macskull

Weekends are the peaks. If you look at the graphs on Discord you can see the same thing happen.

"Homecoming is dying." "The servers are empty, no one plays anymore." "It's so hard to find teams even on Excelsior." "The lower-population servers are a ghost town." "Fire Blast is in desparate need of buffs." "Regen is a good set when you use an entire tray of oranges and purples every fight." Have you or a friend heard someone utter those phrases, or ones like them, ingame or on the forums? Or even on Discord? Well, here's some cold hard data. Background: Last March I was curious about player count because it felt like less people were playing, but I had no actual data to back up my feelings. Sure, the HC Discord has player count statistics, but they only go back seven days so they're kind of useless for long-term analysis. I initially started my tracking by manually checking player counts from the server status page at a certain time once a week. This was fine, unless I didn't have an internet connection at 6PM on a Saturday, or I forgot to check, or I forgot to write down the number, or Mercury was in tardigrade, or Corey was in the house, or whatever else the cosmos could dream up to disrupt my plans. Oh, and I was about to drop off the face of the earth for half a year with no way to even get onto the internet, let alone update anything at all, and a tracking system like this that relies on manual labor is definitely not going to work when the person doing that labor isn't around to do it. "Surely there must be a better way," I thought. Turns out, there is. Enter Python and my "the only coding experience I have is a few months of Java 15 years ago and even then I could barely make a functional program" self. Turns out, you don't really have to write your own code from scratch when what you need is 90% complete somewhere else - you just have to find the pieces you want and put them together, then make them work for your specific task. In my case, I wanted a script that would do the following things: Pull the player numbers from the server status page. Put those numbers into a Google Sheets document. Repeat steps 1 and 2 at a certain interval. Use Google Sheets to determine the maximum player count for each server (and total) for a given day. Graph these maximums. Simple, yeah? Not so much. So many headaches. Took me a solid 3 days of tweaking code and tweaking my Sheets document to get things working. Google Sheets is weird about filters and zeroes, so I had to get creative with Google's query language to get the data in a format that would give a user-friendly graph. The result: A 50ish-line Python script which does everything in steps 1 and 2 above, an AWS virtual host which handles running the script every 15 minutes (and hosts everything since my computer is not always online), and a Google Sheets document with... just a few lines of data. Today's the one-year anniversary of when I got the whole thing up and running, so here's a year in review! So, player numbers did what, exactly? This. They did this. (Ignore those weird dips in January and February, the script pulled no data for a week or so for some unknown reason). There are some significant dates for the peaks and valleys: 28 August 2022: Issue 27 Page 4 released. 2378 peak players, almost 200 more than any other day over the past year. 25 December 2022: Christmas. 1450 peak players. Makes sense, right? The release date for Issue 27 Page 5 isn't statistically significant and is buried somewhere in those peaks in mid-October 2022. More macro analysis: player numbers are roughly similar to where they were this time a year ago. They peak in the summer then fall off in November and December. TL;DR: Reports of Homecoming's death are greatly exaggerated. That being said, there is extreme stratification in the server populations. Excelsior tends to have a population greater than the other four servers combined and Indomitable and Reunion really are mostly empty. I suspect there is nothing that can be done about this, but player population and proportional share of server population has remained relatively stable so I suspect we're simply sitting at a baseline. In other words, the people who are still playing the game four years after it came back into the public eye are here to stay, and any large population changes (down or up) aren't going to happen. One more thing: If you want to play around with an interactive version of the graph above, check the links in my signature.

Oddly enough, April 2nd had the highest concurrent peak player count (about 2115) since Halloween. I've got about a year's worth of data now and from what I can see November through January were the slowest months (makes sense, it's the holidays) but other than the weird peak at the beginning of April player numbers have been relatively stable over the past year. I'm assuming that peak was due to the Mapserver event but the weekday player numbers this week aren't anything significantly different than they've been.

No, they're both "Moderate Increased Range." The PvP-specific range bonuses are separate from the non-PvP-specific ones but Experienced Marksman's bonus is active in PvE as well.

