Player History

Hello, reader.

If you've found your way to this page you're probably looking for information about who I am, so this is a history page of my years past and present as a gaming geek while keeping City of Heroes the focus of this text.

Preamble

Back in my teen years I was involved in playing Villains & Vigilantes, a pen and paper RPG, with some high school buddies. We had many campaigns and rotated the gamemaster role amongst ourselves to keep things interesting. This is where my superhero avatar Stalemate first sprung to virtual life, during a scifi / techno campaign where a whole origin and background was designed for him. My wife Cassiopea also played then a character who would later on become the inspiration for a slew of CoH alts, and her global name.

Before all this, I had started videogaming on the Atari 2600 console and my first computer was an Apple IIc which I happily lorded over my friends who owned Commodore Vic 20s and C64s. Although enjoyable, the games themselves were nowhere near being adequate for replacing my weekly V&V nights so they took the backseat.

Life took us RPGers into different directions. The V&V nights stopped (for me at least). Years passed. I fell back onto FPS games such as Quake 3, Half-Life and Counter Strike, the Descent series, and explored other titles as fancy struck me.

I continued on in my interest in all things IT, even choosing that field for my career and establishing a network of like-minded friends and acquaintances through discussion forums.

And that's where I learned of City of Heroes originally.

Hero Reborn

In June 2004, several friends of mine started spreading the word about a new superhero themed MMO: City of Heroes. Despite having had no interest in MMOs previously, this one more than intrigued me. I had to try it. When enough money was scrimped and saved (weeks in my case then), I bought the game on July 24, 2004 and waited patiently until all the installing and updating was completed.

Naturally, the first character I wanted to create was Stalemate.

I adapted the original character's powers to what the game proposed. Since the original design called for a robust, tech armored character, the tanker archetype was a given, but the power blasts had to be dropped. A compromise was made by selecting Energy Mélée, which in my mind was an acceptable mix of super strength and power blasts, and then I promptly hated the coloring of until color customizations came along. The actual costume I chose was mostly grey, with the huge robotic gloves and featured the electron pattern on chest and legs.

It was horrible, and I had no inkling that I'd be able to modify it later, but I just wanted to get playing. Outbreak was (and still is, perhaps on par with the villain side version now), one of the best game introductions I've ever seen. Right away the player is made to feel like his actions matter in the grand scheme of things. No rat hunting for 10 levels here.

My friends met me once I reached Atlas Park, and I don't recall anything but thinking "this is so awesome" - even when Group Fly was used by one of them. We had no idea...

The free month given with the purchase was extended to 3.

My wife watched as I plowed along into mobs of bad guys, laying down the law with energy laden fists. She got into it as much as I did and was reticent to try at first, but eventually she did.

Ignoring the fact that her previous gaming experience could be summed up with Tetris, Galaga and Frogger, I coaxed her along to at least create a character, hinting that it was like shopping with no spending limit. I knew she'd enjoyed creating characters for V&V, and that this was similar - with the added bonus of actually seeing your creation interact in their virtual environment.

Later on, to prevent additional marital strife (and I'll admit, to slow her progress to level 50 before I could make it there), we splurged for a second account, and the entire family was then playing with son and daughter also creating characters and playing whenever we'd let them.

NB - Whatever they kids say, the fact that there were more "no PC" groundings in those days had nothing to do with me wanting to play more CoH. Those are untruths.

Other games I was involved in at the time got less and less attention.

Supergroup Leadership

(Adapted from information already available on my supergroup website)

How the Phantoms of War Came to Be

This is a brief background overview of how this supergroup came into existence. The original forum thread that started it all is still located right here.

The core of the organisation originally consisted of a supergroup named The Ghosts of War (notice the slight difference in spelling with our current secondary SG Ghosts of War) created on the 31st of July 2004. It was comprised mostly of online friends who frequented an IT discussion forum and had started playing City of Heroes and started spreading its infection to any who would listen. I had been uninterested by the medieval/fantasy MMORPGs until my online buddies told me all about the CoH take on a superhero version.

The Ghosts of War* had been originally created by Raining Blood (AKA WebHead) and had ilovetheusers (AKA Aumakua, Miss Dynamo), Diverrr, Buzzerbeater (AKA meatwad) Sky Ranger (AKA JetFlash), Phantom Aura (inept, AKA Crypto Knight) and Stalemate v.6, if memory serves me. Later on, we thought it would be a good idea to start up another supergroup for our main characters starting at security level 15. *That SG was disbanded with the official fusion between Paragon Punishers and Phantoms of War.

The name and logo were then reproduced into another SG named Phantoms of War, which I founded with Stalemate v.6 on August 28th 2004 using meatwad's (Buzzerbeater) name suggestion, simply because I had reached level 15 and got to Atlas Park first.

