Jimmy

Hey folks! Just a few quick updates for you. State of the Servers As of this morning, everything should be running fairly smoothly. We’ve added another two mapservers, for a total of 9. We’ve also capped the concurrent players to 1,500 per shard for the moment, but we will look at slowly increasing this until we start seeing stability issues. We’ve also made a number of other small tweaks, including setting all zones to unload if they are empty. This means you may get an extended loading time if you try to enter a currently-empty zone. Setup & Finances We’ve had a bunch of questions regarding what the current setup is, where it is, and what it’s costing, so in the interest of transparency: 1x Auth Server (4 cores, 8GB RAM) 1x Web Server (4 cores, 8GB RAM) 4x DB Servers (6 cores, 16GB RAM) (One per shard) 5x Big Mapservers (32 cores, 64GB RAM) 4x Small Mapservers (16 cores, 32GB RAM) It’s hosted in Amsterdam, and overall it’s costing around $4,700 per month. Reconnecting The previously-mentioned fix for allowing players to skip the login queue if they disconnect has been improved, and should now work under almost all circumstances. Please let us know if you continue to encounter issues with it. And some quick stats: We’re on 31,500 accounts, 107,183 characters, and we currently have just under 3,000 people online. That’s all for today. Please don’t hit the servers too hard! Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls. - The Homecoming Team

Hey guys! Thanks for the feedback. Your best bet for up-to-date info is the Discord server: https://discord.gg/X4fWUDV (see the server updates channel).

Yup, that's what happened :)

Should be resolved now! Thanks for all the reports everyone.

Hey folks, We’ve got some exciting news about an additional shard, the 15th anniversary of City of Heroes, and some Double XP headed your way. Before we get to that, though, we’ve got more cool stats to share! Peak player count has increased to just over 3,500 Over 22,000 accounts have been created Over 47,000 characters have been made 1,421,429,180 XP has been earned (that’s 38 million XP per hour the last 30 hours!) 1,541,311,910 influence is being held by characters (up just over 1.2B in 30 hours) There are a couple of people who have already reached level 50, that’s real dedication! Here are the origins you all have selected; Magic continues to dominate here: 13,612 Magic 10,174 Mutation 8,668 Natural 7,455 Technology (+1) 7,089 Science (-1) [*]Here’s a rundown of the Archetypes people are playing; Widows still aren’t seeing much love =( : 6,340 Brutes (+1) 6,064 Masterminds (+1) 5,996 Blasters (-2) 5,413 Scrappers 4,177 Controllers 3,765 Tankers 3,296 Defenders 2,920 Corruptors 2,432 Sentinels 2,159 Dominators 1,702 Stalkers 777 Peacebringers 740 Arachnos Soldiers (+1) 709 Warshades (-1) 508 Arachnos Widows The 15th Anniversary: Double XP & Events! In order to help celebrate the Anniversary, double XP will be enabled on Saturday, April 27th and will continue to remain active until 12:00 AM (Midnight) PST on Monday. Update: Unfortunately hosting the costume contests is not an option at this time due to instability. We may decide to try this out again once things are working more smoothly but we cannot make any guarantees at this time. Sorry about that! We are planning to host costume contests at approx. 2 PM PST on Saturday, April 27th, on the Excelsior shard. Because of the amount of players we are expecting to have online over the weekend we cannot make this a guarantee but rest assured that it something that we want to do and will try our hardest to work out. As it currently stands, we plan to host these costume contests in Kings Row at Freedom Plaza (next to Blue Steel). The GMs will be spreading out across the different Kings Row instances to organize and run each costume contest. The winner in each costume contest will be awarded with 10 million influence and a fancy golden title. The three runner-ups will each be awarded 2 million influence and a slightly less fancy golden title. A Second Shard: Excelsior! We have launched second shard named Excelsior! Over the past 48 hours we’ve been closely monitoring the servers, and while we’ve been able to address and resolve some of the problems, we’re at a point where any further improvements we make to Torchbearer will suffer from diminishing returns. We’re hoping that this new shard will help spread the load out a little so that we are able to continue to grow and handle all of the hugs you guys are giving the servers. Here’s some information that we can provide about the shard right now: Global chat and Wentsworth's are shared cross-shard No character transfers will be available at this time, and this is unlikely to happen in the near future You will have the same Global name on both Torchbearer & Excelsior We cannot currently hard-cap a shard’s population. We’re going to try to keep everyone up to date on the population of the shards with the hope that the players will balance out the load between the two Note that a shard with a lower population is going to perform better; this should incentivize playing on the new shard [*]This shard will be accessible in the same manner as Torchbearer. Simply log in with your existing account and it will show up in the list alongside Torchbearer In order to encourage the playerbase to spread across the two servers, the 15th Anniversary double XP buff has been enabled early on Excelsior. You should have the buff as soon as you log into the Excelsior shard. Permanence The question of permanence of the servers and characters is being brought up again since Excelsior’s launch. The statement that we made on this topic yesterday still stands true for both shards; the short answer is that we do not know yet. Our primary long-term goal is still to ensure that the community has a stable server that we can all enjoy together in perpetuity. Right now we cannot say if his server will be that, but we are not closed off to that possibility. If for whatever reason that primary goal requires us to shut this server down or wipe the character database, then we will do that. Outside of fulfilling that goal, we don’t foresee any reason why a character wipe would need to occur. As always… Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls. - The Homecoming Team

