A year ago when NCsoft first granted City of Heroes Homecoming the license to operate officially, the devs made clear that they would be creating a “city council” of likeminded servers, some of which would be “merging in” to the existing set of servers and operated through Homecoming itself. At the time, Homecoming mentioned Victory and Paragon as two of those servers. And now, a year later, Victory is officially part of Homecoming.
“It’s taken a little longer than expected, but as of today we are pleased to announce that we have merged in Michiyo’s Victory server as the sixth Homecoming shard,” the Homecoming devs wrote early this afternoon. “Victory will function exactly like the five shards you already know and love, just with significantly fewer preexisting characters. On that note, the name release system will not be activated on Victory for the time being. We hope you’ll give them a big welcome!”
MOP reader Lunar reminds us that Victory is based in North America, making this the game’s fifth NA server. And if the name Michiyo sounds familiar, it’s probably because she’s been running Victory since 2019, and she’s also the programmer responsible for restoring the original CoH forums and for building the City Modder modding tool we featured last year. A good egg, in other words.
A follow-up FAQ from Homecoming clarifies that this is not the original retail Victory server, so no, you’re not getting old characters back. It’s also not planning to merge any of the existing servers into each other, nor are there plans to bring in more servers beyond Victory.
“Are any other servers planned to merge into the Homecoming cluster? There are no plans to do so. We’re only able to bring Victory in because it kept up with our updates over the years. Due to the divergence between our codebase and those of other servers, merging them in as we have with Victory would likely be impossible.”
City of Heroes Homecoming took MOP’s award for Best Classic MMO in 2024; we also honored NCsoft with our Studio of the Year award owing to the granting of the CoH license.
