The business of saving City of Heroes has now stretched on three weeks since our first article, but it hasn’t slowed down a bit. Over the weekend, we covered the new 4chan-linked server, Homecoming’s code of conduct, the Ouroboros test server, a new small boosted experience server, and confirmation that talks between Titan Network and NCsoft continue.
But even since our last report, there’s been big news. Players will recall that just a few days ago, the Homecoming team suggested it wouldn’t be doing character transfers at all to help players move from overpopulated servers to those without queues, specifically because a tool for it didn’t exist; in fact, all it could promise was that it would try to manually move characters between shards should it ever need to close one down.
That’s all in the past now, as late last night, the team brought character transfers online. Caveat: They’re technically down as I write this post Monday morning as the team is investigating some sort of shard crash, but we assume they’ll be back once fixed. Here’s the deal:
“Did you want it? You got it. One of the most requested features of all time on our servers is coming live NOW. Like, NOW now. Now. Like, now. Right now. Yep, this very second. SHARD CHARACTER TRANSFERS ARE NOW ONLINE. You can take your character from Torchbearer to Indomitable! Or Everlasting to Excelsior! Or anything in-between. This feature is in BETA, and while we have done extensive testing, it should still be done carefully, and you should transfer your mains only with that knowledge. Current limitations are 5 character transfers ever 3 days, don’t want to overdo it. That limit likely will be lowered over time. The transfer button will be at the top of the character select screen, looks like a pair of arrows. Also, the transfer may say it’s ‘Busy’, the solution right there is to wait.”
Homecoming also kept the fun coming this weekend by rolling out lockboxes! I’m kidding. The team’s actually bringing back the original game’s Super Packs, but instead of being buyable in a cash shop (which for obvious reasons is not happening), they’re buyable through the in-game auction hall with in-game currency, which should both bring the items into the game and help drain a bit of inf from the slowly inflating economy.
The group further clarified that it will not be rolling back to pre-i25 content, that i24 isn’t more optimized, that “there’s no basis to the rumour that [i25] cannot be updated,” that it will avoid character wipes if at all possible, that it’s not making any money (just the opposite), that it’s still not soliciting donations, and that it’s not porting original characters. Perhaps most importantly, the team writes that it has “no issues with anyone else running servers” but won’t be cooperating with “any groups whose behaviour puts [Homecoming itself] at risk.”
Want some hard numbers from the weekend? At the time of the snapshot on Sunday, the four Homecoming servers once again saw over 6000 concurrent players. Here’s the breakdown from Discord:
Finally, it just wouldn’t be a City of Heroes update without a little bit of drama, would it? Apparently the Reddit team has called out the Homecoming team in Discord; the lead admin says Homecoming as a team hasn’t “acted in good faith” with Reddit, allegedly refusing to help Reddit set up a server or respond to its “requests for clarification and communication.” We asked Homecoming about the spat, and here’s the message its representative sent us: “Our official response is that we aren’t engaging in this conversation because it’s just a waste of time, and that’s it really. Please don’t harass anyone from the team for a response because you won’t be getting one.”
Requisite reminder: These are rogue servers, not technically sanctioned by NCsoft, though NCsoft has not made any public statements about them. Negotiations between Titan Network and NCsoft continue, but it remains unclear whether the currently live shards will be wiped or maintained permanently or how any of them they will be funded long-term. Please do not give anyone money for City of Heroes servers right now.
05/06/2019 6:10 PM
Homecoming has released more info about its hardware costs.
