Sorry, It Has Been a While...

I know, I know. I should update the blog more frequently than once every couple of years, but school has been keeping me busy. But I think a quick update on where things are at would be in order.

I am still alive, and I do want to make some content updates-- at some point. I have been saying that for years though with not much to show for it, but there it is. Maybe I will just curate memes or something. Low-effort stuff haha.

The short story I mentioned in my last few posts a couple of years ago did get published in the Vintage Worlds 2 anthology (i.e., that Kickstarter was successful). If you missed the Kickstarter but still want to buy the book, it is still available at Founder's House.

Regarding use of the blog itself, the Numenera 2 Character Creator still sees a decent amount of traffic, though because it has been a few years since I updated it, it is slightly out-of-date, lacking data from the Torment: Tides of Numenera Explorer's Guide and possibly other sources. Regardless, it has over 22 thousand all-time views currently. For reference, it passed 10k all-time views in May of 2020, and 17k in January 2021, so 2020 was the big year for it, but it's still getting quite a bit of use. Actually, I am slightly surprised it still works-- I half expected the changes Blogger has made to the site would break it, but apparently not. Looking at the graph, use of the generator seems to have peaked in March/April of 2020 and dropped off since then, but still mostly remains at a higher level than when I was actually updating this site.

And speaking of the website, the site overall is at about 58 thousand all-time views. Two years ago (January 2020), it had just passed 17k total views. Biggest month ever for the blog was April of 2020, with 2,731 views that month. Guess the lockdowns and so on that were going on at the time encouraged people to play around with rolling up Numenera characters.

Anyway, that's all for now. Happy New Years, everyone.

57 Hours Left for Vintage Worlds Kickstarter

The Kickstarter for Vintage Worlds 2 & 3 has a little over two days left. It is coming down to the wire as to whether it will fund or not. Cross your fingers, tentacles, pseudopods, or other equivalent appendages!

Vintage Worlds is a series of anthologies of retro-style sci-fi short stories. By retro sci-fi, I mean rockets and ray-guns, sword-fights by the light of the twin moons on the canal-banks of Mars, dangerous forays into the humid jungles of Venus teaming with ultra-tropical alien life, unscrupulous smugglers and pirates haunting the Asteroid Belt, and so on. That is to say, the Solar System as it should have been, as opposed to the one we actually got. It is a really interesting sub-genre of science fiction if you ask me -- and who wouldn't want to ask me?

Volume One of Vintage Worlds turned out really well, I thought. Help us bring Volumes Two and Three to life!

"The Sarcastic Snake-Men of Neptune" To Be Published in Vintage Worlds 2

Very exciting news! The long-awaited Kickstarter for Vintage Worlds volumes 2 and 3 has begun at last. My short story-- actually closer to novella length-- titled "The Sarcastic Snake-Men of Neptune" will appear in volume two. If you have read the first installment of VW, you may remember my story, "The Headless Skeletons of Mercury". Two characters from "Headless" appear in "Sarcastic," but it is not necessary to know the story of "Headless" in order to understand and enjoy "Sarcastic." I mention it only because if you liked plucky heroine D.J.'s Mercury shenanigans, you'll probably enjoy a much longer story seeing her get into trouble on a trip to Neptune.

And perhaps I am a vain person, but the awesome cover art of volume two could very well have been inspired by "The Sarcastic Snake-Men of Neptune" (which does contain a scene on a moon of Jupiter), although in my mind, D.J. doesn't look at all like that haha.

Tears of the Gods Chapter 9 Updated

Not that I expect many people care, but I made a large-ish addition to Part 9 of the Tears of the Gods. That is the first time I have gone back and made a major revision of a previously written chapter. This was needed to more properly introduce a character that plays an important part in chapters 10-12 at least, and possibly beyond, when and if further chapters ever get written.

