Jimmy

For this initial testing period I'm not entirely sure. Once we add it in properly it will be persistent. Luna will be back every year :) Reduced XP rates are an interesting idea, we may look into it. For now I'd advise that you selectively disable XP if you think you're going to outlevel content (you can do this in the options window).

These things are on our radar, we don't want to make any hasty changes though. Ambushes, patrols and allies specifically.

If there's enough demand for something like that we might consider it - Rebirth and Reborn are pretty close to Vanilla from my understanding though. For the foreseeable future it'll be up and down as required for specific rounds of testing, and will be wiped regularly. A long-term testing shard may happen in the future but we haven't got any plans right now.

If you have any questions for myself or the rest of the Homecoming team please feel free to post them in this thread. We’re in the process of putting an FAQ together as well, so you may find your question featured there!

Hello Heroes & Villains! It’s been just over a month since our first shard Torchbearer went online, and we wanted to take this opportunity to discuss a couple of frequently-discussed topics and lay out our plans for the future. Firstly, I’d like to open by presenting our mission statement: To break that down: Our prime directive is to keep the servers online and available to everyone. Every single decision we’ve made has been in support of that goal. With that said, I’d now like to rewind a little bit to some controversial events that have taken place over the last few weeks. The biggest concern that’s been directed towards us is our seeming unwillingness to assist other groups in setting up their own servers. This assertion in and of itself isn’t quite fair: We have, in fact, been helping other groups with advice and support - however, we have not directly been sharing any code that’s based off of the original City of Heroes source code. The reason for that is pretty simple: The only legal action NCSoft has taken in relation to City of Heroes’ return is a DMCA claim against the original upload of the i25 binaries (which, for the record, did not come from us). They haven’t touched any of the servers. The conclusion we’ve drawn from this is that at least for the moment, NCSoft do not mind the servers being up, but they do mind code (and other files) being shared. And if we now refer back to our prime directive: Sharing code could have put us, and the Homecoming servers, in the (legal) firing line. Obviously, we did not want this to happen, and so we opted to not directly share any code based off the original source, and instead just provide advice. (As an aside, we have actually released a tool used to monitor server stats under the MIT License. We felt safe doing so because it’s built entirely with original code and does not use any of NCSoft’s intellectual property. The source can be found here, and it is fully compatible with both i24 and i25 servers. For examples, please see our status page here and Victory’s status page here.) Next I’d like to talk about progression, XP boosters and the AE nerfs. To catch everyone up: In i25, Incarnate components can be acquired by earning ‘Veteran Levels’ (levels beyond 50 which do not actually increase the strength of your character, they just provide badges and Incarnate components) and Incarnate XP can be earned from any content - however, normal Incarnate content will also provide the standard Incarnate rewards On the Homecoming servers you are able to select an XP rate between 100% and 200% - however, increasing it above 100% will reduce your influence gain to the same degree (200% XP = 0% inf) On the Homecoming servers XP rewards for non-Dev Choice Architect missions is reduced by 50% (for further context: This is similar to the reduction that was present on live, but by making use of the XP boosters mentioned above you can in fact get a higher XP rate than was present on live) (Another aside before I continue: The AE nerf was originally to reduce the strain on the server as many AE farm maps used mechanics which were incredibly server-intensive, but we have decided to keep the nerf after we saw the other positive effects it produced) The concerns we’ve seen about progression seem to be focused in two key areas: Progression is too easy, nobody will run Incarnate content Stop nerfing AE, let us play the way we want to play I’ll cover both of these concerns together with a simple answer: The above changes are actually intended to allow everyone to play the content they enjoy and still progress at the rate of their choosing. Take AE farms for example: Our goal was to ensure AE farms were roughly as valuable as they were on live as well as ensuring that those who simply wanted to level quickly were not forced to rely on them. Using the boosters you can now participate in a wide variety of content and still level up quickly. We think this has actually been very successful - we still see a small subset of players engaging in AE farms, and those players still enjoy it and find it rewarding, but it is nowhere near as dominant as it was before the adjustment. The way the Incarnate system works follows the same thinking. We don’t want people to be forced to grind through only Incarnate content to unlock those specific rewards, we want players to be able to play the game in the way they choose. Overall the feedback we’ve received regarding these changes has been overwhelmingly positive, and we intend to continue making adjustments to support this philosophy as the player base