Last night, the City of Heroes Homecoming team posted some intriguing numbers on player operating systems that got speculation about the current playerbase size pumping. In addition to the revelation that nearly 5000 people have logged in using Mac or Linux and that there’s at least one soul out there still running on Windows XP (hah!), there was a tantalizing suggestion that we could just… add the totals together to see the game’s monthly active users, which would’ve meant the game has seen over 70K unique players in the last 30 days.
But apparently, that’s not quite accurate. We reached out to Team Homecoming last night, and its reps told us that those OS figures are merely aggregated launcher stats and are “inflated” compared to the actual MAU. In other words, it’s not 70K.
Homecoming was, however, willing to give us real numbers. According to the volunteer team (and ignoring forum accounts with no associated game account), the real monthly active user count for February was 42,867 – not too shabby at all for a revival of a game turning 20 years old this spring. Average concurrent users in February clocked in at 2,243, with a peak of 4,390 – not really that far off the peak from the month before.
Even more intriguingly, the game apparently now boasts 300,089 total accounts since 2019 – 36,724 of those new since the top of the year when the license agreement was announced. Gamers have rolled 227,593 new toons since the announcement too. And they’re not even all mine!
I mentioned to the devs that even I’ve noticed that Excelsior is still heavily populated – fully on red heavy load even at weird times way past primetime – so I asked whether the team is satisfied with its recent changes for handling load, which included carrots to nudge players off the bigger servers.
“The shard balancing incentives we began on January 16th (shard-wide XP bonuses and events) helped with balancing the load during the peak of the post-announcement rush, but players seem to have settled back onto Excelsior and Everlasting since,” Homecoming’s Cipher told us. “Fortunately, we’ve recently made some improvements to the server code and our database server hardware which have both made a significant difference in hardware load during peak hours and alleviated the issues we saw causing Excelsior to lock up at times.” In case you’re wondering, a hefty plurality of characters rolled in the game are on Excelsior – over 40%. The breakdown:
Excelsior: 1,066,011
Everlasting: 579,079
Torchbearer: 403,333
Indomitable: 327,076
Reunion: 282,804
Finally, we asked for character stats, expecting nothing, but the team was able to offer a full count of active archetypes from the last 90 days (they might do one for powersets on the forums in the future!). Unsurprisingly, Brutes and then Blasters lead the other ATs by a fair margin. Dominators have come up in the world lately, too!
Brute: 45,266
Blaster: 41,787
Tanker: 30,547
Mastermind: 30,096
Scrapper: 29,662
Controller: 27,149
Corruptor: 22,454
Dominator: 21,294
Sentinel: 20,341
Defender: 20,006
Stalker: 15,033
Arachnos Soldier: 4,957
Peacebringer: 4,353
Arachnos Widow: 4,118
Warshade: 3,414
Thanks for chatting with us, HC!