Does that mean that Tears of the Gods is back on and will be someday finished? Maybe. I don't want to make any promises in that regard though because I have done that several times already just to let them slip, but I do really, really want to finish Tears. It is the only novel-length thing I have ever written, and while it has essentially zero chance of real publication, it is a story in my brain that wants to escape onto the page even so. Plus I think it would be cool to call myself a novelist as well as a short-story writer and poet.

Stay tuned!

Updates and Milestones: May 9, 2020

Just a few quick updates.

This past month, April, was another record month for Troy Stories, with 2,493 views. Wow! That's the first time we have had a 2k+ month in terms of page views. Needless to say, it was a huge improvement over the previous record of 1908.

Also, last week sometime, the Numenera 2 Character Generator itself passed a big milestone: 10,000 page views since publication, right now sitting at 10,192. For perspective, it was about this time last year that the generator passed the 2,000 cumulative page-view mark, and it was around this time in 2017 that the generator first saw the light of day. Pretty neat, eh?

Additionally, as mentioned yesterday, Love in the Ruins is now available for purchase.

And lastly, a PSA: the mask goes over your nose and mouth. Both nose and mouth. Yes, nose included! I know, I know... it's hot and uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as being intubated by a ventilator, if I had to guess. Also, if you pull the mask down to talk to someone, you are defeating the purpose of having the mask at all -- may as well just lick that person's eyeball while you're at it. A mask is not a magical talisman. It will not block your sputum getting on other people or their cooties getting on you if it isn't between you and them, capisce?

That's all for now. Don't let the 'rona getcha.

Love in the Ruins has been published

I'm officially a published poet now. Love in the Ruins came out a couple weeks ago, and a poem of mine is included in the anthology. Link is here:

Love in the Ruins at Founders' House Publishing

Blurb from the publisher:

"Many stories have been written already about the approaching end of industrial civilization:  about the great tragedies and the small triumphs, about struggles spread out across landscapes and struggles just as bitter within individual hearts, about the people who survive and the ones who don’t. One theme that's been unfairly neglected in deindustrial fiction is love. ... This anthology includes ten stories and three poems about love in the deindustrial future, by turns ethereal and earthy, traumatic and tender—but all of them ending with a promise of happily ever after."

Deindustrial, in case you are wondering, basically means after industrial civilization has been brought low, usually due to running out of oil. One may consider deindustrial fiction to be a sub-sub-genre of post-apocalyptic fiction (itself a sub-genre of science fiction), but deindustrial generally posits a slow decline instead of the fast collapse more typically envisioned in post-apocalypse stories. (And if you are wondering what a civilization's slow decline looks like, have a look out your window.)

Updates and Milestones: April 1, 2020

Hello, I'm still alive. The 'rona ain't got me yet, and I ain't even April Foolin'.

It is heartening to see that the blog gets a lot of use still. I know I say that every time I post, but what can I say? It feels good to be of service, in whatever capacity I can be. And March, interestingly enough, set another record for the blog with 1,908 views, a substantial increase over the previous record, which was 1,716 views, set in December. (Since I didn't do a February or March update, I guess I should mention that January had 1,487 views, and February saw quite a big drop-off, with 1,178 views, which was the lowest since June of 2019.)

I guess folks are stuck at home spending their time rolling up Numenera characters. No judgment -- I do the same sometimes (which is, in fact, why I went to the trouble to set up that character generator). And as usual, a bit less than half of this last month's traffic went to... drumroll... the Numenera character maker. The old Cypher System character maker and the Revised edition Cypher System character maker nearly tied for second place last month though, which is a slight change from how things normally are. Those three pages together account for about three quarters of the site's traffic. In a very distant fourth place is the printer-friendly Numenera character sheets index, with a whopping 36 views in March. No other page or post cracked 20 views for the month.

Other news: if you recall my poem "Come Home Ere Falls the Night" and the Love in the Ruins anthology project it is a part of, that seems to be moving forward at last. The publisher has sent out contracts to the various authors, so hopefully that book will see print at some point. (No doubt the 'rona will delay the timetable on that, as it has everything else.) Not sure what the status is of Vintage Worlds II, but hopefully that will get off the ground this year too.

