As more and more players learn that NCsoft has granted a formal license to player-led Homecoming to run City of Heroes servers, the playerbase – and its peak concurrency – continues to swell.
A week ago, we noted that the Homecoming servers had seen a peak of 3260 concurrent players over the first weekend of the license, but this past holiday weekend was even better, with a peak over 4400 (official tally is 4431) players concurrent yesterday. That’s creeping up on half of its peak concurrency back in 2019 on Memorial Day weekend right after the code was released into the wild.
Player Macskull, whose self-updating spreadsheet collects all the player numbers reported by the team and compiles them into a peak concurrency graph, demonstrates both the January 7th and January 15th spikes – the latter surely propelled by the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday here in the US.
Perhaps the most interesting numbers are found in the per-server number-crunching. Starting that first weekend, the Homecoming admins instituted massive experience boosts for characters on the three smallest servers – Torchbearer, Indominable, and Reunion – in an effort to pull people away from the biggest server, Excelsior, whose player population was already swollen bigger than the biggest live shard back in the day. Everlasting, the roleplaying server, was considered just right as it was. Well, never let it be said that players don’t like huge experience buffs because while Excelsior is still overtopping the others, Torchbearer is now bigger than Everlasting (the RP server), and the devs are retooling the buff ratio again.
“January 16th, 2024 Everlasting & Torchbearer […] now have +50% XP. Reunion and Indomitable will remain at +100% XP. Additionally, Rikti Invasions are now live on all shards and will continue until maintenance next week (January 23rd). Enjoy!”
So if you were riding the experience train, you’ll have to make use of those freebie server move tokens once again. The real question is how the servers will settle once that train finishes its run – and interest in this 20-year-old MMORPG dies down again. (I’m waiting to move back to Everlasting myself!)
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