I almost deactivated my City of Heroes account on Monday. Almost.
I've been playing the game for just over a year now and while I've met some interesting people in the game, I felt played out. My main character (whose hero name, the "Health Fairy", was originally just a joke) had done the two most interesting things that a hero can do in the city: rescue Statesman, and participate in a successful Hamidon raid. With the number of alternates I've created, the only character option I haven't tried is a Kheldian, since I don't have a 50th level character. And I have no interest in playing a Kheldian.
Also, I've been participating in the Pinnacle Role Play Congress, in which I've written some about my characters with varying degrees of quality (Check the "Our Story So Far" thread on the main forum page and look for the stuff filed under Gelidity and the Health Fairy. My ID is "Modern Comet".). Despite myself, I've been comparing my stuff on the Congress site to what else has been posted, and it ain't pretty. Comparing write-when-the-urge-hits stuff like mine to stuff being pumped out by professionals (for fun!), well I know I shouldn't do it, but I can't help it, and it's been pretty discouraging carrying around the feeling that I've been dragging the rest of the group down.
So in that state of mind, I was at the NCSoft site, about ready to hit the submit button on the "Why I Left" form.
But I stopped. More to the point (and this is going to sound weird), my characters stopped me.
Not all of my characters, to be sure. I have more half-formed costume-and-powers-only 'toons scattered across the servers than I want to think about. No, these were my core characters--the Health Fairy, Gelidity and the Modern Comet--that stepped up and said, "You may be burned out, but we're not. You may be played out, but we're not. Our stories haven't been told, not completely."
It's more than a little scary, I'll admit. I've had characters try to take over a story before, but I've never had characters stop me from abandoning their story before. I don't think I'll be able to move on to other games, other ideas, until I do something about this...
I may have just discovered what to do for NaNoWriMo this year.
raven said: