City of Heroes beta ended last night.

The finale was a big invasion by the Rikti, the alien bad guys whose initial invasion created the current state of the CoH world (that is, super-bad guys all over).

It was pretty cool. There were some hiccups -- a bug prevented some of the Rikti from fighting, and there were more players (I think 60,000) than the devs could handle -- but it was fun to stand with the other heroes of the city and wait for the aliens to come.

There were some very cool suggestions on some of the fora for improvements next time. One in particular that I agreed with was a change in the location of the event. The way it went was that the aliens spawned from portals around the center points of each of the zones where they invaded. This is pretty sensible. However, the suggest I rather liked was that the aliens start in some entrance point -- like coming out of the train terminals or through the gates between sections of the city or from portals located at the peripherals -- and make for the center point. That would have been fun, trying to defend areas of the city against invaders moving over the ground instead of jumping on the spawns as they came out.

I'm excited about playing for real. I'll have to see if I can find a group to hook up with. My two best superhero buddies are not playing, so I don't have built-in pals. At least, they're not playing yet. :)

Update on the MMORPG front.

World of Warcraft is quite addictive. It's similar to Diablo II, in that there is almost always something that you're doing that has an imminent reward. It also combines social interaction -- grouping is very helpful and fun -- and limited safe areas.

All in all, not a game you can play for five minutes or have in the background when you're doing something like folding laundry.

I've been playing with the Lounging Lurkers, a guild formed from the Lurker Lounge web site. It's a D2 analysis site, which appeals to me as both a D2 fan and a rules geek. So there's a degree of minor legend status associated with the folks in the guild, and it's quite fun to play with them.

On the other hand we have City of Heroes, the superhero MMORPG. I've been anticipating this for some time now, and since I pre-ordered, I'm guaranteed an invite to the beta by April 7th. So I'll want to be playing that.

And I can't keep up with one MMO, let alone two, what with the fulltime job and the kids and all.

Gee, nice problem to have -- which cool free game do I want to play? Of course, COH stops being free in a couple of weeks when it ships, but the first month is a sunk cost at this point.