[Updates to this piece are at the end!] If you were planning to abuse the Architect Entertainment system on City of Heroes’ Homecoming rogue servers, we hope you already got your easy expies because it’s been nerfed now. AE is the game’s player-created mission system, designed for storytelling, but traditionally players have found ways to create cheese missions that provide heaps of experience, allowing them to levelcap quickly. In some cases, there were outright exploits of mobs that posed no threat at all to participants. But the Homecoming team has now patched that problem out of existence by nerfing AE across the board and shoring up the exploit.
“Some of you may have noticed the AE server going up and down a bit – it’s getting hammered quite hard. We don’t want to disable it completely and remove the ability for anyone to play any AE content, but we need to discourage overuse for the moment. As such, we’ve reduced the XP gained from Architect content by 50%. In the future, hoping to be able to flag a subset of content as ‘Dev Choice’ which will then be exempt from this limitation, but that’ll be happening a bit further down the road. I know this may upset some of you, but we’re hoping the various other XP bonuses & Anniversary Badge bonus will make up for this.”
The team has also noted that character transfers across servers are not currently possible as nobody’s built the tool for it yet. “What we can say is that if for whatever reason we end up shutting an individual shard down we should be able manually move all characters onto another shard,” the lead GM writes. “This is not a guarantee it’ll work, but it is a guarantee we will try our best. Obviously, renames may be required as part of this process.”
That’s all part of the lead up to trying to convince folks to give up on the beleaguered Torchbearer server and play on the two servers added most recently: Everlasting, the unofficial RP server, and Indomitable, the unofficial PvP server, not that you need to do either activity to play there. The team has extended double experience bonuses for those two servers through Monday, in addition to experience bonuses on all servers on weekdays, meaning if you’re playing on the smaller servers right now, you’re getting 250% experience.
I do want to add here that we’ve been informed of at least two other live servers from other teams, but we’re reluctant to link to them just yet until they are verified (or for that matter, until we know whether they even want to be covered in the press and see their numbers blown up like Homecoming’s!). They are to my knowledge independent of the more public team ventures across Discord, which include Homecoming, /cogx/, Ouroboros, Reddit, and a separate community negotiating team called SCOTS.
Homecoming itself has previously addressed the status of Tequila, requests for hardware assistance, and the inadvertent data collection incident, though it says it cannot comment on distributing that patch externally.
Once again, some stock reminders: These are rogue servers, not technically sanctioned by NCsoft, though NCsoft has not made any public statements about them. We’ve had confirmation that negotiations between Titan Network and NCsoft continue on, but it remains unclear whether these shards will be wiped or maintained permanently and how they will be funded long-term. Right now, these four servers are being funded to the tune of $4700 monthly by private donors with 32000 players. Please do not give anyone money for City of Heroes servers right now.
Teaser from Reddit:
I’m really interested in seeing the outcome with the negotiations with NCsoft. Blizzard bent the knee and will release Classic due to the private server interests. Today, there are articles about whether Classic will be a massive hit and savior of Wow … how little time was needed before everyone lost complete focus on why Classic is even being made.
The major industry reset currently ongoing for many companies seems to have opened their eyes to lost audiences and the games that launched their success. I hope this trend continues. Sadly, it is very clear that the brainwashed gamer audience has not yet opened their eyes to these trends. Everything still needs to be a “massive success” to them.
The lesson of “play what you find fun, even if the majority isn’t into it” is not only lost on many today … it was never learned.
NCsoft’s answer to this may be a tipping point. Honestly though, it baffles me that some these large companies haven’t yet taken note of the legacy game trend.
I wouldn’t hold my breath; NCSoft is, first and foremost, a Korean company. They will only worry about games that are making revenue in their primary market. That was the whole reason they shut down COH in the first place. Considering the usual experience of big publishers, they don’t care about the IP’s of their old games – but fuck everyone else who want to preserve those games.
Unless you get to 50 in like 3 hours, for me, it got too boring playing the same map over and over. Yes, I could get a few easy levels pre-20s but after that I want to go play other content. What I really loved AE for was the ticket system. If I didn’t like a price on the auction house, I would just do a couple large maps in AE and then buy what I wanted directly. Absolutely loved that aspect.
Added in a quickie update about Sunrise.
sfaik it’s an independent team from all the others. It stands for Solution Coordinators & Operational Tech Supporters.
Just hit 28 on my Radiation Melee/Shield Defense brute last night, and I’m having the time of my life teaming with friends and randos again. This game has everything I’ve missed and haven’t been getting with modern MMOs. It’s just fun. Just plain FUN. I’ve been teaming with one of my best friends, duoing redside, him on one of two characters and myself on my Rad/Shield, we’re on voice chat, and it’s like we haven’t missed a damn beat with regard to planning out tactics for the missions we’re in over our heads with. It’s what I’ve missed about teaming with my friends. Now we just have to get The Gravy Train™ going again and we’ll be golden.
With all of this work towards private servers, one of the biggest things I’m looking forward to is new Archetypes and Power Sets. I’m really, really curious to know how difficult it was for SCORE to add the Sentinel, and the half-dozen sets they added, because I can think of a handful of Archetypes and Power Sets that don’t need any additional assets.
I made a killing selling lowbie salvage back when AE was all the rage. It was beautiful!
Rogue servers this, Rogue servers that… I want to play on a Hero server. Or at least a Vigilante server. Devs hate Villain servers, as we all know.
I DON’T KILL ANYONE >:C
We “arrest” them. And/or get sent to the hospital!
Hence why my heroic main is now a Dark Melee scrapper. Nobody dies! He just borrows a bit of their soul, that’s all…
I prefer Praetorian servers. ;)
Woohoo! Just found all my original archived costumes and powersets on an old hard drive.
Stuffs gonna happen!
Im glad they did this, just because finding a team of people to run normal content with has been a struggle.
I could care less if someone gets to max level in the blink of an eye… but when it keeps me from being able to group up with people in a multiplayer game, then i get a bit bothered by it.
I am not super invested in the game at the moment, just happy to be able to wander the world again when I have time, so nerfs / acceleration dont bother me in either case. And with the server code out in the wild now (I mean if I really wanted I could make my own damn personal solo server) and things even if this gets shut down more will spring up I imagine.