Totally lost on the whole City of Heroes rogue server thing? Here’s a recap of all our coverage from the last three weeks of drama:
• Jan 2: NCsoft follows up City of Heroes code copyright filing with fresh trademark application
• Nov 29: City of Heroes: Homecoming kicks off the winter season in its latest patch
• Oct 1: City of Heroes: Homecoming patches in the third part of Issue 26 with new stories and powers
• Sep 27: City of Heroes’ Homecoming announces Issue 26 Page 3, Halloween content, and collab with other rogue servers
• Sep 25: City of Heroes’ Homecoming rogue servers are now blocking copyright-infringing characters
• Sep 19: City of Heroes Homecoming is now banning accounts for… real-money trading
• Sep 11: TonyV leaves City of Heroes NCsoft negotiations, resigns from Titan Network
• Sep 11: City of Heroes: Homecoming plays with Rage crashes, PvP stuns, and Tanker powers on the test server
• Sep 9: City of Heroes Homecoming asks players what they want from a licensed server
• Sep 4: City of Heroes Homecoming players have rolled almost a million toons to date
• Aug 27: City of Heroes Homecoming adjusts snipes and Dominator powers with the latest patch
• Aug 22: Today’s City of Heroes’ Homecoming patch future-proofs the rogue servers for Mac players
• Aug 12: City of Heroes’ Homecoming Team finally posted a new beta patch after months of public quiet
• Aug 8: City of Heroes’ Homecoming rogue servers have joined the Titan Network/NCsoft negotiations
• Jul 8: Catching up with City of Heroes’ Homecoming rogue servers as NCsoft negotiations continue
• Jun 8: One of City of Heroes’ rogue servers, Reborn/Pleiades, was just shut down by its operator
• Jun 3: City of Heroes: Homecoming hit 100K players as another donation round funds
• Jun 1: Perfect Ten: 10 things I’d love to see added to City of Heroes in the rogue server era
• May 30: City of Heroes: Homecoming adds numerical power cooldowns, nerfs Death from Below, adds User Agreement
• May 28: City of Heroes: Community harassment ramps up as Homecoming counts 91,000 players
• May 22: Perfect Ten: Helpful tips for returning to City of Heroes in 2019
• May 21: City of Heroes: All the public servers we know of, plus Reddit’s launch and Homecoming’s name release
• May 20: City of Heroes: Homecoming concurrency, Rebirth and Reddit’s i24 servers, and the future of basebuilding
• May 17: City of Heroes: Homecoming’s new home, EU players, multiboxing, SEGS, and… piglets
• May 15: City of Heroes rogue server teams activate i24 PTS, prep for tomorrow’s Homecoming server moves
• May 13: City of Heroes community forms Round Table as Homecoming rogue servers count over 56,000 players
• May 9: City of Heroes’ Homecoming servers port to Canada this weekend, server status page is live
• May 8: Leaderboard: Would you donate for a City of Heroes rogue server?
• May 7: City of Heroes: New servers, Discord drama, and Homecoming gets $6900 in donations in 20 minutes
• May 6: City of Heroes’ Homecoming rogue servers will offer character transfers after all
• May 4: City of Heroes now has a fifth rogue server live as Homecoming buffs up and work on i24 continues
• May 1: City of Heroes’ rogue servers nerf AE farms, boost XP, but can’t do character transfers
• Apr 29: Two weeks in, City of Heroes has four rogue servers and heartwarmingly massive queues
• Apr 26: Nearly 30K people have rolled City of Heroes rogue server accounts as the game turns 15 years old
• Apr 24: Aaaaand now there’s a new temporary City of Heroes rogue server up
• Apr 23: The Titan Network is negotiating to open a legal community-run City of Heroes server
• Apr 22: City of Heroes’ first new rogue server shut down over a fake legal threat, but admins say it’s coming back
• Apr 22: Leaderboard: Do you plan to play on a City of Heroes rogue server?
• Apr 21: City of Heroes’ rogue servers may abandon character restoration as 14000 gamers register to play
• Apr 19: Lawful Neutral: Is it safe to play on City of Heroes’ inevitable rogue servers?
• Apr 18: The City of Heroes private server team has released its code [Update: The test server is live]
• Apr 18: What’s going on with City of Heroes now: ‘This game is a unicorn’
• Apr 17: Massively OP Podcast Episode 217: City of Heroes after dark
• Apr 17: Into the Super-Verse: The death of the City of Heroes community
• Apr 16: Leaderboard: Where do you stand on the ‘secret’ City of Heroes emulator?
• Apr 15: ‘Secret’ City of Heroes emulator operators address SCORE leak drama, rebut personal info database rumor
This is great!
But how much? I mean name changes already cost free, i could only imagine how much they will gouge us on this one, i bet it’s going to be free x 2 anyone? freaking bastards, (omg lmao bastards lol i rarely use that word, someone’s been watching GoT).
When game companies charged us for all these things because “real” people did it at the time, was completely acceptable, since then it’s been a cheap cash grab, freaking basta… :) haha
Seriously though this is a very good thing.
I have a character on the first shard, which i could care less about as the one i rolled on the second shard is the one that showed me the game.
I only made the second character on server 2 so i could jump on to figure out stuff about the game as the 1st server was swamped.
Spent a good hour on the first one, painstakingly making every decision and tbh made the game feel meh to me in the end, feverishly click the second one, click, click, looks ok, ok, i like that, that sounds good, sure give me that i don’t care i only want on to the server quickly and…
the magic happens, immediately run into my swl friends, i mean come on wtf right.
