RP to fill in the blanks.

I suppose it doesn't really matter what you think happen. It's all about the RP so keeping it simple and flexable works best. That's how I RP...small backstory no major details connected to in game events or characters. My characters are connected to RP. The shutdown could be one of those things that no talks about so when it's brought up everyone can just say "I don't want to talk about it."

[Jachim]

This is an interesting topic!

Our roleplay group of about 6-7 people had played CoH for going on 6(7 maybe?) years! We had a huge continuity internally that we kinda made up and superceeded CoH's continuity a lot of the time. For example, in character many of our long-time characters were prolly 'more famous' than the Phalanx and other such self-centered nonsense. We never recruited and kept to ourselves, and in fact weren't even on the 'RP' server, we were on Victory ^^

When the game was shutting down, it was during an internal story-arc that involved an evil villain who was about to erase the timeline.

They won, apparently.  But! We're still doing an in-universe D20 campaign now, so it lives on until City of Titans and/or CoH returns!

[Blackshear]

That makes it fairly easy for you, Jachim, but still tough for, say, the Virtue community.  Unless the new devs come up with an official lore reason for the shutdown, there are going to be hundreds of different explanations.  My vote is still "Ouroboros time-skipped the world (and Praetoria) to avoid some monstrous doom."

As for everyone starting at level 1, perhaps some weird permutation of Carbon Law / Temporal Scaling?  Let's be frank, Carbon Law was basically just phlebotinum, so they can pretty much interpret it how they want.