Cipher

Would you mind linking where they have said that it is okay to mirror/scrape the wiki for derivatives? Thanks!

We're currently experiencing an issue with one of the Datacenters we have the manifest server in. As a temporary solution you may try the following: In Tequila, click Options then under Manifests paste "https://forums.homecomingservers.com/update/manifest.xml" (without the quotes) then click Add. Click OK then, in the drop-down below Play, select the new manifest URL. This is a temporary mirror for the manifest while we move it over into our larger network in the BHS datacenter.

Hey everybody! It’s the first of the month so it’s time to talk finances again. I would like to start this post by reiterating how thankful we are for the community’s tremendous support. The last month has been incredible :) Last Month Last month we accepted $6,953.34 in donations after PayPal fees. Here’s a breakdown of where the funds were used (in no particular order, some servers we had to order later in the month to scale up and the DO bill took a while to pay because of PayPal): $3,229.46 to pay our DigitalOcean bill. Unfortunately as many are already aware, PayPal was not being particularly cooperative with us and we had our funds locked for a while. This meant that our DO bill continued to rise very quickly and ate through our contingency fund by the time we were able to migrate to OVH. This left our balance at $3,723.88. $339.00 to pay our cost of incorporation to form the LLC. Our Registered Agent is northwest in Delaware. Because of our situation at the time we needed to expedite the company formation which cost a little extra. Our intention is still to move forward with opening and operating under a non-profit (501c3/4) in the near future but there were a few reasons we decided to open an LLC first (and this was after speaking with a business consultant): it gave us more flexibility to move funds and establish ourselves before operating under an NPO - we did not have the option of funding the NPO’s account ourselves and co-mingling funds under an NPO will cause you to lose all coverage from the corporation should an issue be brought up in court and can cause a lot of other problems. As an SMLLC we were able to move funds (so long as they are tracked very carefully and thoroughly documented) to make sure we kept all of the bills paid - which we had to do multiple times because of PayPal. NPOs take more time to setup than LLCs - the time from submission to formation for our LLC was under 8 hours and we needed the entity up and running within a day due to our situation at the time. We will still be able to move all of Homecoming’s assets, and the LLC itself, under the NPO once we do have it setup. This left our balance at $3,384.88. $3,807.62 to order our servers at OVH. All of our servers were ordered with NVME SSDs and the gigabit vRack upgrade ($23/mo upgrade per server). Our SQL database servers (2) both have Web licenses costing a total of $128.80. Here’s a breakdown of what we have at the moment: 7x Advance-5 (96GB memory, NVME SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $354.99/ea 2x Advance-3 (64GB memory, NVME SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $160.99/ea 2x Advance-2 (64GB memory, NVME SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $126.99/ea 6x Advance-1 (32GB memory, NVME SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $102.99/ea 2x SQL Server 2016 Web license @ $128.80/ea This left our balance at -$422.74. $480.00 to purchase Windows OS licenses. We actually got a fantastic deal on OS licenses that’s saving us a ton of money compared to paying monthly through OVH’s license system. Our servers are using 10x Server 2016 licenses and 6x Server 2012 licenses. This left our balance at -$902.74. $199.99 to purchase a Code Signing Certificate from GoDaddy. We’re still working on getting through the verification process (I’ve reached out to an accountant as we need a letter authored by an accountant or lawyer to continue with the verification process) but we hope to have this ready by next patch. This should help with all of the false antivirus flags that keep happening after every patch. This left our balance at -$1,102.73. This Month Now that that’s out of the way, let’s outline our upcoming and recurring expenses. In addition to our upkeep, we would like to transition to better forum software and add a few additional servers. Here’s what we’re looking at for this month: Recurring (current): OVH: 7x Advance-5 (96GB memory, NVME SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $354.99/ea 2x Advance-3 (64GB memory, NVME SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $160.99/ea 2x Advance-2 (64GB memory, NVME SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $126.99/ea 6x Advance-1 (32GB memory, NVME SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $102.99/ea 2x SQL Server 2016 Web license @ $64.40 ea Total: $3,807.62/mo Expansion OVH: 1x Advance-3 (64GB memory, 2x2TB NVME SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $213.99 (recurring) 1x SQL Server Web license @ $64.40 (recurring) Server 2016 OS license @ $35.00 (one-time) This server will take over central services & deployment duties and will be responsible for making regular full database backups. [*]1x Advance STOR-2 (4x12TB HDDs + 2x240GB SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $188.99 (recurring) 1x SQL Server Web license @ $64.40 (recurring) Server 2016 OS license @ $35.00 (one-time) This server will act as the central database for EU and serve as our primary backup target for all servers. We have other backup sites, but we would also like to have one on our current network. [*]1x Advance-4 (256GB memory, NVME SSDs, 1Gbps vRack) @ $331.99 (recurring) Server 2016 Datacenter OS license @ $60.00 (one-time) This server will host our development servers and the beta mapservers. The Datacenter license is to allow us more flexibility with virtualization through Hyper-V. Miscellaneous We would like to migrate to better forum software. We’re currently looking at Invision Power ($300 + $40 every 6 months) or XenForo ($160). We are going to be using G Suite Basic for email and better collaboration going forward. We’re already heavily using Google services (such as docs) and paying for Business email through IONOS out of pocket. This would amount to around $60/mo. We need to recoup our negative balance of $1,102.73, so this will be tacked onto this month’s expenses. In total we will be looking at $4,671.39 per month for hosting expenses, $60 per month for G Suite, and $430.00 for one-time expenses this month. We also need to recoup our negative balance of $1,102.73 and would like to refill the contingency fund of $1,250.00 (note that once we have our contingency fund we will not have to tack this onto further months unless we actually use the funds).This all totals up to $7,514.12. As of the time of this post our donations will be open again at https://forums.homecomingservers.com/donate/ and will automatically close as soon as this month’s goal is met. Thank you again for your continued support. As always we’ll do our best to ensure that this remains a fun and welcoming community for all :)