That's all for now. Don't let the 'rona getcha -- as the Good Book says, "wash your hands, you sinners".

Updates and Milestones: January 3, 2020

Just a few quick notes I wanted to make. I'm still here keeping an eye on things. At some point I would like to make more content for the blog-- on my agenda in particular are a first-edition version of the Numenera character creator and the final installment of the two-make-three Scrabble words guide. Those are fairly low-hanging fruit and should be doable when I have some time.

Blog Milestones: December was another big month for the blog with 1716 page views, just edging out November's record of 1701. And as far as looking back at the year overall, Blogger doesn't keep yearly stats, but luckily I did do an update post last January. According to last-year me, Troy Stories passed the 4,000 all-time page views mark on January 7th of last year. (Important to note that that is cumulative all-time views, not just views for 2018-- the 4000 figure includes at least several hundred views from 2014-2017.) This year? The blog passed the 17,000 all-time page views mark yesterday (January 2), meaning the site had ~13,000 views in 2019 (after subtracting the 4,000 pre-2019 views from the total all-time views), on average more than a thousand a month. Any year in which a site more than triples its traffic is a good year, I would say.

And of course, needless to say, most of that traffic went to the Numenera 2 character creator, and second place is awarded to the old (i.e., first-edition) Cypher System character creator. No other page on the site came close to the numbers for those two pages. Since Blogger doesn't keep yearly stats I am not 100% sure whom to award the bronze medal to, but I believe the Numenera printer-friendly character sheets index did better on the year overall, even though the brand new second edition Cypher System character creator did much better for the month of December. And as far as the next tier down is concerned, the only other pages with more than a handful of hits for the year were the poem A Ruinman's Villanelle, aka "Come Home Ere Falls the Night," and the City of Heroes Monitor Window tip, interestingly. The latter two posts both had a bit over a hundred views each on the year, much more than is typical for one of my regular blog posts, which don't normally even hit double digits, let alone triple.

Anyway, that's all for now. Happy New Year, everyone.

Cypher System Revised Edition Character Creator is Live!

Have at it. The new CS character generator for the revised edition (or second edition or whatever you want to call it) of the Cypher System is up now. Very likely there are some things I missed when entering the data. If you find something amiss, please let me know, if you would be so kind.

If you see a bug but don't want to post a comment on the blog for some reason, you can always email me any bugs you discover. My email address is my first and last name, including the Roman numeral, all one word and lowercase, no dots or anything like that, at Gmail. (It is the same username as for Blogger, which you can copy and paste from the URL above, simply adding the "at Gmail dot com" part to my name).

A few quick notes. First, some of the suggested foci by genre include a few extras not in the core book, e.g. Thunders has been added to the Superhero genre because come on, how is that not a superpower? For some reason, Emerged From the Obelisk does not appear in any of the genre focus lists, so I tossed it in to both Fantasy and Superhero. Drives Like a Maniac has been added to Sci-Fi and Modern because why not, and Runs Away and a few other mundane foci have been added to multiple genres. These are not the only ones, but I am too lazy to make a comprehensive list of differences. (In all cases, any differences should be foci I have added to genres-- I did not take any away.) Next quick note: as mentioned in a prior post, species descriptors are not limited by genre in this character creator. (We do not discriminate against an Elf gallivanting about in outer space or an Artificially Intelligent clockwork tin-man traipsing through the fantasy woods.) Last quick note: the Weird West/Steampunk genre which existed in the previous version has been carried over to this new version as well. If you are wondering where that came from, since it doesn't appear in the core book, well... I made it up. (Maybe some day I will make up a Weird West setting to go with it.)

Star Wars is Surprisingly Unterrible (No Spoilers)

I wasn't planning on seeing the new Star Wars movie since I didn't really care for episodes 7 and 8, but a friend of mine from church bought all the tickets for a 74-seat theater for the premiere of episode 9 and resold them at cost to people he knew, so I thought, why not jump in on this action. The chance to see a movie in a theater full of people I all knew was pretty neat.

