Getting answers to questions
It's kind of depressing to find out that the character you've chosen to play has a critical flaw that makes it useless after many hours of play. You can spend some time researching, what Archetype to play, what kind of powers to take, and which city to start in (as of Issue 6, you have two choices for CoH and one for CoV).
The obvious first choice would be the game manual and it is good to read, but you will get better answers and more complete data online. While there are a wealth of guides and various sites online, forums are where the lifeless, unbathed play masters reside. In the very essence of the game addict, they spend their nights playing and their days dodging work to help people like you learn about the game in forums.
Actually using forums is out of the realm of this guide, but they all work basically the same way (If you've used one, you shouldn't have any trouble with another). More useful than that is which forums to use. There are many good ones out there, but other than the official forums at http://boards.cityofheroes.com, I found the forum at Gameamp.com to be the best site.
In fact, because of the way the main boards are, I spent most of my time using Gameamp.com instead. Let me explain:
The official forums
The main boards at CoH can't be written to unless your account with PlayNC is active. That means that if you're like me and trying to do research before-hand or post information after canceling, you can't (though you can read what's already there or posted by others). The reason, they say, is that they can't keep disgruntled ex-players or juvenile weirdos from being a pain. Their solution, right or >wrong< was to ban all non-paying members from the forums, even if you previously had an account.
The second major problem is that the culture of the CoH forums tends to be bitter, petty, and not just a little bit nasty. For some reason, asking a question or making suggestions is taken as a personal challenge not unlike insulting one's mother. While you may get the information you're looking for (maybe), you'll feel a just a little violated in the process.
Problem three is that finding anything useful there is an artform. The search engine is dreadful in that it doesn't point you to relevant posts, but rather to each individuals response in a chain of 4000 responses in a single posting. After you limp away from your vain search, you can try to navigate using the menu system. However, the menu only goes two levels deep so the 30,000 posts for the Blaster AT are all lumped together into an impossible 137 pages of topics containing 1300 total topics. Have fun browsing.
These numbers are real as of the day I wrote this part of the guide. Later, they will be larger.
You could just ask every question by starting a new topic, but inevitably, forum pros will insult your family, your honor, and your dog while pointing you to the previous post from two and a half years ago that answers the question.
Gameamp forums
It's true that the search isn't much better and because of the few users on the site (between 10 to 20 regulars), there's not as much information available.
But, the people on the site are by nature, polite, patient, quick to respond, friendly, and very experienced. I posted in the forums for almost a month before playing and had great advice on a large number of topics. I made a point to make many of my new characters on the server that most Gameampers played on so I would have access to teaming with the people in the forums now and then. There's also an in-game chat channel that was started by Gameampers that you can use to ask questions of the forum posters in real time during the game (if anyone happens to be online). I've not once been given grief for posting any question even if it's one that's been asked before.
The Gameamp channel is called "gameamp.com" and is available from any server that you play. If a Gameamper is online, no matter what server or character they're playing on, they will see any messages posted to the channel. There is also an official gameamp SG on the Triumph server (with several others run by Gameamp members on other servers).
Guides
There's a large number of guides online and many of them are very good. I built my Dark/Regen scrapper based on the guide in the Main Forums (though it's sadly outdated now). Everything on this site counts as a guide as well. Finding them can be hard, but search engines will help as will people in the forums (who can point you to good guides that they've used). Guides often provide the most complete information on a topic and are my favorite, but can become outdated as more current Issues become available.
Online References