The question then becomes: what is "authentic?" The game was constantly changing during its original run. Maybe there's a point in the game's past you could look back at and say "I want to play the game as it was then" but you end up missing out on tons of QoL improvements which came later. For what it's worth, I agree with the other poster in this thread who said that even if the game came back as it was at shutdown with similar player numbers to what Homecoming has, I'd stay here. I don't have the time or energy to deal with the exhausting grind that so many systems in the game had. I think it's also worth pointing out the reason Homecoming started off very differently from the live game is because the code base HC uses had over 6 years of improvements and changes after the live game shut down. Many of those changes were to simply make the game playable with the tiny population which existed while the game was "secret," and the other servers out there working off the I24 codebase are having to find different ways to address those problems - for example, the barely-functional market from the live game is exponentially worse when there are only a few dozen concurrent players most nights. Hopping over to, say, Rebirth and seeing the last 5 sale history for a purple IO go back nine months is disheartening - sure, they've changed merit vendor costs and added new ways to IO your characters, but they still require grind. This is largely because it was the first publicly-accessible server that was stable enough to handle large populations and didn't get nuked from orbit after three days by a scared admin. Homecoming's head start all but ensured it was (and would always be) the server where the vast majority of players ended up. I would have to go digging through my post history to find, but a year or so ago I did some digging because someone insisted this wasn't true, but HC had something like 2 weeks of lead time over any of the other currently-active servers.

WoW is an anomaly in the MMO world and using it as a comparison is going to make anything look bad. But, we'll use your numbers. We'll assume "tens of thousands of players" to mean 50,000 which is probably generous. At its peak WoW had 12 million players. That 50,000 people playing vanilla WoW on private servers is... 0.4% of the maximum player count. That's essentially insignificant.

Some of the changes that have been made were sorely needed (massively underperforming sets, for example). On the other hand, some things could've been left alone. Sure, the devs could focus on adding new content and leaving the core game mostly the same, but that isn't a solution good for the long-term viability of Homecoming. The dev team could spend months developing new content (seriously, the Aeon SF took like six months to go from its initial beta to what we have now), but players will get through it in a couple hours and then move on. You simply can't put out quality content faster than the players can consume it. And then there are the players (like me) who don't give two shits about the new story arcs or task forces or flashback arcs or whatever and are really only around for the gameplay. At any rate, the OG game would have kept evolving as time went on, just like it evolved during its original live run. Would it have evolved along the same lines Homecoming (or any of the other servers) has? No, of course not - but we have no idea where it would have gone because the people who could tell us might have only had just the most basic idea of what the next few issues were going to contain anyways. If you're looking for a game that is unchanged except for the two-or-three-times-a-year addition of a new story arc or two, you're not looking for a game - you're looking for a time capsule.

You're thinking of SEGS, but I think all they've managed to get done in the 10 years since the game originally shut down is getting the tutorial running.

Not really. There have been many systems which were rewritten from the ground up as they were changed and reverting those changes wouldn't be trivial. The original code doesn't exist anymore, unless someone happens to have source code for older versions of the game floating around.

It's what, like 1 or 2% buff/debuff? In an environment where DR already reduces buff/debuff values, they're essentially meaningless.

I'm the exact opposite - with a few exceptions I find little reason to play a Defender over a Corruptor. The higher damage cap is huge, and while it's true Scourge is kinda useless most of the time, it really adds up against hard targets (and honestly that's the only time sustained DPS is relevant since other mobs will die quickly anyways).

It's possible, but to get numbers like that they'd have to siphon off a sizeable chunk of Homecoming's playerbase, and that isn't going to happen. That, or have a huge advertising budget... which also isn't going to happen.

I think the SEGS project is working with an old code base, though I don't remember if it's I4 or I5. They also don't have a playable product yet either.

I'm sorry what

Why not play this one? Sure, the graphics are a bit dated, but there really aren't any others with similar combat mechanics.

Seems so. "They fixed" that in the summer of 2019.

What do you mean, they already fixed the bug that bypassed the -def if you stacked it! /s

Rebirth has weekly PvP events which usually have a dozen or so players attend. It is entirely possible for someone to play on more than one server (raises hand). Rebirth exists because a group of players wanted an experience that was more true to the progression system on the live servers than what I25-based servers have. They're doing their own independent development with that principle in mind, though they've taken steps to reduce the "grind" compared to what it used to be.

Sure is. I'm here for the same reason everyone else is - this is where the people are - though I do use Rebirth as a "vacation home" so to speak since every time I log on my Guardian over there I cry inside because Homecoming is stuck with Sentinels. As to why this is where the people are, that topic's been discussed at length.

