“Go. Fold. Kill Coronavirus,” mandates the call to action from the City of Heroes: Homecoming team. The devs of the rogue server have created their own folding@home team that players can join to donate their PCs’ computing power to the collective effort of processing data to combat the novel coronavirus.
For those unfamiliar, folding@home is “a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases.” Effectively, it lets regular folks use their unused PC power to help process the data for these simulations, joining a collective research effort to understand diseases like COVID-19. Readers will recall that this was one of the collective efforts that were pointed out by GPU maker Nvidia.
For folks interested in helping out, there are instructions on how to add your PC’s resources to the pool as part of a team the Homecoming devs have created. Doing so will put players in the running for a variety of in-game prizes each month, with the top 10 contributors getting 500 Reward Merits and a permanent costume power of their choice. The top contributor from that list will receive an additional 500 Reward Merits, while the second and third contributors will receive 250 Reward Merits. Even if you’re not among that list, you could still receive a prize, as 10 other team members will be randomly selected to get 500 Reward Merits.
The effort and the contests themselves will run for at least six months. Be sure to read through the forum post for all of the details and instructions.