I won't spoil anything about the movie. I just want to say, if you like true Star Wars movies, you'll like episode 9. Unlike some others I could name, this one is actually worthy of the Star Wars name, in my opinion.

Don't listen to the critics on Rotten Tomatoes (who give it, currently, a 57%). Note the audience rating, which is 87%. This is almost the exact inverse of episode 8, which had a 91% from the critics and a 43% from the audience. This basically shows that movie critics today have essentially no integrity or intellectual honesty. The movie is good, and the critics-- as usual-- are full of it.

(A side-rant. Ever since Roger Ebert passed away, there has not been a halfway decent movie critic/reviewer that I can find. I did not agree with everything Ebert said, or even most of what he said, but his opinions about movies were presented mostly logically, focused mostly on relevant things, and mostly without spoilers. I knew if I was thinking about watching a movie, I could read Ebert's review of it and know pretty reliably whether I would like the movie-- not that I liked the same sorts of movies he liked, which actually I mostly didn't-- but that his reviews were sufficiently honest that I could get a pretty good idea of whether I would like a movie based on what he said.)

Quick Note Regarding the Revised Cypher System Character Creator

The Character Generator for the revised edition of The Cypher System is almost ready. I am about two-thirds of the way through the foci, and have been updating the foci lists under the genres as I go. Once this is done, within a few days probably, after some final checking, it will be ready for launch. There may be will certainly be a few bugs and/or missing data at launch. There always is with these projects. Let me know if you see something that doesn't look right. If you don't want to post a comment on the blog for some reason, you can always email me any bugs you see. My email address is my first and last name, including the Roman numeral, all one word and lowercase, no dots or anything like that, at Gmail. (It is the same username as for Blogger, which you can copy and paste from the URL above, simply adding the @gmail.com part to my name).

Revised Cypher System Character Creator Update (Plus a Blog Update)

The new version of the Cypher System Character Creator (for TCS 2nd edition) is fairly close to being ready for launch. Done so far: descriptors and types. Still to do: new foci and genres. As noted in the previous post, once this is done, there will be two CS character creators: one for first edition and one for second edition.

The introduction of genre-specific species descriptors in the new book brought an interesting challenge since the generator's code was not originally designed with these in mind. After some thought, I decided not to add code that would dynamically take away or add in these descriptors based on genre selection, since it would require a major overhaul of the setGenre code for the sake of only a handful of descriptors. On top of that, many of the genre-specific descriptors could potentially work in other genres/settings. For example, space elves are a fairly common trope-- think Eldar from Warhammer 40k or Minbari from Babylon 5. Space dwarves are less common, but not unheard of. So, depending on setting (and GM approval, of course) Elf and/or Dwarf descriptors could potentially be used in a Science Fiction game. Similarly, the Half-Giant, Helborn, Morlock, and Roach descriptors could also be alien species with a little tweaking. On the other side of the coin, Artificially Intelligent could be used to represent a clockwork/automaton character in a Fantasy or Fairytale setting (think the Tin Woodsman from The Wizard of Oz or the clockwork soldier whose name escapes me at the moment from Return to Oz).

And moreover, not all fantasy settings have Elf or Dwarf characters; in fact probably most fictional fantasy worlds do not. To my mind, these species descriptors are not so much genre-specific as they are setting-specific (or perhaps one might prefer the term universe-specific).

So instead, the way it is set up now is that the species descriptors are available to all genres, but selecting one will display a brief note indicating that your descriptor choice is "genre-specific" and subject to GM approval. Obviously it goes without saying that everything is subject to GM approval, but these are definitely something you will want to run by your GM before becoming too attached to your Roach Adept Who Exists Partially Out of Phase or whatever.

