The City of Heroes Homecoming servers are packing up their bags and moving to new hosting this weekend, so you should probably expect some downtime during the transition.
“We’ll be moving to OVH soon, likely this weekend,” Game Master Tempest writes on the team’s forums. “This move is a big one, and we’re expecting a transition time of around 6 hours. I do have some good news though, for you NA folk – the servers are going from The Netherlands to Canada! This should reduce latency a good bit. Additionally, we will be running at max-capacity full time after the move, instead of spinning up and down mapservers on demand, which should make for a more smooth experience for everyone involved!”
According to the devs, regular maintenance windows will be put in place once everything’s set back up again, although players should be warned that Architect Entertainment missions will be wiped, so if you’ve written one you like, back it up for reimport later.
The move was intended to be funded by a fundraising drive earlier this week – a drive that managed to pull in nearly $7000 in 20 minutes and was immediately closed when it met its goal. Apparently, that part’s hit a snag with PayPal because people were too generous, too quickly.
“[I]t looks like we’ve run into a bit of a speedbump with PayPal after that donation drive. The amounts that came in were so fast, it tripped up their security system, and unfortunately, they’re being rather mum on when they’re going to release those funds. The good news is this shouldn’t impact our move, but it does provide a bit of frustration on not being able to access the funds we’d earmarked for the move. […] After a phone conversation with PayPal, they clarified that at this point our only option is to wait for their security process to go through. Hopefully it shouldn’t take long, but as of right now our only option on this is to do as they asked – wait.”
As for recent updates? Arenas are now in place on the Homecoming servers, and market-fiends may also be bummed out today by a recent change the developers expect to be “controversial” – that’d be the update that “seeds” the market with salvage, so nobody will ever be paying more than 10K for common salvage, 100K for uncommon, or 1M for rare. “Please keep in mind that this is an experiment that we are doing to address the drastic inflation that we saw occurring between different time zones. Salvage was consistently doubling in price during certain times of the day.” The group has also noted that it has no plans to make recipes more expensive or less accessible – “if anything, the opposite may happen” – though it has no formal plans yet.
