Difference between revisions of "User:Dyne"

Revision as of 13:25, 27 August 2018

Userboxes This user's global chat handle is @Dyne. This user's time zone is Eastern. This user is a Veteran. This user has been playing City of Heroes since Issue 0.
This user suffers from Altitis and possibly Altsheimers as well. Fortunately for this user, neglect of player characters is not a crime… yet. This user has one or more Level 50 Heroes. This user's main hero is a Defender. This user plays both City of Heroes and Villains on the Virtue server. This user plays both City of Heroes and Villains on the Freedom server.

Origin Story

Dyne was a ordinary college student, until one day when he was bitten by a radioactive MMO...

My very first character in City of Heroes was named Neutronium P.I. All of my friends and one of my younger brothers had been in the City of Heroes Beta, and they seemed very excited. I'd also suffered through the era of obnoxious 90s darkity-dark comics, and I was a bit down on superheroes at the time as a result. Also, around the time the game was actually launched I was going through a difficult struggle with depression, compounded by an unexpected need to move house a few months early. I'd been offered a copy of the game by my friends so I could play with them, but hadn't taken them up on the offer.

As the dust was settling from the move, though, I needed something to distract myself. Sometime before June 13, 2004, I finally decided to give the game a spin.

Since I didn't have the copy I was offered, I instead went to visit my brother before he went to work, and had him show me the game. When he departed for work afterward, he left his account logged in for me to play around with. I created Neutronium P.I. as a test character. I knew everyone had settled on some specific server after launch, but I couldn't remember which one or deduce it from my brother's character list. Everybody was at work, so I couldn't ask anyone. As a result, I just picked a server to create Neut on -- Liberty, Guardian, or Victory probably, but I can't recall for certain. Later I found out everyone had settled on Virtue.

At some point shortly after that, I obtained the box I'd been offered and began installing the game. My account was created at 5:54 PM eastern time on June 13, 2004. This was announced to my friends in an email jokingly titled "Last free man on Earth finally succumbs". My forum account was created at 11:40 AM on June 17, 2004.

I made a few characters while playing overnight. I ended up recreating Neut on Virtue at some point between the 14th and the 19th, then recreating him on Liberty when I eventually needed to use his Virtue slot. Much, much later, he eventually became the avatar for my Badgebot experiments on Paragon Chat (as shown in this video from post 11). (FYI, I never got much further with that project. I hadn't solved the question of how to host the bot, and got distracted from working on it by other things. Paragon Chat added a much better badge implementation before I got back to it. I might eventually dust off the code and use it for history plaques (which I believe Paragon Chat doesn't yet support) or other ideas, but even if not, it was a good learning exercise.

Characters

I'm slowly expanding this list.

Where possible, I use emails and chatlogs as a primary source for retrieving the creation dates, but in many cases all that I'm left with is the earliest screenshot that I still retain (many files from the first few years have been lost. CoH also didn't store the date/time in filenames originally, and some of those left have had their timestamps changed ove rthe years, such as when early screenshots were converted from TGA to JPG).