Also of note, while updating descriptors I discovered that the Virtuous descriptor was missing from the existing first-edition Cypher System generator (and presumably has been MIA all this time). This has bee rectified; apologies to all frustrated would-be goodie-goodies out there.

Blog Update

The blog set another record this past November with 1701 views over the course of the month, a substantial increase over the previous monthly record of 1517, set back in August. In fact, the blog has not had fewer than 1200 views a month since last June. Most of the traffic is, as always, to the Numenera character generator, but an increasingly large slice goes to the Cypher System character generator now too. Those two pages together now account for well over half the site's total views.

Revised Edition Cypher System Character Creator: Coming Soon!

A few months ago the second edition of The Cypher System came out. I missed the Kickstarter (had just lost my job and decided to go back to school, so money was a bit of a concern), but the other day I went ahead and bought the PDF version of the revised CS core book. I am planning to post a revised version of the Cypher System Character Generator as soon as I can.

What I am planning to do this time-- and what I should have done when the second edition of Numenera came out-- is make separate generators for first edition and second edition. The Cypher System character creator that's out there now will remain as the first edition character creator, and the new one of course will be the revised edition. That's the plan, anyway. I have not gotten all the way through the new book yet, but it looks like changes to Tier One characters are fairly minor (e.g., for Warriors, Thrust has been removed and a couple of other Type abilities renamed). If I decide overall changes are minor enough, I may decide to just have the one (revised) character generator in order to reduce potential confusion. We shall see.

Things are still busy for me, but I do not expect the revised Cypher System generator to take long to set up.

Updates and Milestones: September 4, 2019

I am very happy that people still come to this site to use the Numenera 2 Character Generator. In addition to that, the vanilla Cypher System Character Generator has started to blow up in a big way as well. August, in fact, set another record for Troy Stories, with 1517 views, a truly massive increase over the previous month's record of 1217, set in July. (And weirdly, the difference is exactly 300. This is Spartaaaaa!)

Most of the traffic was, of course, to the character generators. An interesting stat though: about half of the Cypher System character creator's all-time hits came within the past 30 days. That indicates to me that my CS character creator is only just now really catching the attention of the Cypher System community and/or Google. Pretty neat.

Some news: I have heard back from Zendexor, and he indicates to me that the story I submitted for Vintage Worlds 2 has been accepted for publication. The formal announcement has not been made yet, but should be forthcoming soon. I will post here when that happens.

A personal note: I am going back to school now, trying to finish up my bachelor's degree after a long hiatus. That is part of the reason I have not produced any content for the blog lately. At some point I would like to get it going again (although I say that every month...).

"Ja'ek and the Beanstalk" Posted at The Ninth Word

Monte Cook Games has officially launched The Ninth Word-- note the lack of an L-- a repository for fan fiction pertaining to the Ninth World, i.e. the world of Numenera.

The first story to be posted to the site was Monte Cook's own "Reach of Ghosts". Story number two is, wait for it, "Ja'ek and the Beanstalk" by yours truly, a story I submitted several years ago to the now-defunct (I think) CypherCaster magazine which they decided not to publish. I am happy that that story has found a home besides this blog.

Updates and Milestones: August 1, 2019

For some reason, July was a huge month for the site despite the lack of updates, with 1217 views for the month that honors Julius Caesar, straight-up demolishing the previous monthly record of 818 (set this past April). If you're curious-- though I know no one is-- the months intervening between my last monthly update and now (that is, May and June) had a bit over 600 views each, which at one time would've been huge, but compared to the expectations set in March and April, were kinda lackluster. (I'd thought perhaps interest was waning in my character generator, or even that interest might be waning in Numenera more broadly. I guess not haha; maybe the announcement of a new Numenera source book and novel has rekindled interest?)

As one might expect, a bit more than half the Troy Stories traffic in the month of July was to the Numenera 2 character creator. Another 20% or so of the traffic went to the generic Cypher System character creator. Another ~2% of the hit parade marched on over to the relatively new Numenera 2 Character Sheet index, and about the same number of hits to the Scrabble Two-Letter Word List. Other hits were scattered around the site here and there, with little apparent rhyme or reason. (Must have had a ton of hits on the front page; visits to the site's main front page count toward overall stats but doesn't have its own individual views stat that I can find.)

