Watching Teen Titans definitely reinforced the same superhero nostalgia trip that was at the heart of my time spent in City of Heroes. I didn't realize it until I started watching the show, but my main blaster shared some eerie similarities to Starfire. COH was a lot of fun to play; it helped me understand the appeal of the mass RPG without the high leadup to having fun that a lot of the examples of genre had at the time. As Kevin has pointed out before, COH dumped you straight into the "hey, you're a hero -- go beat up the badguys!" No killing of ten rats for you!

In general, the game had a great casual flavor. Highlights included:

• Right off the bat, you could make your own costume, rather than spend hours/days/months searching for the +10 Robe of the Bloviator.
  
• Instanced missions were always scaled to be appropriate for your group -- there was no requirement that you spend an hour forming an appropriate team.
  
• Travel was mostly fast, once you got past level 14.
  
• The teamplay was always fun and fast-paced.
  

Unfortunately, the strengths also turned out to be weaknesses. The accessible nature of the content, in many ways, makes it feel trivial. You do the same basic set of missions over and over again, in randomly generated dungeons that don't substantially differ from each other, so the randomness mainly just means you have to explore how the nodes intersect yet again. The level grind gets painful, quick, since in the end, that's all there is to do. There's no real in-game economy, or ability to differentiate your character outside of combat.

What I had the most hope for was the base building that was introduced with City of Villains. Unfortunately, base building turned out to so oriented towards massive teams grinding for reputation that it was completely inaccessible to the casual players that heretofore, the game seemed solely aimed at. Now, all the sudden, you DID need a forty man team of heroes grinding for rep. And, in the end, my heart just wasn't in it.

So, when my debit card got lost last month and I had to cancel it, and when NCSoft sent me a polite e-mail about how they cancelled my account when the old card # was declined, I realized that I was done being sentimental about characters I wasn't even playing anymore. Cya, Paragon. It was a lot of fun. Really. But it turns out I'd rather be riding my giant horse made ENTIRELY OUT OF FIRE or turning into a bear or something.