arseovrteakettl

I have mourned the loss of CoX since the NCSoft servers shut down. I have a RL friend who also played, and there has not been a time when we've gotten together, however briefly, that we didn't raise a glass to the memory of CoX. Last week, when I heard of the aptly named Homecoming, I thought it would still be the valiant effort I'd first heard about years ago - a small group of renegade players who somehow back-engineered/hacked/stole CoX assets and recreated the game in a grassroots effort to bring it back to life - or something like that. It did not seem promising, back then. I also tried Champions Online because I love love Cryptic and Statesman despite their betrayal (sob). But it just didn't do it for me. Then someone in another game I was playing - the lovely Secret World Legends - mentioned Homecoming as if there might be some here, here. I checked it out. And I really could not believe my eyes: not only is there CoX, but there are multiple shards as populated as any WoW server, and likely as populated as any original CoX server ever was. Not only that but there are a bazillion very generous QoL and other new things: totally free play with no restrictions, 1000s of alts possible, ability to instantly rename and move between shards in the login screen, free stuff from the P2W vendors, free base editing (!!!!) with a bazillion new items, many new costume choices, new sprints, new ATs, shortcuts like /ah, ability to play the other side via the little bird in Pocket D, and well every day I learn new stuff. And then I learned it's not even a for-profit effort: it's run by volunteers - people who are doing it just for the love of the game. We're all here just for the love of the game. This has accomplished another miracle: it has effectively banished the miasma of discontent that plagues pretty much every other game. There is no one who is supposed to run things better because you're paying for it and they "work for you". If you don't like it, go make your own. Now if only the shards would come back up...

I thought it was just because I've gotten so old in the meantime. Everyone walks faster than me in RL too! But yes I just came back too, and there is a lot of new and great stuff - both QoL and other. There is so much to do in the game now that there's no need to slow us down to keep us from running out of content. I'm loving it.