Widower

The only thing we summon around here is dancing demons! (Well, also zombies, grave knights and liches, but that's in game. Whole 'nother can of worms.)

Spam? What spam?

Hello Paragon City! We wanted to take a moment to both review our year in 2024, as well as provide a look-ahead to our plans for 2025! The year started out with a bang, having been officially licensed! We also saw the completion of Issue 27, both a new Anniversary Event accompanied with a 20th Anniversary Celebration that we did, and the release of Issue 28, Page 1! That was just our successes! Let's not forget some of the things you (the players) achieved in 2024! 2024 Player Stats: Number of Characters Created in 2024: 574,534 Torchbearer: 68,208 Excelsior: 255,972 Indomitable: 63,394 Everlasting: 120,017 Reunion: 66,943 Powerset & Archetype Data of 2024: Most Popular Archetype of 2024: Brute - 77,367 Blaster - 75,570 Mastermind - 67,112 Least Popular Archetype of 2024: Arachnos Widow - 5,183 Warshade - 5,780 Arachnos Soldier - 7,980 Peacebringer - 8,116 Most Popular Primary of 2024: Mastermind Robotics - 14,547 Mastermind Demon Summoning - 13,221 Mastermind Necromancy - 11,632 Least Popular Primary of 2024: Stalker Stone Melee - 377 Stalker Radiation Melee - 571 Defender Traps - 591 Most Popular Secondaries of 2024: Brute Fiery Aura - 12,721 Mastermind Dark Miasma - 11,681 Blaster Devices - 11,681 Least Popular Secondaries of 2024: Corruptor Sonic Resonance - 770 Stalker Fiery Aura - 777 Stalker Ice Armor - 783 Most Popular Combinations of 2024: Blaster - Fire Blast & Fire Manipulation - 5,205 Mastermind - Necromancy & Dark Miasma - 4,811 Dominator - Arsenal Control & Arsenal Assault - 4,518 Least Popular Combinations of 2024: Defender - Sonic Resonance & Archery - 4 Defender - Trick Arrow & Energy Blast - 6 Tanker - Super Reflexes & Stone Melee - 6 NEW 2024 Powersets: Arsenal Control -10,311 characters made in 2024 Arsenal Assault - 5,631 characters made in 2024 Marine Affinity - 15,127 characters made in 2024 Most Popular Task Force: Positron 1 Task Force - Completed 19,858 times in 2024 Least Popular Task Force: Eden Trial - Completed 909 times in 2024 Most Popular Story Arc: "What Was Lost" by Matthew Habashy - completed 112,892 times in 2024 Least Popular Story Arc: "Light & Darkness" by Abyss - completed 911 times in 2024 Support Tickets Resolved by Game Masters: 12,954 Game Master with highest ticket closure: @GM Crumpet (3,030 Tickets Closed in 2024) 2024 Forum Stats: Total Forum Posts in 2024: 101,569 Total Topics in 2024: 7,469 Highest rated forum users of 2024: Luminara (5,179 posts & +2849 Reputation) Snarky (8,394 posts & +2714 Reputation) Rudra (7,627 posts & +2588 Reputation) Highest rated forum post from 2024: NCSOFT & Homecoming License Announcement (+245) Welcome Home! - An Open Letter from Homecoming (+133) City of Heroes 20th Anniversary! (+97) Number of Kheldians Consumed: Infinite It was certainly an exciting year! While we can't start 2025 in as exciting of a manner like we did last year, we did want to take the opportunity to give you our tentative plans and roadmap for the year ahead! First though, we've had a lot of follow-up questions regarding the redesign of Homecoming's team structure that took place at the beginning of last year, so we wanted to shed some additional light on that. Homecoming Team Structure: You can always reference our Staff Directory for the most up to date listing of our current staff roster! However, the team is broken down into three major groups, which have a subdivision leadership structure within them. It's important to note that every member of our team is a volunteer, driven solely by their passion for the game and dedication to helping the community. From the City Council to the Game Masters and Developers, each individual generously contributes their time and expertise without expecting any compensation in return. We uphold strict protocols to ensure fairness and integrity within our ranks. Access levels are carefully monitored, and measures are in place to prevent any misuse for personal gain. City Council The first is our City Council. This is our group of administrators who oversee the entire Homecoming project, including both the Game Masters and Developer teams. While the team makes decisions collectively, within the ranks of our City Council, some members take on additional leadership roles crucial to the success of our project. @Conviction and @Globetrotter oversee the Game Master team, ensuring that our moderation efforts remain effective and fair. @Faultline provides guidance to our Developer team and supports our Lead Developers in coordinating the City Council's vision for the project. @Number Six spearheads the work on the game's code, expanding the bounds of what's possible in Paragon City. @Telephone and @Michiyo run our infrastructure and server systems, ensuring seamless operation. @Widower (no relation :P) supervises our Discord and Forums and is our community manager, providing community engagement and regular updates to players. @Arcanum serves as our operations manager, supporting both the Game Master and Developer teams in their day to day work. @Cipher is the head of the project. He is the final voice on internal discussion and debates within the council. @Homecoming is our general account we use for non personalized messages. All City Council members have access to post from this account. Game Masters Game Masters uphold the Code of Conduct, ensuring that our streets remain safe from villainous behavior. They moderate our official communication channels (Forums, Discord, and in-game chat channels) and address any concerns or issues that may arise within our community. Within our Game Master team, there are distinct roles that ensure the smooth functioning of our community. Lead Game Masters - Entrusted with the crucial task of collaborating with the City Council to shape moderation policies and guidelines. They oversee the broader operations of the Game Master team. Game Masters - The largely unsung heroes of our team! They handle all of the player tickets (both from in-game and forums) and are tasked with moderating our official channels and enforcing the Code of Conduct. Novice Game Master - You may see this role in our discord from time to time. These are newly onboarded Game Masters who spend time learning from the Game Masters and Lead Game Masters, with limited in-game access levels and moderation tools while they step into the role. @GM Bot - Our robot GM! This bot allows our Game Masters to perform numerous tasks and commands without being logged into the game. It also allows the team to post administrative messages across all shards (i.e. Notifying of our weekly server maintenance). While there may not be a human sitting behind this bot, it still has feelings! Be sure to send it a tell in game saying "Hi!" Developers Behind every thrilling mission and exciting update lies the hard work of our Developers. They're the creative minds drafting new content, enhancing gameplay experiences, and bringing your adventures to life. We internally have a structure of Lead & Senior Developers, who provide support & leadership across various development departments; including Code, Art, Powers, Story & Writing, and more. Together, these teams collaborate (under the guidance of our Lead Developers and City Council) to deliver new content and experiences to the game. @The Curator - Similar to our Homecoming account, this is a general Developer account. Several staff members have access to this account to post things like Patch Notes. It is not monitored by any one individual. Hopefully this provides some invaluable insight into how the team runs behind the scenes and can answer questions we've seen pop up from time to time. If you have any others, please don't hesitate to reach out to either our Game Masters or City Council for additional info! 2025 Development Goals: Now, let's get to the "fun" stuff and take a look at the upcoming calendar year! The team has been hard at work on several projects to make 2025 an exciting year! While we can't disclose all of the details yet, due to the fact it's a volunteer project and people's availabilities fluctuate, as well as the simple fact everyone enjoys a cliff hanger... We did want to share some tentative plans with you! Seasonal Event Updates: In 2025 we will be making some updates (varying in degrees) to all of the seasonal events hosted during the year! First up will be our Spring Fling event, which is set to run tentatively starting February 4th - March 4th. Issue 28, Page 2: We hope to release Page 2 of Issue 28, continuing on the exciting building blocks of Page 1, in Early Spring 2025! Issue 28, Page 3: Assuming everything goes to plan, we look forward to releasing Page 3 by the Fall of 2025! While the main goal for the pages listed above will be to continue the overarching storyline, we also hope to release new powersets, costume pieces, base items, badges, and customization features that allow you to play your character's story the way you want to! As a reminder, we are currently looking for a Tools Developer to assist us with some of these goals! If you're interested in volunteering your time to support the team in this capacity, please submit an application and our team will reach out! We look forward to sharing more with you all Soon™ - in the meantime, here's some in-development images to share with you all 😉. Please keep in mind, as this content is in development; it is not finalized and subject to change. Thanks for reading! We look forward to another heroic year in Paragon City and a less-than-heroic year in the Rogue Isles and Praetoria!

