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

[wei yau]

My main characters were all on Virtue and they were the only ones I truly RP'd.  For the Zodiac Guardsmen, they left Paragon City to travel the world and the multiverse seeking other guardsmen who were cast from the Temple of Heaven.  Pursuing them was The Celestial Dragon and her Fallen Guardsmen, with the same goal of recruiting or killing any lost guardsmen.

Only one character of mine is actually traveling dimensions, The Knave of Trumps.  Her ability to navigate the White Rabbit Holes of Wonderland allow her to explore other dimensions.

As for all the other characters I had on every server, well, for them life continued as it ever did in Paragon City.

[Felderburg]

If the game picks up right where it left off, I don't see much reason to even have an in-game explanation. A successor like CoH2, that might take place in a slightly future Paragon with different signature heroes would certainly need something, but since Legacy CoH is likely to just be I23 forever, and CoH 1.5 apparently is trying to have the game start at I23 / I24, and build from there, there's no storyline gap (in-game, anyways).

As for people starting at Level 1 again, that's a slightly larger issue, but there's no reason not to RP a character as if he/she/huge is still 50, even if you need to go through the mechanics of leveling up. Besides, plenty of people would re-roll characters with different power sets - same character, suddenly Level 1. No issues there - either it's a change in powers, or the character is being RP'ed at high levels, just with a more accurate power set that wasn't released when it was created.


Also, just for reference:

Since this is your first exposure to time travel, I need to tell you about the Carbon Law. Carbon Law is the law of Time Travel that restricts how far forward or backward you can actually travel. In Earth years, this comes out to around 5,730 years, give or take 40 or so. Everyone is different. I'm from the 78th Century so I am at the limit of my 'tether'. I can travel back in time a little bit more, maybe 3 or 4 years, but I dare not try anything further. When someone travels beyond their tether, he finds himself assimilated by the time stream, never to be heard from again.

As you could see from that little exercise you lost access to a whole slew of your abilities. It was basically your body adjusting to a different time stream. We call this Temporal Scaling. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it can come as a shock. It adjusts what you call 'Combat Level' in this time period to fit that of the time stream you are now in. Different streams have different scaling. I chose that mission for you because it is the harshest form of scaling out there, and what better way to drive the point home?

Via: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/The_Pilgrim#The_Ouroboros_Initiation_.2825-50.29_HEROES

It's interesting that the Carbon Law was circumvented by Nemesis because he no longer resides in his original body - which is made out of carbon. So I wonder if the Carbon Law only applies to carbon-based lifeforms... Twilight's Son, after all, is energy-based... but we don't know how far from his tether he is.

[Blackshear]

That's my thought as well...the new team comes up with an official story involving Ouroboros, some kind of time freeze or time skip, and the Carbon Law / Temporal Scaling reduces us all to level 1 for some reason.

If Nate Downes is successful he'll set up a team to revive the game, and once that is going on we can present our story ideas to them.  They probably can't add any story stuff like this to the game itself, but it can be on their website.

[Teikiatsu]

Since I'm planning to remake some of my 50's with new powersets or origins, and my wife likely will not be teaming with me like last time, I'm just going to tell myself it's a parallel universe.

[Blackshear]

Since I'm planning to remake some of my 50's with new powersets or origins, and my wife likely will not be teaming with me like last time, I'm just going to tell myself it's a parallel universe.

That's fine for you, but I'm foreseeing the first night back in Pocket D for the old Virtue crowd.  There will be a hundred different RPers with a hundred different explanations for why we're all lowbies unless our new overlords hit us up with some lore.

[Teikiatsu]

That's fine for you, but I'm foreseeing the first night back in Pocket D for the old Virtue crowd.  There will be a hundred different RPers with a hundred different explanations for why we're all lowbies unless our new overlords hit us up with some lore.

Oh no doubt.  It may drive off the ERP's for a while.  The D may actually become a place to hunt down old friends.

[JennSpace]

Jenn Space is in the limbo just like Peter Parker at the end of the Spiderman Animated Serie and will return to Paragon City once we get our game back!  I'm working on a huge story, time will have continued to flow just like irl and it will be epic!!

[Gorgor]

"Who took all my money?  Why am I so weak?  Who destroyed everything in my superbase?  I'll bet it was those damned gnomes in Guild Wars!". >:-(

[JennSpace]

"Who took all my money?  Why am I so weak?  Who destroyed everything in my superbase?  I'll bet it was those damned gnomes in Guild Wars!". >:-(

It was the hellions!! Back when I was playing City of Heroes, I'd always blame everything on the hellions because they're completly clueless about everything! XDDD They were so proud of their girlfriends ...girlfriends from Hell manipulating them!

