This is a copy of the “farewell to the community” letter I wrote to the City of Heroes players on the forums. If you wish to respond, please do so there: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=296458 as I have to manually approve every comment on this website.
This is the hardest thing I have ever had to write.
Just over nine years ago, the best man from my wedding, Sean Fish said they studio he was working at was looking for designers and wanted me to interview for the position.
Wait, let me back up.
I met Sean Fish through a good friend of mine, John S. Sean and John starting playing CCG’s and I was crazy jealous of him monopolizing John’s time. He was “John’s new best friend, Sean.” Little did I realize how cool of a guy Sean actually was.
Wait, let me back up.
I met John S. at the first Amber (diceless RPG) game that I ever played. John was a legend in Amber circles, his name was in the rulebook! And here he was in MY GAME! I soon found out that he lived incredibly close to me and I was driving him to the once per month game and we became great friends.
Wait, I need to back up again.
I got invited into my first Amber game because one night at DunDraCon (an RPG convention here in the bay area) I was wondering around and saw a guy I had played ONE game with the previous year, Jim K. Jim was sitting alone and we soon struck up a conversation. Hours went by of us chatting about everything and soon one of Jim’s friends, Jeff K. showed up (around 1 or 2am) and said he just played the most amazing Amber game of his life and wanted to run Amber now. I told him my roommate was a HUGE Zelazny fan, and we were both instantly invited into the game.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that invitation was the DEFINING MOMENT of my entire life. I can trace my career back to it, I can trace meeting my wife back to it (a chain of friends back to Jim and Jeff and another Amber game that spawned from the first one), everything. If I hadn’t chatted with Jim that night, I never would have become Lead Designer of City of Heroes (I am sure Portal Corp has cataloged these universes). Yeah, that’s just how my mind works.
OK, I had to tell that story to brighten my mood up enough to get through this. This will be incredibly hard.
When I interviewed for Cryptic I had been unemployed for nearly a year. I am sure I landed the job by promising Melissa Bianco that my Star Wars Galaxy character would make her a house for free, (just hit up “Carbonite” on the Flurry server, I told her.) I loved writing the missions I got to write, designing the Enhancement System, determining the XP curves and implementing them, then launching the game. Next up was Badges, and implementing that system, then Craig Zinkevich called a bunch of designers into a room and said “we want to do something for Halloween, anyone have any ideas?”
I proposed that players could literally Trick or Treat in our game by clicking on doors. Craig’s eyes lit up and he looked at the engineer in the room, who was lost in though. “Yeah, we can do that” the engineer said. Magic. I believe it was my idea to freeze over the lakes in Paragon for the Winter event too (my memory is hazy on that one).
When I took over the reign of Lead Designer I was extremely happy. I inherited the work of Zeb Cook, Jack Emmert, and Rick Dakan, and I was determined to make them proud. I grabbed the lore and ran with it. I invented things that would likely never see the light of day (how many remember my post about Gargarin Space Station and the Armstrong Moon Base?) I made the universe of City of Heroes my personal RPG campaign, and you were all my players. I loved getting new designers who had the same passion as I did, and letting them run wild making their own RPG campaign for you all to play in.
I learned so much about MMO’s over this time. I tried to make an MMO that me and my friends would want to play. One that wasn’t frustratingly hard. One that allowed us to play together no matter what level difference there was. One that allowed us to collectively play on a “Task Force” where our progress was saved even when we were logged off.
Nowadays a lot of MMOs get compared to World of Warcraft, because most of them are trying to emulate WoW. I would get new designers in and they would wonder why we had some systems that were NOTHING like what WoW did, and I have to explain to them that we were released seven months before them. It is a testament to the game that we were able to survive the Warcraft juggernaut, we had them beat in a lot of different areas. That’s not to say WoW is a bad game. I’ve told people “You don’t get 12 million players and still be a bad game” there were lessons I learned from WoW, just as there were lessons I am sure they learned from CoH.
But you want to know the most amazing part about my time on City of Heroes? It’s pretty easy… look in a mirror. Seriously, it’s you guys. CoH has THE BEST community in the gaming space, HANDS DOWN. We have players that praise everything we do 
. We have players that put us to task for our game balance. We have players that reverse engineer our math. We have players that criticize our storytelling. We have players that are passionate about the lore. We have players that make machinima movies and write stories where a character I created has a romantic relationship with a character they created. We have EVERY POSSIBLE TYPE OF PLAYER, and in the end I know they all LOVE City of Heroes because they ALL STICK AROUND, even the ones that apparently we could do no right in the eyes of!
And I want everyone to know, in my entire time posting on the forums, I have never, ever, put ANY player on Ignore (even though I have been sorely tempted). When I read a thread, I would read EVERY POST in it, everyone was entitled to their opinion, and I would be doing them a disservice if I didn’t at least read their complaint (even if I didn’t agree with it).
So the big question is, “what am I doing next?” Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve got some ideas, and rest assured that once I have something to talk about, you’ll hear it on the twitters () Yeah. I changed my twitter handle, but if you were following , everything switches over for you automagically.
I am going to miss the hell out of this game, but most of all I am going to miss the hell out of you guys. We had fantastic plans for the future, stuff we were working on right up until Friday. Stuff that would have made the passing of Neil Armstrong seem eerily coincidental. I would have loved to read your comments about the stuff we had planned.
So this isn’t goodbye. I will end up somewhere and I hope that I can “run an RPG” for you all again someday.
Until we meet again,
Positron