Anyway the ques are way down, even during prime so atm plan to stay on excel, but ques suck and if i were to move to another server i’d love, well no, i have to take that character with me.
Maybe the European Union can stop bringing fines against Amazon, Google, and Microslft long enough to enforce their laws on someone other than American companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_law_of_the_European_Union
Well if American companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft paid their fair share of tax and were run in the correct manner then the EU wouldn’t have to fine them in in the first place lol
Fuck Reddit.
I entirely agree with the teams disregard for Reddit’s special brand of bullshit.
EDIT: and OMG did I miss superjump. /sigh
I don’t know what in particular it is about CoH – it’s not the prettiest, combat is pretty pokey, the crafting is dull as dirt, and there really isn’t even an economy (sort of), I mean, your characters don’t even actually HAVE MONEY. But my goodness its fun. I think part of it is that the dialogue is written really well (Dilo for the win) and everything in the game just oozes the developers’ love for the genre.
It does so many things right overall. The combat I find fun as mobs move around and you can throw them all over the place, but it does feel a little lacking at low levels since you don’t have many attacks, I’m sure that turns some off. It does look dated but the animations and visual effects are really solid.
Also, Super Jump! My favorite travel method by far. I use them all, but SJ is my first love.
Much of what is great is the freedom to select anything.
I can pick fly, really?
You mean i don’t have to wait till i’m level this and only if i’m that certain class, equipped with a purple wand after midnight mind you and i’ve done every quest 5 times, every group mission twice, traveled every inch of the game 3 times, and logged out for over 24 days and then constantly logged in straight for 48 days with no map connection problems.
I can just pick it? No way! What’s the catch?
lol
Travel powers used to require level 14 and at least one power in a pool which opened at 6 (For example, grab combat jumping at 6, then super jump at 14). Making them available at 4 sure makes getting to Kings Row roof tops easier at low levels, and even with that old system it wasn’t hard to work them in, but 4 is nice as even with no xp bonus you can get 4 in no time at all.
I’m going through this all the time in swg:l and coh, i’m like, was this always this way or was it different before?
OK so there was some gates, still in the end avail to all, if you so choose. I do see a lot of people use super jump.
I use ultra graphic settings and the game does not look that dated to me? I find with swg:l and now coh, it’s only a matter of a little acclimating time and you realize the graphics are not that bad, pretty good at times in fact.
Sure when the only thing the game industry has done over the last decade+ was remove challenge/fun/game/content, and pumped up the graphics to overload, yea sure it’ll look dated… at first.
When you keep going omg there is game in here, you fully understand how little graphics really matter.
I do like modern graphics but like with modern shooters I find that gameplay is often, not always, but frequently, cast aside to make a game look fantastic. I’m fine with older graphics anyway, and CoX was my 2nd MMO and looks far better than EQ did/does. It was much better looking than WoW was back then too.
I’ve got it turned all the way up and it runs like a dream, of course it should! The big test will be if I ever do a Hamidon raid again. For how much I love CoH, Hamidon was the worst raid I’ve ever been too. It was lag hell and just a PITA so never went back.
I’d be lying if i said i didn’t like high end graphics, but at the expanse of game, no.
Not to sound like a bummer here but some of the new game play from up and coming games of all walks, i don’t follow much of it only get to watch it almost daily and there was one and you are an animal, anyway i dunno, it didn’t feel immersive to me in anyway, it felt so fake or unreal, so on display that i could not take anything organic from it at all, just like a check list game, ok i killed the bad guy do i pretend to be immersed as i walk to next guy to kill who looks like amazing but so fake. My one boy, totally pumped and i do not say a word, outside yeah that is so cool, looking to be an awesome game, it’s his to enjoy and look forward too i’m certainly not going to ruin it for him ofc. I guess to me it’s a little too graphically good which comes off fake to me possibly.
Yeah, I remember picking fly to only get to hover a couple of feet off the ground. That was another thing I hated about the game.
I can tell you that the pacing of the game (yes its slow paced, and I prefer that), its writing, and its customization are what grab me especially with the Architech system and the ability to write your OWN adventures in super detail.
It’s how all mmorpg’s should be but the industry exposed us all to faster and that makes it really hard to go back. Bottom line i still favor glacier slow any day.