[ryuplaneswalker]

I am going to quote another or My kind for my reaction to the near destruction of Paragon city

"I have survived more apocalypses than you have had chest colds"

though really, the best thing to do would be act as if nothing happened >.> we are picking the game up right from where we left off.

[doc7924]

A wizard did it.

[PsychicKitty]

For RolePlaying purposes....perhaps you should take a bit from the DC comics universe before the new 52. 

Krono had literally gone around destroying universes to figure out how they worked and such....and the Justice League had to put them back together.

So maybe the shutdown was something similar....a schism....and the universe ended...but was then put back together by some unknown force....except this time....a mirrored bunch of realities(ie the other games based on city of heroes coming out) where formed as well.

Perhaps some heroes in another universe like the justice league in DC comics reformed those universes.....maybe it was a group from the champions game....>_>(hmmm...maybe cryptic has more powers then we thought)

seriously...coming up with story lines and ideas is simple.....shouldn't take more then a minute to figure something out.

[Pengy]

A simple walk into Mordor descends into vacation hell when the unruly natives begin throwing sticks and stones. No one who participates is unscathed, with many missing or dead and the survivors diminished in power. The trainers are fine, for the usual reason.

[Paragon Avenger]

We have all been map served, yup, for over 2 freaking years.  Bit don't reboot just give the connection time.

[AmberOfDzu]

As I understand it today, I would consider it a complete reboot, since the characters/supergoups  and other user data wouldn't be returning. I might make variations of my old characters, but they'd be entirely new characterizations with new histories and and the chance to fix a few things about them I didn't like.

[Arcana]

It's interesting that the Carbon Law was circumvented by Nemesis because he no longer resides in his original body - which is made out of carbon. So I wonder if the Carbon Law only applies to carbon-based lifeforms... Twilight's Son, after all, is energy-based... but we don't know how far from his tether he is.

Its possible the carbon law doesn't specifically refer to being in a carbon-based body, but to something else.  The loophole I always assumed Nemesis used was not to transfer to a mechanical body, but to specifically transfer to a *temporally local* body.  What Silos could do that the other Menders couldn't was to jump 5000 years into the (his) past, make a robot body with contemporary materials, transfer into that, then jump back another 5000 years, rinse, repeat.

I think in one of the Loregasms it was noted by a dev that canonically it was body-switching that was the key to Nemesis beating the Carbon Law of time travel, which implies simply being in (or being able to live in) a robot body was not enough to simply jump a million years without running afoul of it.

Why call it the carbon law may be for similar reasons we still talk about airplanes breaking the sound barrier, even though there is no such barrier of sound.

[Felderburg]

[Everfreefire]

The only real plan I had for this was rolling a new Necro/ MM. It would have been an aftereffect of the shutdown and relaunched, created from the shutdown as a means to try and take the game down again by any means necessary. The various Zombies would be 'deleted' characters from before the shutdown resurrected for it's purposes.

[Arcana]

Also, the text from the mission where the Carbon Law is introduced (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/The_Pilgrim the Mender Lazarus bits) notes that a person can only travel back / forward in time a certain amount: specifically, "around 5,730 years, give or take 40 or so." This is the half life of Carbon 14.

Which suggests another method of time travel that can beat the carbon tether: teleport to a different universe in which gluon binding energy is higher and Carbon-14's half-life is a billion years, then travel back as far as you like.

[Felderburg]

The only real plan I had for this was rolling a new Necro/ MM. It would have been an aftereffect of the shutdown and relaunched, created from the shutdown as a means to try and take the game down again by any means necessary. The various Zombies would be 'deleted' characters from before the shutdown resurrected for it's purposes.

That's interesting. I kind of like that concept.

I did make a team of characters that worked for Portal Corp., and I'm still debating what their story should be. I don't think that for most people, there should be any RP consequences, since a revived game would have no acknowledgement in its storyline, and would pick up right where the game left off. But a group that was in another dimension at the time.... might be aware? Interesting implications.

Which suggests another method of time travel that can beat the carbon tether: teleport to a different universe in which gluon binding energy is higher and Carbon-14's half-life is a billion years, then travel back as far as you like.

Well that is brilliant. But it assumes that the Carbon Law is somehow tied in to the half life of carbon, rather than just a coincidence.

Also, it runs into the problem that any universe like that is likely to be very hard to get to, since it would likely be so different from Primal Earth that the energy required to get there would be enormous.

I do have to wonder if the devs meant the tether to be tied in with carbon's half life as part of some sort of metaphysical rule, or if it was just a convenient number that allowed them use definite, but very distant, dates.