We're working on it, hang tight.

Hello! 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. 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! Questions Which I Anticipate You Will Ask Frequently: Is this the original Victory server from retail CoH? No. Does this mean we can get our characters from retail back? No. We have too many shards! Are there any plans for shard merges? No. 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. Thanks for reading!

Hi everyone, As you know, we began open recruitment for the development team back in January and we've had a lot of awesome people apply already and have made some great additions to the team. Today, however, I am posting to announce that we are looking to recruit for the following specific roles: Tools Developer - Art Pipeline This is someone who has experience working with and supporting the 3d art pipeline (modeling, animation, texturing, etc.) and can lead the charge for creating new tools to bring developers' creations into the game. Ideally this person has: Comfort/Experience with creating plugins for Blender or other 3d authoring software (3DSMax, Maya, Substance, etc.). Knowledge of common 3d asset formats (glTF, FBX, OBJ) and the ability to write tools which process and convert assets between various formats. The ability to read and understand C. Comfort working with git and using Discord to coordinate with the team. Tools Developer - Writing & Content This is someone who has experience creating GUIs to read and manipulate structured DSLs for the creation of powers, story arcs, etc. Ideally this person has: The ability to read and understand C and write maintainable C#. Experience with a C# UI library such as WPF, WinUI, or MAUI. Comfort working with git and using Discord to coordinate with the team. If you're interested in any of these roles then please apply here; we'd love to have a chat and potentially work with you! Thanks!