One announcement: though I have not had time for blogging lately, I did manage to get a story finished in time to meet the deadline for the Vintage Worlds 2 call for submissions. I sent in an 11,000 word novelette, the longest I have ever submitted to one of these contests. I don't yet know if it will be selected, but I feel pretty good about it.

That's all for now...

"Come Home Ere Falls the Night" To Be Published (And Other News)

I apologize for the recent lack of updates on the blog. Real-life has been quite full of turmoil lately. Have not had time to write anything for the handful of people who follow this site. Sorry 'bout that. =(

But, I do have some good news. The poem I submitted for consideration in the Love Among the Ruins project has been accepted and will appear in dead-tree form along with the other accepted submissions for that book. Here is the announcement of that happy fact (you will have to scroll down to the row of asterisks). Maybe not happy for the trees, but... y'know.

Not sure when I will have time to write a big update for the blog, but the occasional quick update should be doable. Again, I want to write more, I just don't have much time right now. Hopefully at some point real-life problems will settle down.

Updates and Milestones: May 1, 2019

Troy Stories set another record this month for views with 818 in April, just edging out March's record of 811 views. Overall, the site has now had 6,593 "all time" views, of which 2,079 are of the Numenera 2 Character Creator. Which reminds me, the two-thousand view milestone for the character generator was passed just over a week ago. (And to put that into perspective, the second-most viewed page on this site has only 156 views all-time.)

The generic Cypher System Character Creator seems to be getting a little bit more use as well, as of this moment tied with A Ruinman's Villanelle for fourth most-viewed page on the site with 121 views apiece, but I think people just don't play generic Cypher System nearly as much as they do Numenera, so there's less demand for this sort of thing. I could be totally wrong about that though.

This month also saw the addition of another Numenera-related utility, the Printer-Friendly Numenera Character Sheet index. Within a matter of hours of being posted it had already passed the Scrabble Guide index in total number of views haha (not that that's a particularly high bar).

I can understand though. With the Scrabble Guides, my guides are competing with well-established sites that have had extensive online guides since OSPD 3rd Edition. Whereas with Numenera and the Cypher System, there are not many alternatives to what's offered here.

And speaking of Scrabble Guides, the R-Z Two-Make-Three list is coming, but time got away from me, so I didn't get it finished before the end of the month like I'd planned. Should have it ready in a few days though, I think.

Regarding the Tears of the Gods, may have to take a break from it with plans to revisit it in the future.

That's all for now...

Quick Tip: City of Heroes Monitor Window

CoH Tip of the Day: There is a way to make City of Heroes expose the "real numbers" for you in terms of your character's Defense, Resistance, Hit Chance and other stats, taking all buffs, debuffs, etc., into account (instead of having to rely solely on vague descriptives such as, "adds a moderate amount of to-hit chance", etc.), but it is not at all obvious/intuitive how to do this. Seeing these numbers is critically important for monitoring your performance in end-game content (at least for tanks-- maybe other classes don't depend on it as much, though they could probably benefit from it). At low levels it's not that big of a deal, but if you're doing Incarnate content, you may want to have the monitor window going.

And so, ever since CoH came back into my life last week I've been struggling to find/remember how I got the monitor window to show up before. Was it a custom UI mod? A window that had to be opened with the typed-out /window_show command? Something else? My first thought (after my googling proved unequal to the task) was to check my old Windows XP box that still has CoH installed on it and see if it had any kind of custom UI files, or if there was a user settings file that might say what the window was called. I checked and couldn't find anything.