During the testing phase it will be a command that you must enter once per client launch. Once it's in full release it'll be in the options menu and persistent like the other settings :) Edit: The setting will actually be persistent for testing but only accessible through the command for now :)

Fortunately we're now able to withdraw funds to a bank account to pay the first few bills that way; nothing on the front of being able to pay using PayPal directly still though.

Hey folks, We have some major news that many of you have been curious about. We’ve been asked time and time again if you’re able to financially contribute to the Homecoming team, and so far the answer has been ‘not yet’ because we wanted to ensure we weren’t putting the server in any unnecessary risk. Today that changes. We’re happy to say that we’ve now set up as an LLC (the first step towards becoming a non-profit) and are in a position to be able to take donations in order to keep the servers online. Going forwards, our plan is to move to a less expensive, long-term hosting solution with OVH. The key reason this solution is less expensive is because it is significantly less flexible, but now that we’ve experimented with what our hardware requirements are and have the server load under control, that is no longer an issue. This initial donation drive will be to cover some one-off costs as well as the first month of hosting at OVH. Once those costs are covered we will close off donations until next month. We’ll continue with this pattern until a longer-term solution is decided upon - likely in the form of a Patreon. For full transparency: The money is being handled by a new legal entity, Homecoming Servers LLC (registered in Delaware, file number 7407345), which was set up today. We are currently in the process of transferring all Homecoming-related assets into this new entity. Our ongoing costs will be roughly as follows: Auth Server 1x A1 @ $102.99 [*]Shard Database Servers 5x A1 @ $102.99 each, $514.95 total [*]Central Database 1x A3 @ 137.99 [*]Mapservers 6x A5 @ $354.99 each, $2129.94 total [*]Services Box 1x A1 @ $102.99 For a total of: $2,988.86 per month before factoring software licenses. Please head on over to this page for more information on OVH’s pricing. In addition, the one-off costs for this month also include: Around $1200 to pay off the remaining bill to Digital Ocean (here’s the bill for May so far), up until this point we’ve paid around $1370 ourselves Around $500 to cover the remaining time we will be spending on Digital Ocean $375 filing costs for setting up Homecoming Servers LLC A $1250 contingency fund to cover any other unexpected costs or to spin up additional hardware if needed Which is an additional $3225, for a total of $6313.86. Lastly, a few quick points: There is absolutely no in-game benefit to donating, and there never will be - the one exception may be that donors get queue priority and/or some kind of forum title, but that is undetermined at this point (and definitely will not be happening for a while - we just want to be fully transparent about our intentions) Homecoming Servers LLC is not currently a non-profit as it’s a multi-month process to set one up, but the eventual goal is to convert it into one (as previously mentioned, the entity was set up today) The primary reason for setting up an LLC is to give us tax protection - if the donations were funneled through an individual, they would be classed as income and as such would be taxable We plan to close donations as soon as the $6613.86 goal is met, and the same process will be repeated for future months until a more permanent solution is worked out (see above) If we receive any money over the goal before we shut donations off, it will be put in reserves for use the next month We will post full receipts of all expenditure at the end of each month If you wish to contribute, please go on over to our new donation page (apologies, it isn’t very pretty yet). We will update this post once the donation goal for the month has been met. The donation target has been met, thank you! Thank you in advance for your support. And as always: Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls. - The Homecoming Team