The first "competition" (which is an odd way to put it since it's not like the servers are competing against each other at all) used an I25 code base as well, but can you in good faith fault anyone for looking at the huge list of post-shutdown changes and going "woah wait a minute that is very different than what the game used to be and I don't like that?" EDIT: I also did not include in my previous post a discussion on the queue server kerfuffle, which prevented teams from running high-capacity servers unless they had specific configuration information. Since Homecoming basically had that delivered in a gift box it's not hard to see why they might have been at some advantage to begin with, even if someone else had managed to pony up the resources to run a server.

First point: if tens of thousands of players had weeks to establish themselves on a server and another server came along that server would need to have some absolutely knock-your-socks-off features to get a significant number of those players to move. Unfortunately no other server even had the chance to do that since the codebase was in the hands of a single group of people. Most players started on Homecoming because they found it first and then either didn't know or didn't care that other servers existed. Second point: you are correct in that Bree came before Homecoming, but the same people behind HC were the ones behind Bree (for the most part). The individual hosting it may have been different, which is why it shut down when they got spooked by a fake DMCA takedown notice. Here's a rough timeline of how the first month of things went down, for those following along at home. April 15, 2019: news comes out that a "secret" private server exists. April 18: the "I25" code gets dumped into the wild. April 20: the first publicly accessible server (Bree, or "the test server") launches. April 22: Bree is shut down due to fear of a DMCA takedown which turned out to be fake (at this point Bree was the only publicly accessible server). April 24: a new "temporary" server is launched and no characters or accounts from Bree are kept. That "temporary" server's name is... Torchbearer. The server's URL (http://score.savecoh.com) now redirects to the Homecoming forums. Also April 24: the Reddit Discord mentions they are working on releasing an I24 server but as it was not packaged in a ready-to-use format like the I25 files, they haven't been able to launch a server yet. April 26: the team behind Torchbearer renames themselves Homecoming. April 28: Homecoming launches its own Discord server. May 3: the first I24-based test server starts up but is only for private OuroDev testing. May 4: /coxg/ (Thunderspy) launches its I25-based server, with the intention to roll back to an I24-based version once it is ready. Unity also launches an I25-based server around this time, with a maximum capacity of 300 players. May 7: Victory launches as an I25-based server. May 15: the first public I24-based test server launches. May 18: Rebirth launches as the first stable non-I25-based public server. TL;DR: After Bree shut down there were no publicly-accessible servers until Torchbearer, and the next independent server didn't show up until over a week after that. No, I can transfer characters between Everlasting and Excelsior pretty much at will, and I can pull on the resources I've already gained (inf, recipes, enhancements, salvage, etc.) to give me a leg up with any new characters I create on either of those servers. Not only can I not transfer characters between a Homecoming shard and any of the other servers, but none of my resources can be transferred either and I'm starting over from square one.

I suppose I could summarize the whole thing in a series of bullet points: Existence of a "secret" server is made public The powers-that-be behind said server launch a public server, which shuts down within a few days for various reasons The powers-that-be make a second attempt, which is Homecoming All returning players go there because it's the only large-scale option (the software for a DIY server exists but it requires substantial hardware to support more than a handful of players) Some players aren't happy with all the post-shutdown changes and want to start their own server(s) based off the I24 beta code This code is not initially available to the public since it needs to be scrubbed for sensitive information A few groups launch I25-based servers which then roll back to I24-based once that code becomes available In short, yes, it's the first result because it's the most popular - but that's just causing a cyclic effect of more players going there because it's the first one they find, ensuring it stays the most popular. The overall argument I'm making here (and it's the same one I've been making since 2019) is that Homecoming became popular because it was the first and only option, and stayed popular because that's where the players already were.

"The here and now" is because that happened. To be clear, I agree with you that options are good (and I don't understand this wacky "the other servers' devs should start contributing to Homecoming and stop splitting the player base" that some posters here seem to want), but I don't agree that Homecoming has a population orders of magnitude higher than any of the other servers because it is somehow better.

If you do a Google search for "City of Heroes" Homecoming shows up multiple times on the first page alone. There isn't an explicit mention of any other server in the first ten pages of search results. When a player rediscovers the game odds are Homecoming will be the place they end up because it's the one they found first - and if they know the game is back and know there are multiple options, they'll go to Reddit to figure out where they should play and most people will recommend Homecoming on the basis of its population. Players tend to gravitate toward where the others already are - we saw it with the individual shards from the Live servers and we're still seeing it on Homecoming. Homecoming launched on April 24, 2019 and by April 29 there were over 30k registered accounts. Within the first month it was almost 100k. The other servers never stood a chance.

It wasn't them having their act together so much as it was the people who were running the server while it was "secret" for 7 years.