After months of teasing, City of Heroes has gone free2play for everyone, with the ability to pay for extras, and if you have paid for it in the past, then you get “Premium Status!”

The Cryptic Studios game now runs under a “Paragon Rewards” scheme, meaning you get reward tokens for purchasing a subscription, which means you will earn reward point when you pay for things.

With the new rewards scheme, you will earn 1 point for every month of subscription, plus another one every 12 months, and another one for every 1,200 Paragon Points you buy (which is approximately $15), these points are spent on account-wide benefits, like XP boosters, temporary powers, and enhancement unslotters and boosters.

It has been designed this way so that it is everyone can see how much of a veteran everyone else is, so you can see who are the real veteran players around as they will have lots of bells and whistles on their cape. Though it’s a little odd, to unlock things like powers, and it seems even classes, by paying for them, this is an interesting method not many people have adopted.

City of Heroes is yet another game to fall to the free2play model, along with DC Universe which was announced last week, but City of Heroes has been going a long time, since 2004, and it has held out quite well until now.

This is one of the few games that has had good content constantly dished out, in the form of “issues” – like a comic book – there has been over 20, with this one being the 21^st, changing the game name to City of Heroes: Freedom.

You can play the game for free as of today, and if you have paid for the game in the past, then you should be upgraded to Premium Status straight away, so a warm welcome to returning players.