Difference between revisions of "User:Dyne"

Latest revision as of 11:25, 17 October 2018

Userboxes This user's global chat handle is @Dyne. This user's time zone is Eastern. This user is a Veteran. This user is Honorable. 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 once an ordinary college student, until the day he was bitten by a radioactive MMO...

Many of my friends and one of my younger brothers had been in the City of Heroes Beta, and they seemed very excited, but I had suffered through the era of obnoxious 90s darkity-dark comics, and I was a bit down on superheroes as a result. I was also going through a difficult struggle with depression, compounded by an unexpected need to move house a few months earlier than originally planned. So when the game launched and my friends offered a copy so I could play with them, I 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, and had him show me the game. When he departed for work afterward, he left his account logged in so I could play around with character creation.

My very first character in City of Heroes was an Invulnerability and Super Strength Tank named Neutronium P.I. I knew everyone had settled on some specific server after launch, but I could neither remember which one, nor deduce it from my brother's character list, and since 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.

In the Game

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 new character the night I created my game account, but I ended up recreating Neut on Virtue at some point between the 14th and the 19th. (He was eventually deleted and recreated on Liberty when I needed the slot.)

Neturonium P.I. as a Badgebot

Paragon Chat

Much, much later, Neutronium 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.

Primary Characters

I'm slowly expanding this list.

Note: Some of the dates below are more certain than others. Where possible, I use emails and chat logs 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 screenshots, logs, and demos from the first few years were lost when my old PC stopped booting due to a power surge. CoH also didn't store the date/time in filenames originally, and some of those that remain have had their timestamps changed over the years, such as when early screenshots were converted from TGA to JPG).

Second Stringers

Some of my characters were created with the intent of being a regular character. They stuck around for awhile, or they were characters that grew into that position. Those are the characters on the list above.

Then you have the character list below, which includes the Arch-nemeses, civilians, parallel incarnations and other NPCs, some made to RP with other players. It also includes "rough draft" characters -- concepts that never really got off the ground, costume tests, and power set experiments. Many of the latter don't really deserve articles of their own.