Oh, I'm afraid I've had one of my trademark changes of heart.

When City of Heroes launched, I was one of the first people in line. I was in the three-day headstart (where I got to play before it was officially on sale) and played for a few months. I mostly played one character (Captain Valiant) and got up to level 32 before I pretty much stalled out.

See, I tend to play solo (meaning that I didn't necessarily team up with other players, which some would argue defeats the point of playing a Massively Multiplayer game) and I preferred to play exclusively missions (meaning that I liked to have some point to what I was doing, instead of just randomly attacking thugs on the street). But the game wasn't really designed with that as a goal, so around level 32, I ran completely out of content. I'd done every single mission available to me, and the only way to progress in the game was to either spend hours repetitively offing the same guys on the same city block, or team up with random strangers (because most of the people I knew weren't playing much anymore, having been lured away by the siren song of World of Warcraft) and hope they had something interesting to be doing. Plus, the switch to the 30+ game meant that I was mired in Experience Debt (which is what you get when you die a lot).

So I quit. I deactivated my account.

Now, a couple months ago, I decided that they'd added enough content for me to start playing again. I logged on and promptly had lots of missions. I started playing, and was delighted to learn that leveling was quick and easy. I read in the forums about how a lot of people were unhappy about Issue 5, but the parts that affected me the most were: more experience in missions, and less debt in missions. So it lined up pretty well. Things were going pretty well for Captain Valiant! And City of Villains was about to come out, which promised to add lots of new content, in the form of "playing a different, but very similar game".

So a couple of days ago, City of Villains and Issue 6. Just in time, too, since I'd run out of missions again, and I was really not looking forward to running around on the streets again. The new changes to the way characters worked seemed pretty sweeping, but I figured I'd be able to roll with them.

Well, I have to say, Captain Valiant is definitely weaker than he used to be. Before, I was hard-pressed to take on a Boss one-on-one, and now, I have to assume I'm getting at least one death in the process. More worrying is the fact that I'm completely out of indoor missions. Well, except for this new PVP zone, where all I have to do is avoid the hundred of players interested in killing me on my way to get something done. That's not actually that hard (Captain Valiant can turn invisible!) but I don't really feel like doing the same four missions over and over again, especially when one of them is broken. And being surrounded by people spitting out poorly-spelled obscenities because I am reluctant to allow them to kill me just isn't that much fun.

But that's okay, because maybe I can play City of Villains, right? Sure! It's a whole new game with new archetypes to play around with. And this time, I get to be evil, which is bound to be more absorbing.

Except that City of Villains, as far as I can tell, doesn't involve a great deal of actual villainy. You spend most of your time doing jobs for someone else, and those jobs frequently involve "Go here and kill these freaky-looking monsters". That's just like City of Heroes! And, well . . .

It feels even less fun. Maybe it's just that I've got a pretty short half-life for playing an MMORPG, but City of Villains is just not grabbing me. The idea of grinding away with a whole new character and spending another several months to get to a point where I can't get anything done . . . I'm just not up for that. Even playing a pirate who summons an army of zombies isn't doing it for me.

So I cancelled my account again. Now I can get more reading done! Note that I did this shortly before buying the retail copy of City of Villains, so I wisely save fifty or so bucks. That's good timing.