and economy matures. Now, let’s talk about the future! Firstly we’d just like to say how appreciative we are of the hundreds of messages of support we’ve received, and we’d also like to apologise that we’ve not been able to respond to all of them! One key question that’s been asked in many of these messages is what you can do to support Homecoming. The most immediate thing people ask about is donations. For the foreseeable future we’re going to be sticking to the model we established last month: Opening donations for a short window at the beginning of each month in order to cover the costs for that month only. Earlier this month we opened up for our first donation window and asked for a total of $6313.86, which you guys raised in 19 minutes, which quite frankly was incredible. We were incredibly taken aback by your generosity. We know PayPal isn’t ideal, but for the next couple of months we will be sticking to this method. In the future we hope to move to something more sustainable, such as Patreon, but for the moment we need the ability to cut donations off once we’ve got what we need - and PayPal allows us to do that. The next thing many of you have offered is skills and expertise. Again, we’d like to apologise that we’ve not been able to properly respond to each and every one of you about this, but we hope the following information will suffice! For those of you interested in being GameMasters and/or moderators: We tend to recruit our GMs from those we see being helpful and friendly on our Discord server and in-game, so that’s the best place to start if this is something you’re interested in. For those of you interested in helping with the website: Please go ahead and post in this thread. We are now starting to look at options for expanding the website (and hopefully moving to new forum software), so we’d love to hear what you guys have in mind! For those of you interested in helping with future development of the game: This is where it gets a bit more tricky. As mentioned above, we aren’t able to conduct open source development until we feel we would not be putting the servers in jeopardy by doing so. We are eagerly awaiting the day where we can open up development to everyone who is interested, and in the meantime there’s two things you can do to get ready for this. Firstly, post in this thread if you’re a programmer or this thread if you’re an artist. Secondly, start becoming familiar with OuroDev’s SCoRE (i25) branch, it’s close enough to ours that anything you create should be compatible without too much additional work Which brings us onto the next topic: Future development. We firmly believe that i25 (and by extension, i26) is the future of the game. The changes and content that have been added thus far line up with our mission - to ensure the game feels like home - and for that reason we intend to continue down that path. There are rumours flying around that i25 is a ‘dead end’ and that it cannot be developed further, or that it’s more unstable than i24. Neither of those things could be further from the truth. i25 has, in fact, had years of fixes as well as a range of new content put into it from a very dedicated group of fans. Two examples: Have you tried running the Imperious Task Force recently? Do you remember how laggy the valley of death was before the game shut down? Well, not anymore. There’s a brand new trial, Market Crash, available in Kallisti Wharf. Head on over to Ade Wellington near Wentworth’s with a team of level 40+ Heroes (or Villains) to give it a shot! Plus a very minor bonus mention: You can now change your costume every 15 seconds instead of every 30 seconds! And there’s more to come, with two things on the immediate horizon. First up, a hotly requested QoL feature: numeric power cooldowns. This is something we’ve been testing internally for a couple of days now, and we’re hoping to make it public soon, but in the meantime here’s a sneak peek: The first version of this feature will be coming in the next patch. Initially it will be available by typing “/cooldown_indicator 0/1/2/3" (1 puts the number at the bottom, 2 at the top, 3 in the center, and 0 disables the feature). Once we’ve gathered enough feedback it’ll be added to the options menu. Secondly, we’ve been hard at work rewriting our database architecture for efficiency and performance. The most visible effect of this is to reduce the amount of time you spend waiting for character select to load. In order to test this we will soon be opening up a TEMPORARY shard. This will appear in Tequila as Homecoming (BETA) and will require a new patch. We will be using a complete copy of the existing Homecoming account database, so if you wish to partake please ensure you create your account ASAP - once the copy is made, new accounts will not be able to participate in this test. To begin with, this shard will contain a copy of all characters from one of the existing shards (which one exactly is TBD). Everyone will have access to the /levelupxp command and we’ll also be making everything in the Auction House free in order for you to quickly create new characters and give the new platform a thorough test! PLEASE NOTE: Characters on the beta shard will be wiped after a couple of days. Do not become attached to anything here, for you will be very disappointed when it’s gone. In closing, we’d like to thank all of you, our players, for the faith you’ve placed in us. We want exactly what you want: To bring City of Heroes back to life, and to ensure it stays that way. The future’s bright, and we’re very much looking forward to sharing it all with you. - The Homecoming Team

