City of Hero even gives characters a place to go and hang out, make plans for upcoming missions, or find teleporters to other areas of the game.

That place is a supergroup base, and once again it’s something that can be customized to suit the designer’s wants and needs. Bases were introduced with the City of Villains expansion (and the Issue 6 update to CoH Influence ) and have become an integral part of the game for many players.

But the developers of CoH Influence are not content to rest on their laurels. In fact, they really can’t afford to. They’ve been the only entry in the superhero MMORPG genre for more than five years now, so anyone looking for a different kind of MMORPG among the dozens of fantasy and several science fiction games would inevitably check out CoH Influence to see what it had to offer.

Now, though, we’re coming up on the release of Champions Online (due September 1st from Cryptic Studios, the original development studio of CoH Influence) and DC Universe Online, coming next year from Sony Online Entertainment.

Suddenly a genre which has belonged solely to CoH Influence is about to be a bit more crowded, and City of Heroes will need to step up their game to compete with the upstarts.

Fortunately for fans of CoH Influence, the five-year-old game shows no signs of slowing down, even in the customization department. For years now, players have clamored for power customization, i.e., the ability to recolor or otherwise customize their characters’ powers.

One of the key features being touted by Champions Online is just this, power customization. Not to be outdone, Paragon Studios recently announced Issue 16: Power Spectrum, which will bring this long-awaited feature to City of Heroes, nearly negating what could have been a key difference between it and Champions Online.

Issue 16: Power Spectrum will allow players to recolor powers from nearly every powerset for which this ability would make sense. Along with weapons customization, which was introduced in the Issue 11 update, this means nearly every powerset in the game can be made to look very different from the way it did at the game’s launch.