macskull

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.

"First one out the gate" is hugely important in situations like this. When tens of thousands of people have had three weeks to start over playing a game most hadn't seen in at least seven years, and they've used those three weeks to reform old friendships, level old characters, and otherwise get established, it's a hard sell to get them to move anywhere else. Homecoming players can move at-will between the HC shards because server transfers are free and they don't really have to start over, but the same isn't true for moving from, say, Homecoming to Rebirth or Thunderspy. Once player momentum like that is established it's next to impossible to stop barring any cataclysmic events. EDIT: Also, man. I would kill for Guardians, but instead we're stuck with... Sentinels. Yay.

The single biggest reason Homecoming has the lion's share of the playerbase is because it was the first server cluster. If Rebirth had a 3-week head start over Homecoming this conversation would be happening on the Rebirth forums. Sure they are, but in order to use them you: Unlock Unai as a contact Do his story arc up to the farm mission of your choice Hope you or someone else doesn't accidentally (or maliciously) complete the mission Get lower rewards for time spent In order to use an AE farm you: Go to almost any zone Start the mission arc of your choosing EDIT: I'm looking through old Massively articles because information on player numbers going back earlier than April 27 of this year is hard to find - apparently HC set a concurrent player record of 7950 players in mid-May 2019, about 3 weeks after the servers spun up. We are seeing peaks of around 1/4 that number on the weekends.

Would likely have the opposite effect.

...which is why I also addressed that concern and included citations from the Homecoming team.

If @Luminara is a staff member they're either doing a great job of keeping it secret or I'm just really dense. Here's your citation. I'll even quote the relevant bit so you don't have to click it: We really didn’t want the Mission Architect to be an environment that encourages farming for XP, Rewards or Badges That took me all of five minutes to find. Even if I couldn't find an explicit statement to that fact, it's implicitly acknowledged by simply looking through the patch notes between I14 and I15 when the vast majority were AE fixes to address various exploits or "get lots of XP at low risk" strategies. If your argument against this is "well that's a dev from live, not Homecoming's stance" here are a couple more sources for you. The Homecoming dev team takes a very "pick and choose" attitude toward the live devs when it comes to changes the HC team wants to make.

I think it's partly a forum thing. Player population is down from the end of last year (hitting 2500 on weekend peaks was routine in November/December and now 2100 on weekends is a high number) but there are still enough players to easily find teams for what you want - on one or two servers. According to my data roughly 3/4 of the entire player base is on Excelsior and Everlasting and none of the other servers peak at much more than 200 players at a time. So there isn't a population problem but the player base is so stratified you get entirely different experiences depending on which server you pick.

Everyone's allowed to have their own opinions, of course, but when you present your opinion as fact that's where your argument starts to break down. "This is just my opinion" and "let's agree to disagree" are just cop-outs when an objectively correct answer exists. Excepting all that, every argument you're making is geared toward players who already play the game, and are therefore not the target audience of this thread's topic - gameplay changes and the community will not attract new players. The only way you will get a non-trivial number of new players is advertising, which Homecoming is not doing. Let's be real here anyways, this game is nearly 20 years old and MMOs don't have the cultural sway they had even ten years ago.

I am confused by the existence of this topic, as Scrapper/Brute/Tanker taunt/confront powers all come with -75% range which essentially forces your target(s) into melee range. Stalkers? Eh, whatever, that AT is probably the least in need of buffs and they have the ability to invisibly delete mobs anyways.

You'll notice I did not say changing the damage formula would be difficult. That part isn't hard at all and it's been done before (for PvP, and look how that one turned out). The nightmare is the follow-on rebalancing of every powerset and enemy group that would be required after such a sweeping change.

The damage formula not taking animation time into account was a pretty big oversight, but that ship sailed a long time ago and rebalancing the entire game around it would be a herculean task with no real benefit. There are some powers which need animation trimming but that's being worked on already. I think "80% of all power sets being a dumpster fire" is extreme hyperbole - there are maybe a dozen sets across all ATs which are objectively bad and even that's probably a high estimate. Perhaps for those players the things they do at level 50 are the journey, and levels 1-49 are just a hurdle to be cleared to get there? I know I personally don't like whiffing, running out of endurance, or waiting on the three attacks I have to recharge.

I'm not your dude, buddy.

Bruh farmers don't use SS and the proposed Rage crash change would have been a buff for PvP. It ended up getting pulled because the powers guy wasn't happy with it.

Custom enhancements would be cool. Also I, uh, think you added an extra letter to "code" there in your last sentence.

Has to do with how enhancement converters work, and how IOs are considered "unique" enhancements by each power. I don't remember the specifics since this discussion was probably two and a half years ago at this point, but when this topic was brought up in a similar thread a dev stepped in and said "we could do it but then you'd only be able to slot one of each type per power."

Points 1 and 2? Nah. Don't strongarm me into playing how you want me to play. The only reason AE XP got reduced to 50% was to take off some of the mapserver load when the game first came back - it was supposed to be a temporary change which ended up being permanent, but other servers running the same codebase as Homecoming still have normal XP in AE. (Those other servers also still have the winter super packs for 10m inf instead of 25m inf, which tells me those sorts of changes are targeted toward curbing certain behavior on HC and the powers that be are now okay with where things are at.) Point 3? Don't particularly care. Veteran levels were added while the game had a substantially smaller population which made running iTrials (and therefore getting incarnate stuff unlocked) near-impossible. Hell, you used to get Empyrean merits for every veteran level which got scaled back to its current implementation. Not having to grind out iTrials to unlock incarnate stuff is A Good Thing since it lets players play how they want. Point 4? If you'll recall, XP boosters used to work exactly as you're describing (except cost scaled by level) but were changed to their current implementation about three weeks after Homecoming was spun up. Even at 10 million inf per booster the cost was trivial - just give your lowbie some inf and the drops you get during that hour will easily make up for what you spent. EDIT: We can come up with all the things we want about ingame issues making players leave, but we are forumites/discordites and represent a small portion of the population. Realistically it's the slow pace of content updates which causes player attrition - and given the dev team is all-volunteer with other things going on in their lives, that isn't going to change. The updates we get are good, obviously, but they don't come often enough to keep players' attention. If the goal is to recruit and bring in new players, there needs to be out-of-game publicity, which the HC team is not doing for reasons known only to them.

Why not a Mind Controller/Dominator? All of Mind's attacks are psionic type only and don't have positional flags so they're useful against both blue and yellow mitos and you bring along mez to help with the green mitos.

You can do this with Mids already, sort of. If you click on the power in question and then the "Enhance" tab on the left side, you can switch between alternate slotting for a power.

This is the correct answer. I'd rather have them non-convertible than unique per power.

This is a game where I can shoot fire out of my palms, throw a ghost shark at someone, encase allies in a block of ice, or surround an opponent with toxic fungal spores. Using "theme" or "it wouldn't work this way in real life" to justify withholding buffs is just lazy. EDIT: Suppose I should point out this isn't really directed at you so much as it is venting my frustrations at the powers guy for using ridiculous arbitrary rules in deciding whether a power is balanced.

Adding damage to Screech would be cool, since Sonic is one of the sets lacking a snipe and never got buffed after the quick snipe change. Honestly though cutting down the animation time on Shout would do wonders for the set.

Granted, it only lasted like a month before it got shot into orbit with extreme prejudice. This game's full of examples of things which were only in the game for a very short period because they were broken - my favorite two examples are the week after I9 where players could slot stealth IOs into auto +movespeed powers which resulted in players not being able to complete escort missions, and the Energy Manipulator stun proc working on friendly targets so you could drive-by toggle drop people with Speed Boost.