Dagslys, my bright/bright tanker.  Until the recent update, this build was only available as dark/dark.  I think this suits me much better. Hmm, reminds me of what Sigurd Bratlie once said:  If people had a visible halo in real life, that reflected their secret life, they would be far more pious when alone.

City of Heroes occasionally have special events, and one recurring event is “double XP weekend”.  As the name implies, experience points (and influence, the currency of superheroes) are doubled at that time.  Also, former players are invited to come back for the weekend and play the game for free.  This fall, due to some North American holiday, Monday is also part of the weekend.

For the first time in its history, City of Heroes now has a competitor within the same genre. More than that, the competing game Champions Online is made by some of the same people who made CoH.  So a number of things have been done to make the game more inviting, including loyalty bonuses to people who stay subscribers during this season.  I mean, over and above the veteran rewards for people who have subscribed for a certain number of months. Some of these vet rewards are quite nifty, while others are more or less useless, at least for most of us.

Actually, games are generally useless for most of us.  I was speaking relatively, as in “more useless than usual” or “useless even in the context of the game”. Games are after all lower worlds, even compared to the ordinary world that most of us grow up in.  The only thing you can take with you from them is your experiences, and (in the case of online games) the occasional friendship.  Of course, it seems likely that we won’t have anything more when we leave this world either, so the difference may be less than most think.

Be that as it may, I spent some hours in the game this weekend.  I made a couple new characters and took advantage of the flood of fellow new characters to team up quite a bit.  Since I play at a time of the day when there are fewer players (because I live in Europe and most in the USA), teaming up can be difficult on ordinary days.  Special events see a lot more people, and so are easier for team-based characters.