Defiant is the best server.

Hey folks! Hope you’ve all been enjoying yourselves thus far, it’s been a pretty incredible 24 hours! Before we get started, we’d like to share a couple of stats. So as of a couple of hours ago: Peak player count was just over 3,300 16,839 accounts have been created 26,262 characters have been made 255,685,139 XP has been earned 293,306,562 influence held by characters The highest level player is Dacaleos, a level 39 Brute Origins: 7,475 Magic 5,647 Mutation 4,712 Natural 4,204 Science 4,136 Technology [*]Archetypes: 3,482 Blasters 3,435 Brutes 3,350 Masterminds 3,123 Scrappers 2,263 Controllers 2,129 Tankers 1,823 Defenders 1,625 Corruptors 1,334 Sentinels 1,212 Dominators 935 Stalkers 436 Peacebringers 401 Warshades 394 Arachnos Soldiers 246 Arachnos Widows The Homecoming Team Who exactly is behind this server has been one of the biggest questions we’ve received. The project is being headed up by Cipher and Rigo, with assistance from Leo. There are several others involved in actually keeping the server online and running, but they all wish to remain behind the scenes at this time. We would like to clarify again, however, that the Homecoming team is not controlled by or affiliated with any current Discord server or The Titan Network. Leandro There have been many questions about Leandro’s involvement with this server. We want to make it clear that Leo is not directly involved in the administration/moderation of the server, he is only providing technical support. Without a lot of hard work from Leo there is no way this server would be online right now - he has been an incredible help to the team. GameMasters We’ve recruited a couple of GameMasters to ensure everyone is able to continue enjoying the game in a clean, respectful, and welcoming environment. What does that mean? Well, we are currently working on both a player and a GameMaster code of conduct, which we will hopefully be able to share with you soon. In the meantime, a general rule of thumb should be “Would I have been able to get away with this on the live server?” If not, then don’t do it! We would like to thank our GM team for all of the work they have put in so far; they have done a fantastic job and we look forward to continuing to work with them. GM ArachnosPhobia GM-Naysmith GM Widower GM Reliquary GM Jimmy GM Bio GM Dredd GM Xellx If you see any of them around, please feel free to say hi! Please be aware that they’re still currently learning how to use their powers, and are awaiting the admins to unlock further powers when everything calms down. If you see anyone else sporting a ‘GM’ name, they are not actual GMs. Please shun them and report them to an online GM. We are working on a solution to allow players to anonymously report false GMs and problematic players. Donations We’re currently investigating how the community is able to financially support this server in a way that doesn’t put us in any legal jeopardy. The server is currently costing around $2100 per month, but there’s a reasonable chance we may have to scale up further for stability. In order to sustain the load from last night without major issues, the cost would likely go up to around $2700 a month. Can’t say much more on this right now though, so stay tuned! Permanence Many of you have been asking how long this server will be around, and if there will be a character wipe at some point. The short answer to both of those questions is that we do not know yet. Our primary long-term goal is to ensure that the community has a stable server that we can all enjoy together in perpetuity. Right now we cannot say if his server will be that, but we are not closed off to that possibility. If for whatever reason that primary goal requires us to shut this server down or wipe the character database, then we will do that. Outside of fulfilling that goal, we don’t foresee any reason why a character wipe would need to occur. Stability The amount of load on the servers means that we’ll probably need to restart the server regularly and sometimes unexpectedly. Crashes and short rollbacks are likely to happen in the event of an unexpected restart or problem. We are actively working to address this but it does take time. In the meantime we will continue to communicate when we’re aware of ongoing problems and impending restarts. Going Forwards We’ll continue to post updates every couple of days until things calm down. We’re going to work on improving our communication channels as well in order to get news and information out to all of you in a much smoother manner. In the meantime… Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls. - The Homecoming Team