The legally licensed City of Heroes Homecoming team has released an update today, though it’s not entirely the content kind. The most important part is that you’ll need to take some action to save your character names. Readers will recall that for years now, Homecoming has been warning players that it would someday turn on its name reclaim rules, which are meant to return abandoned character names to the pool for active players to snap up. That day turns out to be November 1st.
“The City Council has decided that we will activate the long-awaited name release policy on November 1st, 2024,” the devs write. “In the very early days of the server, back when we didn’t know how long we’d be around, a lot of people made a lot of characters and then abandoned them. There’s no reason to permanently preserve the names of someone who never intends to return to the game. […] We have considered alternate solutions, but the way the servers and databases talk to each other makes those solutions impractical. This solution strikes a balance between preserving character names and freeing up unused names.”
The devs seem to suggest the name reclaim is meant to target characters who haven’t logged in since 2019, but in reality, the actual rules for name release clearly target new lowbie characters after just a month (and the rest of toons under level 50 after just a year). Since the timer has already been ticking in the game for a long time, that means a lot of names will immediately be up for grabs starting November 1st; the devs say an estimated “1.6 million names will be eligible for release upon activation, drawing roughly evenly from the 1-5 and 6-49 buckets” – that’s “roughly half the total number of characters.”
You should probably pop in to your characters and refresh them just in case, as this affects folks with lots of low- and mid-level alts the most. Here are the rules for which character names are at risk:
If I can offer some advice here from a City of Heroes fan who thinks the intent of the policy is good but the thresholds are terrible and has therefore been angry-prepping for it for years anyway: You need to get your name-holding characters to at least level 6, and then set a strict recurring reminder on your calendar to log them all in at least once a year, one at a time. The process is faster if you log them out in a dayjob so they insta-log. Make sure you don’t forget about toons on other servers, too. Isn’t this fun!
The developer post today also announces the opening of applications for closed beta participants (who will be able to access patches early and offer feedback) and amends the code of conduct to address multiboxing and idling in some zones.
Finally, some happy news: The game’s Halloween event is officially live for 2024.
