If you can stretch your mind back into the long, long ago of 2021, back when the open revival of City of Heroes was barely two years old, you might remember that in the mosh pit of rogue servers for the game there was one called Sanctuary. As we noted, it was a pretty creative take on the original game, with new powersets and archetypes (clockwork-themed Masterminds! water melee powersets!). But unfortunately, it was taken out in some sort of nasty hack and closed down indefinitely. According to the server operator, the brute-force hack led the server providers to shut him down; at the time, he said he had been considering opening a new server called Ascension anyway.
Three years later, he’s trying again.
“I am making this post to let you all know that I am going to be reviving my old server Sanctuary,” HixxyDubz wrote on Reddit. “Recently my Samsung 4TB SSD had died and I had lost a lot of data, luckily the server data was backed up on a separate hard drive and it got me thinking about running a server again despite all the issues that plagued the last one. This is a small personal pet project of mine and something for me to do as I feel the last time I never got the chance to really push the content I truly wanted on there.”
Apparently, he’s also looking for people with “experience in running, binning and setting up a server” as well as “Discord moderators, in-game moderators and event planners,” which is… a lot of people!
The Reddit thread teases a new Starship Commander mastermind powerset, while the Discord has even grander plans, including a Magnetic Blast blaster, Chaos Blast blaster, Commander Pool for masterminds, a “massive” Warshade revamp, something called “artifacts of power,” and “changes and updates to the pool powers to make them more potent and appealing in their choices to builds such as an Inherent Hasten and no crashes on the shield powers.” The server will be free with no paid options and no donations accepted, though we don’t have an ETA just yet.
We note here that Sanctuary, like Rebirth (which we covered earlier this week) are not party to the license agreement between NCsoft and Homecoming; however, thus far it doesn’t seem as if NCsoft is inclined to hassle the smaller servers as long as they aren’t bringing harm to the game’s image, so we’re assuming these will continue to be alternatives to the big HC servers.
