macskull

Ehhh, not exactly. On an M1 Mac the game is being run through at least two layers of translation/emulation so there's a bit of overhead. It'll run though.

Rebirth just did a bunch more asymmetrical costume stuff, specifically how patterns interact with each other, and they don't have all costume pieces unlocked from the get-go like HC does. On the surface it doesn't look any different but it significantly increases the number of costume combinations you can use. Trying to use HC costumes on other servers is not usually going to end well because HC has rewritten a good chunk of the costume-related code and HC's version doesn't always play nice with OuroDev-based servers because those are using the legacy I24 costume code as their base. One of the stated goals of Rebirth's costume changes is to maintain maximum compatibility with other I24-based servers. This is a pretty bad take on it - those are both low-population servers because they didn't spin up until around a month after Homecoming by which point they were never going to pull a significant fraction of players away. You can argue otherwise 'til the end of time but the single biggest motivation for players to stay on Homecoming was players were already established and didn't want to start over again. In the case of Rebirth at least, they've done a pretty good job of making sure everything's relatively true to the way it was at shutdown and have no issues in the "stability, balance, things that actually make games work" department. Thunderspy definitely has more of a "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" vibe though,

Tequila is eventually going to be deprecated and no longer receive manifest updates from Homecoming, at which point you'll no longer be able to connect to the servers and play. At any rate, the current launcher version is a "release" version, though there are still "test" and "MacOS" branches.

The entire reason the other servers exist is fundamental differences in how they think the game should be experienced (veteran levels, incarnate XP/drops everywhere, P2W vendor, XP boosters, etc.). That's not something that can be resolved by something like "hey, come work for us now" unless you want a bunch of different codebases and at that point... why not just keep doing your own thing?

It runs through Wine, which is running through (AFAIK) Rosetta. There are several people on these boards running the game on M1 machines and haven't reported any performance issues.

If there's any influence on any of the current servers from members of the former dev team that wouldn't be public because that sort of thing would probably be pretty bad juju. I don't quite get what you mean by "the most organized" either. I'm also not holding my breath on any of these servers ever being made "official" and honestly I'm hoping that it never happens, because if it did it's more likely than not going to mean any server that isn't Homecoming is going to have to go into hiding, so to speak. Except it does matter. People wanted to play CoH again after seven years - badly - and when the first server was spun up most people stayed there even after other groups started their own simply because they'd already been established for a few weeks. Unfortunately none of the servers (including Homecoming) publish population data but it should be pretty obvious to anyone who's been paying attention the last two and a half years that there aren't nearly as many people on Homecoming as there were in 2019. Is that a problem? No, not really, the population is still plenty large enough. From what I've been able to tell the non-Homecoming server populations have remained relatively steady but they were never that large to begin with. One of these is a game being built from the ground up by a group of people who had never made an MMO before, and the other is 1) built by an established team and 2) reskinned from an existing in-progress game in the aftermath of the CoH shutdown. It's no surprise the latter has a working alpha while the former continues to be vaporware (and I put a good chunk of change into that Kickstarter back in the day). To your first point: yes, this is true. Rebirth does good work. Their updates are well-intentioned and well-tested and their goal is to continue development in the spirit of what they think Paragon Studios would have done. If the roles were reversed and Rebirth had been the first server spun up, Homecoming would be in the situation of having a small population. It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy: players tend to gravitate toward HC not necessarily because of what a given server is doing but rather simply because HC has a larger population. For what it's worth, Rebirth's population tends to fluctuate from the mid 20s to the 70s and occasionally higher during weekends and special events. TL;DR: Other servers do things differently than Homecoming and offer players a choice. Having this choice is good. I'm going to continue to play on Homecoming for various reasons but I do spend some time on the other servers because the stuff they're doing is cool. Pretending the other servers (who, by the way, are also actively developing the game) don't matter because of their small population is counterproductive.

The game's been running on M1 Macs for a while now.

Sorry, I'll clarify. I'm defining "competition" as "if a player has more than a basic knowledge that CoH is playable these days they know the server exists." By my count that's another three or four servers on top of the Homecoming ones. I play almost exclusively on Homecoming and dabble a bit on Rebirth because they do have some pretty cool stuff over there which I hope one day makes its way here, but if you think Homecoming has the lion's share of the population for any reason other than "it was set up by the same people running the 'secret' server and was the first public server out of the gate" you should re-evaluate.

I wasn't aware that player count was the only metric that mattered for whether a server was operating, my bad.

Defenders are fine, Vigilance is fine, Corruptors are fine, Scourge is fine. TL;DR: /jranger

I don't agree - competition is a good thing and it keeps the HC development team from making hare-brained decisions that might drive population elsewhere.

There are a small handful of players who stream but no one with more than a few subs/viewers. Positive Gamer was the only streamer with decent view numbers and streamed on HC until the initial streaming ban but then migrated to other servers and hasn't returned.

Out of curiosity, why pair the Emp with the Brute?