Most of the old online CoH player guides have disappeared over the years-- so much for the theory that nothing ever disappears from the internet-- so what I ended up having to refer to was a complete list of all slash commands from one of the old CoH wikis, and trying out different commands that seemed like plausible candidates to be the monitor window. Eventually, I found it. It is /monitor_attribute

Type commands such as this...
/monitor_attribute Current Hit Points
/monitor_attribute Last Hit Chance
/monitor_attribute Smashing Resistance
...etc.

You should get something that looks a little like this (attribute monitor moved to the upper right)...

Just for fun, here's a screenshot of the monitor window in action from the live servers, circa 2011...

City of Heroes is Back. (Maybe.)

A confession: I used to play MMORPGs back in the day. (If you don't know what that is, it stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. If you've heard of World of Warcraft-- still probably the best-known game of that genre-- then games that are like that.)

I played a pretty decent number of MMOs with varying degrees of dedication. The original EverQuest was my first and probably the one I put the most hours into, but I also played Dark Age of Camelot, EQ2, WoW, Wildstar, Horizons, The Secret World, Champions Online, and probably a couple of others I'm forgetting in my old age.

But one MMORPG stands above all the others in my memory, and that is a superhero-themed MMO named City of Heroes, which I played off-and-on from its beta in 2004 until it was announced that it was being shut down due to nonsensical corporate politics in late 2012. It was not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, but it was by far the most fun MMORPG I ever played. Perhaps even the most fun video game of any kind I ever played. CoH also had a great community, which made playing it that much more enjoyable, something that was-- and is-- very unusual for an MMO (and which has made getting into other MMOs harder, when I inevitably discover they have unbearably toxic communities *cough*WoW*cough*Wildstar*cough*). 

(To be fair, some other MMORPGs did have good communities also. The Secret World had a good community. But that may be partly because TSW went free-to-play the same month CoH shut down, and a huge chunk of Secret World players were CoH refugees for that reason.)

Anyway, at this point, City of Heroes has been shut down for longer than it was live, but it still has a large, nostalgic fan-base holding out hope for bringing it back nonetheless.

And that brings me to my reason for posting about all this today. It's back. The dream is alive! Yes, I am serious.

But how? Well, from what I understand, shortly after the shutdown in 2012, an unknown CoH dev secretly (and very illegally) turned over the game's server-side binaries to some guy who then secretly worked on reverse engineering them these past seven years. And now the cat's out of the bag-- the stolen and reverse-engineered server-side code has been leaked, "out there" in the wild. All this time, it was said that without the server-side code there would never be any way to reverse engineer CoH since so much of that game was handled server-side (at least, compared to MMOs of the same era, e.g. WoW, which tended to rely more than CoH did on client-side code, making reverse engineering it easier.) That is the reason people stated for why it was possible to have rogue "community servers" of games like WoW and EQ1, but that such would never be the case for CoH. With the leak of CoH's server-side code though, everything has changed.

And indeed, now there is a playable CoH community server up. Its legal status, etc, is still up in the air (as one might expect), but who cares? Additionally, there's been an embarrassing amount of publicly aired personal drama surrounding the people involved the effort, but again: what difference does that make to me? City of Heroes was my favorite video game, and I truly thought I'd never get to play it again. But now I can. I'm not going to sweat the legal niceties, nor the petty drama. I'm going to log into City of Heroes and "arrest" bad guys by blasting them with my super-powers, and I ain't even sorry.

Note: I do realize that very likely no one among this blog's usual visitors cares anything whatsoever about City of Heroes. It is definitely dated-- it did not boast top-of-the-line graphics even by the standards of 2004, let alone 2019. But it was-- and still is-- a lot of fun to play. It is hard to point to any one thing that makes it so, but in general, you just feel really powerful in CoH even from the beginning, compared to other MMOs, where you typically feel very weak and afraid haha. Despite that, I just can't remain silent about the return of CoH-- to me, this is huge. And needless to say, anyone reading this is, of course, welcome to check it out, even if they never played it back in the day. *Insert caveat here that doing so may or may not be entirely legal, so do so at your own risk, etc*