By this time Raining Blood was seriously considering quitting the game and since I did not want to be a dictator, I chose Ilovetheusers to be co-general. Since he had an excellent reputation in the forums we frequented, even acting as a moderator there then, it seemed like a natural choice that everyone would agree on. The original colors were chosen to keep black as a primary, and amber to herald back to the good old days of monochrome monitors. Old school geek all the way. These have since been changed to white and gold/bronze for all our SGs, a combination we originally started on Protector with PoW Elite, our 50s SG, following Ilovetheuser's suggestion.

At the start of 2005, I came upon the GuildPortal solution and thought it would be ideal to coordinate our SG events, roster, etc. Everyone was quickly invited to participate. We even had the pleasant surprise of finding out Buzzerbeater (meatwad) had mad video editing skills when he offered the Official PoW Promo Video (see it in the Media section).

Eventually, since some of our members had been playing less or even leaving the game alltogether, we discussed the possibility of recruiting more people. Previously PoW had been recruiting by invitation only (still our preferred method of recruiting). We conducted an official recruiting drive one evening, submitted our SG information on the CoH Forums and looked around for quality people to join us. A Code of Conduct was drafted and officers given their ranks and duties.

Not long afterwards, we searched for allies on the Protector server to contribute something back into this fine gaming community, which spurred the creation of the Praesidium coalition with SGs The Valiant and The Protectors. But that is another story altogether.

In more recent years, my involvement with other CoH related projects had caused me to be less present in day-to-day SG activities, and my 2 fellow SG leaders were indicating a desire to quit CoH altogether. A high ranking officer in the SG had been indicating he was interested in taking over. We took advantage of the transition period to offer a fusion to the Paragon Punishers SG, since it was getting hard to see where the line was between our 2 groups in any case.

I took the time to re-assess what I liked about CoH, quit a few projects, started another and within a year had gotten back to actually playing my characters, instead of bumbling through missions while replying to private messages and monitoring global channel traffic.

In that time period, activity dwindled within the SG. Some players transferred elsewhere. Others founded their own SGs on Protector and other servers. And the SG leader disappeared for months, more interested in a new MMO. I was asked back to lead the group, following a sneaky campaign led by my wife to get everyone's opinion on the matter before placing me in front of a fait accompli.

It was then I realized how much I'd missed hanging out regularly with the SG members, running missions, laying waste to the enemies of good on task forces.

So, with an update to the SG structure, with Phantoms of War becoming an alternate SG with a paramilitary flavor and Paragon Punishers taking the limelight, we headed once more into the fray together.

Alliances and Coalitions

Early on when the Phantoms of War came into existence and Protector we started considering the idea of having strong, close alliances with SGs that exhibited a leadership style similar to our own. It was a natural thing for us then to place a formal request with The Protectors (then led by Fire Spin).

They happened also to be in talks with another SG at the time: The Valiant and asked that we consider creating a trio of allied SGs sharing events and activities.

And so the coalition of supergroups known as The Praesidium came to be, in February 2005.

This open coalition of SGs relaunched the Herolympics on the server, after it had not been picked back up by the SG that had introduced it to the server, the Defenders of the Night. This particular activity was a resounding success.

The coalition continued to expand and other SGs expressed an interest in being involved with like-minded SGs and players, so the idea spread until at its peak 35 SGs were participating in it. An external website was maintained for the purposes of activity coordination and sharing. After a few years the Protector server's mood had changed and some started seeing this organization as elitist. To be completely honest, it was - and by intent.

After all, when is selectively choosing people you're going to invite to a private organization not elitist? It's like a game of pick up hockey or dodgeball: people naturally gravitate towards those who the feel a kinship with. Under this

There was also a marked decrease in member SG activity, or at least in activities shared with the Praesidium allies. A number of SGs started claiming the Praesidium's purpose was not coming to fruition, but alas... such purpose was dependent on individual SGs organizing and sharing activities. A vicious circle had been put into place.

So, sadly the Praesidium's death knell rang, and its doors closed officially in November 2009. Previous efforts to revive it by asking new leadership to take over failed, not from the lack of talents from Sooner (who replaced me as Consul), Santa Laws and Ice9.

As a sidenote, the Praesidium's main goal of offering Protector's players a place to exchange event ideas was indirectly replaced by the relaunch of the Protector Vigilance channel and the Protector Activity Calendar.

Server Events

To be completed.

Mentor Project

What is keeping me busy these days.

To be completed.

Current Status

I am currently trying to ease my main character over into becoming a villain for an indeterminate period of time while I go badge hunting redside.

Some new characters have been created, with my very first "villain" archetypes seeing the light of day. Despite having purchased CoV three times, I had yet to create and play a villain AT. Masterminds are fun and I'm liking the concept of the stalker.