This topic has been moved to Developer's Corner. [iurl]https://forums.homecomingservers.com/index.php?topic=148.0[/iurl]

Everything has been very stable since the move (aside from the hiccup last night!), so queues haven't been as necessary. We actually hit a new peak player count yesterday!

Just an update on the multiboxing stuff: We no longer have Mastermind-specific restrictions. The other rules still apply. Follow them or be forever snapped out existence.

Hello! We’ve got quite a few things to go over today, but let’s start with the most exciting… Memorial Day Event Memorial Day is upon us, and that seems like a perfect opportunity for us to host our first large-scale event! When? Monday the 27th of May 12:00 - 15:00 Pacific 15:00 - 18:00 Eastern 20:00 - 23:00 UK 21:00 - 00:00 EU Where? Statesman Plaza, Kallisti Wharf, All 5 shards Heroes can access Kallisti Wharf from any monorail station Villains can access Kallisti Wharf via a Smugglers Submarine (from Sharkhead or Grandville) Praetorians cannot access Kallisti Wharf and must make new characters (To clarify: a Praetorian is only locked to Praetoria until level 20, then they become a Hero or Villain and can go to Kallisti Wharf) What? We’re going to start off with a giant costume contest. The winner from each zone instance of Kallisti Wharf will win 100 Reward Merits, be awarded the Fashion Victim badge, and be granted the title ‘May 2019 Costume Contest Runner-Up’ We will then select a grand finalist from each shard from the winners of each zone instance, they will be awarded a further 150 Reward Merits and granted the title ‘May 2019 Costume Contest Finalist’ One super-stylish winner will then be selected from the grand finalist of each shard - that lucky person will win a further 250 Reward Merits, 5 of each Super Pack (total value of 225m inf!) and the title ‘May 2019 Costume Contest Winner’ Please note that one finalist will be selected from each shard regardless of how many players turn up there. We strongly advise you to pop on over to a lower-pop server for this part of the event if you are able! After that, we’re going to be spawning some Giant Monsters, Arch-Villains, and Heroes for you all to fight. We’re doing this for two reasons: [*]It will help us nail down a crash bug some of you have been experiencing in large-scale battles (such as Mothership raids), as our GMs will be running a special debug build which will output crash logs for us to examine [*]It’ll be hella fun And for our grand finale, Rigo has challenged me, Jimmy, to a duel. By popular demand, we will both be creating special-purpose, brokenly overpowered GM characters, and then facing off against each other in the Arena, and Tempest will be livestreaming the match on his channel. We have no idea what will happen. Well, we do know one thing: Rigo is going down. Disclaimer We’ve never tried anything like this before. The zones may crash. Whole shards may crash. We may be forced to call off one (or more) parts of the event due to unforeseen technical issues. This is very much a trial by fire for us as far as running events goes! European Maintenance Window Reunion, the new EU server, has steadily been growing over the past few days as more and more of you migrate over. One key concern we’ve heard is that the maintenance windows aren’t very EU-friendly, so we’re going to be establishing a secondary EU-only maintenance window. The new maintenance windows for Reunion Only are 1am - 3am UTC on Wednesday and Friday morning (Tuesday and Thursday night US time). We will endeavor to keep all Reunion maintenance to this window, but we may still need to take Reunion down during the main maintenance window for certain operations (such as deploying patches). Of course, emergency maintenance can still happen at any time. Community Reps As you’ve probably noticed, our community has grown very large, very quickly. A few weeks ago we initiated a programme to put together a group of Community Reps to help us better represent and communicate with the wider community. These reps will be responsible for being the point of contact for various sub-groups, as well as helping us generally communicate any news and