These are all pretty good questions that illustrate the difficulty of this situation. Homecoming's role (if/when this happens) would be to provide the base item to facilitate these memorials, nothing more. It would be up to the players to recreate the costume or obtain the file from those with access to the deceased's files, add it to their base and determine which one is "official." I also want to caution people that there are significant technical hurdles to be resolved before we could add such a base item because of the way bases are stored, as well as the fear that stuffing a costume file inside a base file might lead to base files getting corrupted. While we'd like to resolve some of those issues, there are no guarantees that they can or will be handled in the near future or at all.

Well, okay, but don't say I didn't warn you. It has been the consensus of the team for a number of years now that additional memorial NPCs, ala Coyote or Ascendant, will not be added. There are a variety of reasons for this; the favoritism angle, the whole complex of questions around verification and privacy and consent, and the very high odds that we will get it wrong in a way that makes everyone feel some combination of bad, sad and mad. The only potential exception would be if someone who worked on the game were to pass away, as we did for GM Cyclone. That said, there are no specific plans at the moment for a memorial wall/plaque somewhere. However, it is something that I personally have idly considered for a while, as have some others. If there is public interest in it as well, perhaps it could be a reality in the future.

Man, you've got an axe to grind! Next you'll probably be blaming Statesman for your ED...

Just a quick update per public request: the exact time we will be activating the system is 9:30 PM Eastern (02:30 UTC). Please plan (or not) accordingly.

You're not forbidden from multiboxing at all during events; we just retain the right to ask you to leave if we determine your activity (or lack thereof, rather) is exploitative.

Hello! It’s been a while, but we’ve got some news for you today! Closed Beta Applications Open As some of you know, there has been a closed testing shard running for a number of years now, but the way to join has always been kind of opaque. We are pleased to announce that as of today, you will be able to apply to join Closed Beta through the account portal. We're looking for applicants who are interested in providing detailed and constructive feedback about features in development. There are no specific requirements for applying, but successful applicants should have a positive history in the community and a passion for City of Heroes™! Name Release Begins November 1st The City Council has decided that we will activate the long-awaited name release policy on November 1st, 2024 at 9:30 PM Eastern Time. As a reminder, the policy is as follows: 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 6-49 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 (with the exception of Temporal Warriors) 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. This flag will be visible on the character select screen. You can remove the inactive flag from a character at any time simply by logging them in. As you are likely aware, the timer has been going since the release of Issue 27, Page 4, so most names should be released immediately. Why are you doing this? In the very early days of the server, back when we didn’t know how long we’d be around, a lot of people made a lot of characters and then abandoned them. There’s no reason to permanently preserve the names of someone who never intends to return to the game. How many names will be freed up? We estimate that 1.6 million names will be eligible for release upon activation, drawing roughly evenly from the 1-5 and 6-49 buckets. This is roughly half the total number of characters. Isn’t there a better solution? We have considered alternate solutions, but the way the servers and databases talk to each other makes those solutions impractical. This solution strikes a balance between preserving character names and freeing up unused names. Will this ever extend to max-level characters? We have no plans to do so. Code of Conduct Updates We’re making some minor updates to our Code of Conduct, mostly relating to multiboxing and AFKing in various zones. In short: We've added clarification on the watermarks for when multiboxing is and isn't okay with regards to shard population. Multiboxing in the Labyrinth of Fog is now explicitly disallowed. GMs may request that you cease multiboxing during events such as the Winter and Halloween events. AFKing or idling in raid zones may result in a GM moving your character(s) out of the zone. Repeated behavior may result in further action, if necessary. Using TFs and AE mode to bypass the AFK logout timer may result in being disconnected by a GM. The intent of this addition is to give GMs the ability to use their judgement and take action if necessary on a case-by-case basis. To put it simply, you're probably fine as long as you're not causing some sort of disruption or using the functionality for some kind of gain. Repeatedly disregarding a GM's warnings may result in further action. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Halloween event will go live today and will run until November 5th. Enjoy Trick-or-Treating! Thanks for reading!

I'm disappointed. I was hoping this would be a guide for how to not make money, but instead it's just another guide on making money. Alas.

If you've never had a moral epiphany after talking to a seagull, you're doing life wrong.