[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.
05/02/2019 2:10:20 PM
Folks on Discord have probably heard whispers of a new launcher for multiple servers called Sunrise built by the SCOTS team. Yes it’s legit; no it’s not ready yet. But when it is, it will obviate the need for Tequila. Statement from Homecoming:

Teaser from Reddit:

Our complete City of Heroes rogue server coverage:
• Mar 7 2020: City of Heroes’ Homecoming just outlawed video of their rogue servers
• Mar 3 2020: City of Heroes Homecoming players have racked up over 47 million hours
• Jan 2 2020: NCsoft follows up City of Heroes code copyright filing with fresh trademark application
• Dec 13 2019: Massively OP’s 2019 Awards: Biggest MMO Surprise
• Nov 29 2019: City of Heroes: Homecoming kicks off the winter season in its latest patch
• Oct 1 2019: City of Heroes: Homecoming patches in the third part of Issue 26 with new stories and powers
• Sep 27 2019: City of Heroes’ Homecoming announces Issue 26 Page 3, Halloween content, and collab with other rogue servers
• Sep 25 2019: City of Heroes’ Homecoming rogue servers are now blocking copyright-infringing characters
• Sep 19 2019: City of Heroes Homecoming is now banning accounts for… real-money trading
• Sep 11 2019: TonyV leaves City of Heroes NCsoft negotiations, resigns from Titan Network
• Sep 11 2019: City of Heroes: Homecoming plays with Rage crashes, PvP stuns, and Tanker powers on the test server
• Sep 9 2019: City of Heroes Homecoming asks players what they want from a licensed server
• Sep 4 2019: City of Heroes Homecoming players have rolled almost a million toons to date
• Aug 27 2019: City of Heroes Homecoming adjusts snipes and Dominator powers with the latest patch
• Aug 22 2019: Today’s City of Heroes’ Homecoming patch future-proofs the rogue servers for Mac players
• Aug 12 2019: City of Heroes’ Homecoming Team finally posted a new beta patch after months of public quiet
• Aug 8 2019: City of Heroes’ Homecoming rogue servers have joined the Titan Network/NCsoft negotiations
• Jul 8 2019: Catching up with City of Heroes’ Homecoming rogue servers as NCsoft negotiations continue
• Jun 8 2019: One of City of Heroes’ rogue servers, Reborn/Pleiades, was just shut down by its operator
• Jun 3 2019: City of Heroes: Homecoming hit 100K players as another donation round funds
• Jun 1 2019: Perfect Ten: 10 things I’d love to see added to City of Heroes in the rogue server era
• May 30 2019: City of Heroes: Homecoming adds numerical power cooldowns, nerfs Death from Below, adds User Agreement
• May 28 2019: City of Heroes: Community harassment ramps up as Homecoming counts 91,000 players
• May 22 2019: Perfect Ten: Helpful tips for returning to City of Heroes in 2019
• May 21 2019: City of Heroes: All the public servers we know of, plus Reddit’s launch and Homecoming’s name release
• May 20 2019: City of Heroes: Homecoming concurrency, Rebirth and Reddit’s i24 servers, and the future of basebuilding
• May 17 2019: City of Heroes: Homecoming’s new home, EU players, multiboxing, SEGS, and… piglets
• May 15 2019: City of Heroes rogue server teams activate i24 PTS, prep for tomorrow’s Homecoming server moves
• May 13 2019: City of Heroes community forms Round Table as Homecoming rogue servers count over 56,000 players
• May 9 2019: City of Heroes’ Homecoming servers port to Canada this weekend, server status page is live
• May 8 2019: Leaderboard: Would you donate for a City of Heroes rogue server?
• May 7 2019: City of Heroes: New servers, Discord drama, and Homecoming gets $6900 in donations in 20 minutes
• May 6 2019: City of Heroes’ Homecoming rogue servers will offer character transfers after all
• May 4 2019: City of Heroes now has a fifth rogue server live as Homecoming buffs up and work on i24 continues
• May 1 2019: City of Heroes’ rogue servers nerf AE farms, boost XP, but can’t do character transfers
• Apr 29 2019: Two weeks in, City of Heroes has four rogue servers and heartwarmingly massive queues
• Apr 26 2019: Nearly 30K people have rolled City of Heroes rogue server accounts as the game turns 15 years old
• Apr 24 2019: Aaaaand now there’s a new temporary City of Heroes rogue server up
• Apr 23 2019: The Titan Network is negotiating to open a legal community-run City of Heroes server
• Apr 22 2019: City of Heroes’ first new rogue server shut down over a fake legal threat, but admins say it’s coming back
• Apr 22 2019: Leaderboard: Do you plan to play on a City of Heroes rogue server?
• Apr 21 2019: City of Heroes’ rogue servers may abandon character restoration as 14000 gamers register to play
• Apr 19 2019: Lawful Neutral: Is it safe to play on City of Heroes’ inevitable rogue servers?
• Apr 18 2019: The City of Heroes private server team has released its code [Update: The test server is live]
• Apr 18 2019: What’s going on with City of Heroes now: ‘This game is a unicorn’
• Apr 17 2019: Massively OP Podcast Episode 217: City of Heroes after dark
• Apr 17 2019: Into the Super-Verse: The death of the City of Heroes community
• Apr 16 2019: Leaderboard: Where do you stand on the ‘secret’ City of Heroes emulator?
• Apr 15 2019: ‘Secret’ City of Heroes emulator operators address SCORE leak drama, rebut personal info database rumor
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 Trainâ„¢ 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.