updates. So, without further adieu, it is my pleasure to introduce the team: CR Tempest (RP community rep) CR ArachnosPhobia CR EV (AE community rep) CR Miss CR Arckont (French community rep) CR Banana Man aka Dr. Tomato (PvP community rep) Please give a warm welcome to them all! Name Release Policy With 1000 character slots per shard, we expected you to make a lot of characters, but we’ve been blown away by quite how many… To date, you’ve made a total of 399,501 characters across 64,519 accounts. In fact, one of you has made a total of 277 characters! Now, some of you have voiced concerns that many names are simply being sat on by level 1 characters that’ll never be played again. This is a fair concern, so we are implementing a system that will allow names of unused characters to be released back into circulation for use by new characters. Characters will be flagged as ‘inactive’ when the following time thresholds are met: Level 1-5 characters will be flagged as inactive if they have not been played in the last 30 days Level 6-20 characters will be flagged as inactive if they have not been played in the last 90 days Level 21-49 characters will be flagged as inactive if they have not been played in the last 365 days Level 50 characters will never be flagged as inactive When a character is flagged as inactive they are not immediately renamed. Instead, their name is simply no longer locked. This allows another player to create a character with that name, at which point the original character will be renamed. You can remove the inactive flag on a character at any time simply by logging them in. We will not be activating this policy for at least a two weeks (possibly longer), so if there are any names you don’t want to lose, please ensure you keep the above guidelines in mind! This is a first pass on this policy, and we may modify it at a later date, however we will give at least 30 days notice for any changes related to releasing names. Multiboxing Policy We’d like to set in stone the rules around multiboxing. Primarily, these are focused around ensuring that those who choose to multibox don’t have an overly large impact on other players by over-using server resources. The rules are as follows: [*]You may not multibox on a shard that has more than 1500 players logged in [*]You may not use more than 3 accounts at once [*]You may not use more than one Mastermind at once (We've removed this restriction now, the above two rules still apply!) We advise players that wish to multibox to stay away from Torchbearer and Everlasting, as they frequently go above 1500 players every evening. If you are caught breaking any of the above rules when a shard has between 1500 and 1600 players logged in, you are expected to log off, and if you ignore requests to do so your accounts will receive a 24h ban. If you are caught breaking these rules repeatedly with more than 1600 players logged in, your accounts will receive immediate permanent bans. This may seem harsh, but effectively policing this with a strike policy simply isn’t worth the effort - so if you want to multibox on the Homecoming servers, you need to play by our rules, and you need to take responsibility for monitoring the server population yourself. You can do this both on our website and in the #live-shards channel on our Discord. Please note that this does not impact those of you who simply play together with friends and family on the same network. This only applies to those playing multiple accounts on their own at the same time. And that’s all for today, thanks for sticking with us through that wall of text! Now… Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls. - The Homecoming Team

I don't see why not, but don't complain if you run into technical issues ;)

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Reserved.

Catgirl_Brigade.storyarc

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Put them here please :) I'll set up a RP board now!

Hello! I've just set up a few new boards and moved some relevant topics to them. Reconnect General Guides Suggestions & Feedback Please let me know if I've missed any and I'll move them over!

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