This is a false positive; these things are common with Norton in particular but is more generally a problem with the way that some AVs work. This happened because we updated the SCORE executable earlier today. Here is a VirusTotal scan of the SCORE.exe pushed out today (feel free to check the hash or re-upload it!). VirusTotal was 0/72 on scans. https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/ea1710e226ec21586bfd62978d34cab7f08b08f9eff177071a30cbad37a66fa9/detection

Well that seems like a good idea; I'll do that shortly. Thanks!

On the homepage of the forums, click "Game Account" above "Announcements". Alternatively, you may click here to go there instead.

Went ahead and fixed the post editor; you should see all of the controls for editing the BBCode now. I will fix the emojis tomorrow. Edit: I had unstickied this as, at least to my knowledge, the download was not cleared by staff to ensure that it was safe for the community to download. I will state now that if you download the file in the post you are doing so at your own risk. It's not that I don't trust you, Philotic, we just cannot support runnable downloads from anyone without first being checked up on by the staff. Hopefully you can understand this :) Nice job on the tool though, that was pretty quick!

We're addressing this problem; the goal is to make sure anyone that just got kicked out is able to get back in without waiting in queue when this happens.

Have you already registered a game account? You can do this by clicking "Game Account" above Announcements on the forums or by using the link below. Link to Game Registration: https://score.savecoh.com/index.php/board,1.0.html

Unfortunately due to unexpected issues and a significantly higher load than we originally anticipated we will not be hosting the costume contest. We might try to do this at some point when we have things working more smoothly but at this time it is not an option. We apologize :(

Hey everyone, sorry about that! The issue should be resolved now. We recommend sticking to what the launcher downloads rather than anything that anyone other than an official member of the team posts. If you download something that we didn't officially support then we cannot guarantee that it is safe. Thanks.

Unfortunately spam is just a thing with most forum software without expensive licenses. We're working to stay on top of it and have a little more help now.

We're currently experiencing technical difficulties from the shear load that is being placed on all of the servers. There are going to be disconnects, lag, and moments where the servers just get completely overwhelmed and have to catch back up. We are looking at options to help resolve some of these performance and stability issues but this does take time. Thank you for your continued support and patience while we work this out.

Quick update to let you all know that we have finished up the maintenance and the servers are now back online. We apologize that it took a little longer than we originally expected, but if you have any trouble getting in then please don't hesitate to let us know through the forums. Thank you for your patience.

Hey everyone, we need to take the servers down for a little while to help address some of the growing pains that we're experiencing. The estimated downtime is between 20 and 30 minutes, but could take as long as an hour. Once we have finished the maintenance, you will need to restart Tequila and CoH completely to log back in. We'll keep you updated if we end up going over our estimated time and when the server is back online. Thanks!

Hey everyone, I wanted to go ahead and make this post to let you guys know where this project is at currently. Firstly, you guys have done a fantastic job of hugging the servers as tight as you possibly could. In the six and a half hours that this server has been opened we've already seen nearly 10,000 account registrations and over 2,200 players in-game concurrently. The servers are holding up pretty well, but there are definitely going to be some growing pains with a community as large and passionate as ours. I would like to thank Leandro for his support with this project, without his help none of this would have been possible right now. Going forward, we would like to communicate with you guys through the official forums until we have worked out something a little more flexible; we understand that the forums are under a lot of load right now and aren't always accessible. We're still working on all of this in the background and we hope to have more information ready for you guys soon. In the mean time, we look forward to seeing you guys in Paragon City once again and hope that you enjoy your time on the server. Thank you again for all of your support.