This channel just tells you when an event is starting and stopping. If you've logged in in the middle of an event you'll have no idea there's an event going on unless you happen to be in that zone. EDIT: As far as timing/rotation goes for zone events: Zombie invasions are triggered in a random zone whenever a team completes a KHTF. Rikti invasions are triggered in a random zone whenever a team completes an LGTF. Croatoa event has a 25% chance of triggering every 1-2 hours.

Sure, that reasoning might work if the developers responsible for the change were still working on the project, but... gestures broadly

Playing an MM in zone can get pretty boring because you're not mobile enough to pose any real threat and any player who is competent will just ignore you.

Ah, so a conspiracy involving a development team (well, actually, not a development team, but rather the three development teams of Cryptic, Paragon, and now our current overlords) that had the perfect opportunity to gain popularity by reverting some unpopular nerfs but chose not to. Got it. You know as well as I do that if NPCs were able to complain as loudly and as frequently as players this game would have been nerfed into the ground eons ago. Looking at the history of how travel powers have behaved throughout this game's history you'll find the following: At launch, Fly had a 50% tohit debuff at all times while active, to provide an incentive to turn the power off while in combat. Super Speed and Super Jump did not. In Issue 4, SS and SJ had the 50% tohit debuff while active added to match Fly. In Issue 5, all three travel powers had the tohit debuff removed in exchange for a suppression period whenever activating any power affecting an enemy. This was later adjusted to only occur when casting click powers which affect enemies. TL;DR: Combat penalties for travel powers have existed since the beginning of the game, before PvP was added.

Hurricane, so close enough. The tick rate was specifically adjusted so you couldn't instantly floor someone's range to zero.

If this were the case, they would have rolled back all the nerfs in PvE once it became possible to separate PvE and PvP powers effects, but here we are.

...Because it wasn't introduced as solely a PvP-based change? In this game's entirely history there's only been one nerf to a power or mechanic specifically for PvP reasons.

The issues with Empathy are twofold: Empathy tends to attract players with the "healer" mindset because of its power names and descriptions despite healing being the weakest form of mitigation once you get past the lower levels where players lack key powers and don't have enough slots to go around. If I had a billion inf for every time I'd been on a team with an Empathy player who did things like follow the tank around with Healing Aura on auto I'd have enough inf to fund character builds for the next decade. I have been on teams with Empathy players who played the set well but those are far rarer. Empathy is a victim of "Issue 0 syndrome:" it's been largely unchanged since the beginning resulting in it being outclassed in almost every respect by newer sets. It isn't a bad set on its own merits but most other support sets offer a similar toolkit and more. Fortitude is probably the best power in the set because you can actually keep it on multiple teammates but other than that Adrenalin Boost and the RA's are on a stupid long timer, the rez has no additional effects unlike other sets, and three of the remaining four powers are heals and nothing else. Even Clear Mind is a vanilla mez protection power which lacks the added bonuses other support sets get (slow resistance for Thermal, toxic/cold/slow resist for Poison, KB protection for Kinetics, +rech/+spd for Pain, etc.). If you're on a team where another player has defense buffs (Cold, Time, VEATs, Dark Affinity) you're not getting much mileage out of Fortitude and you lack any of the debuffs those players bring to the table. There is no other support set that completely lacks enemy debuffs (you could argue FF but even that has a bit of soft crowd control). While I won't turn away an Empathy character simply because they're Empathy, all other things being equal if I have a choice between an Emp and anything else I'll pick the latter.

I'm a PvPer too but I also understand that PvP is the only use case where Absorb Pain sees any significant amount of use (to the point where its -heal penalty and duration were reduced in PvP only). Share Pain at least has the nice bonus of giving the caster a damage buff but even with that I don't see it used often. Many PvE Empathy builds will skip AP entirely because it's complete overkill most of the time. EDIT: More on topic... I think Thunderspy overhauled AP to work like the OP describes and it's pretty cool. That being said the set needs more help than just changes to AP.

It's extremely unlikely that you'll ever get more than a teaser or two for upcoming content/changes until it lands on the beta server, because these things can and often do change significantly between what shows up in the first testing builds and what makes it to the beta server. It was the same way with Cryptic and Paragon back on live.

There's a lot more that would need to be changed than your list suggests. It would be a colossal amount of work with no guarantee it would bring in any significant amount of players so it just isn't worth the time to work on. The game has changed so much since Issue 12 that simply rolling back all the I13 PvP changes would result in a pretty broken system. For what it's worth travel suppression and heal decay have been removed (they're still options in arena but are off by default) and a recent patch added in mez protection vice resistance for ally-cast powers (Clear Mind, etc.). Things like wholesale mez system changes and damage scale changes aren't going to happen because every power in the game would need to be changed individually.

The /enterbasefrompasscode changes/LRT rework, travel power rework, and Sorcery rework come to mind as being pretty polarizing. I didn't really have a horse in the race for that last one but at least for the first two the majority of players correctly saw them as buffs after a while. I think some other examples of "things getting tweaked or rolled back" include some Dark Melee and Martial Arts changes and changes to the way the Rage crash works. That being said... the new difficulty stuff is being tested, and it'll get more testing when it shows up on the beta server.