I’m completely new to this game i know nothing and Bree was more than generous here explaining thing’s to me; https://massivelyop.com/2019/05/04/city-of-heroes-now-has-a-fifth-rogue-server-live-homecoming-i24/
I mean it’s not that i have a problem with slow, i love glacier slow, but i dunno maybe i felt it, it felt like spending the amount of time it would have taken me to cap a toon was the wrong approach in this game and turned out it isn’t probably the best straight up option and would have burnt out on the game early tbh.
I know mr glacier slow complaining about slow leveling, lol, it’s not that i just have already and could see getting to 3x or 4x and then go, oh i actually don’t like this class as much as i thought, ouch if it’s all you got going. Bree also dropped a planner link in the thread above i’m sure i’ll be taking advantage of.
*hoorb* I WILL EXPELL AIR WITH YOU
I think the teaming is a big part of it. This is one of the few, if only, MMO I can think of where not only is teaming so much more fun than solo, but it is enjoyable, and does not feel forced. You actually want to team. And then the superpowers make it even more fun making you feel like a superhero with all the sounds and effects. You can do so many fun things to the enemies.
Come one Reddit isn’t all bad, hell that’s where I get all my tips for Massively OP so as long as you want to weather the Mos Eisley vibe you can get some useful info and insights.
Heck i dunno but i swear on a splash screen leaving a mission i read the words “Massively OP” in some context, I’m serious, i’m not joking; either i did read that or i’ve finally… nm lol :) anyway been waiting for that splash to happen again. It may not even be about this site, i’m sure it’s not much of a stretch to read the words massively op in a game like CoH in other contexts.
Haha nope I saw it once too – it flashed too fast for me to screencap it, but I know they (or maybe Leo? :D) slipped us into the loading screens. :P
Nice! and i’m not losing it, even nicer lol
It’s crazy how much power Reddit thinks it should have. I can’t stand Reddit.
Seems like the Homecoming team addressed the reddit drama already. Like Bree wrote in the article, “the team writes that it has ‘no issues with anyone else running servers’ but won’t be cooperating with ‘any groups whose behaviour puts [Homecoming itself] at risk.'” — Reddit’s been REALLY toxic in the past. It’s been better since Homecoming’s been available, but I can’t really blame the Homecoming team too much for not wanting to jeopardize their server by being associated with reddit and the *chans.
I am really happy to see that they are working on all this stuff. I have been enjoying my time on the Homecoming servers when I have a chance to play. The CoX stuff (and really all “pirate” server stuff) fascinate me as a lover of games. The fact that communities hold on strongly and are willing to risk all sorts of issues just to bring back a game they love is amazing, and wild. I can’t wait to see how things progress on the CoX front from here.
“The CoX stuff (and really all “pirate” server stuff) fascinate me as a lover of games. ”
I don’t recall the economist who said it – maybe its as early as Bastait? – but it’s a truism that no strong market demand can ever really be constrained; circumscribing the market with legalities, taxes, prohibitions, etc simply all result in that demand creating a black market.
In essence, it was only a matter of time before this occured, and with the server code having been released into the wild, there really is no stopping it. Especially when you can run your own VM Ware server thats apparently pretty easy once you get going.
I tried it out but I just don’t want to get too far drawn in. Without hearing anything from NCsoft I refuse to get pulled in too far. Getting a character to mid to max level would suck if NCsoft comes in and shuts it all down.
I hear you. I’ve been focusing on my Inv/SS Tanker over the others, so she’s 30, but I too really want something official; partly to remove that cloud and partly to help support it. I have no issues whatsoever paying for stuff I enjoy and I’ve been really enjoying this.
“I have no issues whatsoever paying for stuff I enjoy and I’ve been really enjoying this.”
Exact same here, heck i’d even pay for name changes and character transfers, and i’m not joking around like i am above, i wouldn’t even complain, this game must survive!
What you all went through many years ago, omg that must have been brutal to have this game taken from you like that.
I heard the roars at the time, i heard endless coh stories while playing swl, and at no time did i ever fully realize what any of that meant, until now.
The whole thing is so fk’ing wrong on so many levels. I mean i kinda wish i didn’t miss label this game at prime, and then again i’m kinda glad i did, as i now know how the closure must have affected players.
I was hoping the drama would die off. It certainly has been reduced significantly and the in game community has been pretty solid again. I got a couple of my SWTOR guildies that never played and were mostly into WoW and a tried other games with to play and they’re having a blast when we team up.
I’d still prefer something official but this has been great fun and it’s good to see things getting overall more amiable in the community again, stuff like this notwithstanding.
When there is humans at play, dramas never really die off. My hope is that they can be better contained. :(
“they’re having a blast when we team up”
This game shines in that area.