Cipher

Sorry about that, missed a permission!

The Archetype forums have been restored and video embed size has been reduced.

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There will be extended maintenance tomorrow (2019-07-23) beginning at some point during our usual window (1200-1400 UTC; 0800 Eastern US time) and lasting for several hours. We will be performing OS updates and other necessary system maintenance. During this time we will also be transitioning to our new forums. When our maintenance window begins, the current forums will be frozen for a few minutes while they are transitioned into a read-only (read: non-persistent) mode and the database migration will be started. During the maintenance, the current forum will remain available and you will be able to post, but registrations (both forum & game) will be closed and new posts during this time will not persist on the new forum. Once maintenance is nearly concluded and the site has been tested, we will fully transition over to the new forums. Thank you for continuing to support us; we hope that everyone enjoys the new forums! - The Homecoming Team

Logitech G-Pro Wireless - it's expensive and quite a few of them have problems (I had to RMA 3 of them to get one without the double click issue) but when you get a good one, there's nothing better. It's light, wireless, runs for a week of very active use without charging, and the sensor is great.

Hey everybody! Here is an update of our current finances, including a log of expenses over the last month and a list of expenses that we expect for July. Earlier this month our host consolidated all of our bills into one large invoice without warning which resulted in us being charged a lot earlier than we expected to this month and us being put quite far into the negative. Because of this a large part of this donation window will be used to recoup the negative balance and refill the contingency fund, and we will also be moving our donation windows to be the last Saturday of each month, rather than the first, starting at the end of this month. As explained last month, we are still working towards becoming a fully charitable non-profit. The next move we need to take to achieve this is to file to open the NPO and file for 501(c)(3) status. We’re still working out some of the details and legalities, but we’re actively working towards it! Last Month Breakdown Last month we accepted $7,629.99 in donations after PayPal fees. Here’s a breakdown of where the funds were used (in no particular order): As detailed in our post last month, we needed to expand a little - so here’s exactly what we got: 1 Advance-4 server (CA) for $377.99 (Invoice) Development & Beta servers Datacenter license for Hyper-V flexibility 1 Advance-3 server (CA) for $213.99 (Invoice) Central services, deployments, backup worker Central services, deployments, backup worker 1 STOR-2 server (DE) for $188.99 (Invoice) Central database for EU and primary in-OVH backup target for all servers. Here’s a list of other one-off and new expenses from the past month: We purchased some additional IP addresses for two of the servers, costing $36.00 in total (Invoice 1, Invoice 2). We purchased Invision Community w/ the IP.Commerce module for the embedded support system, costing $400.00 in total (Invoices). We’re still working on getting the new forums ready! We moved to Atlassian Jira Cloud for task management, costing $10.00. This will be a recurring fee. We started using Google’s G Suite for email, collaboration, and as an additional off-site backup location. The bill for the past month was $51.20. After adding the cost of licenses, last month’s one-off and new expenses came out to $1,536.97. As mentioned above our host decided to consolidate our billing without warning, so the bills for our existing infrastructure are a little weird this time around. You’ll see in the invoices that all of the servers charged from June X to the 30th prorata - we did not request this, but our host decided to do it anyway. Here’s a list of servers and their associated invoices from the past month: 1x A1: $60.95 (Invoice) 5x A1 + 2x A2 + 4x A5: $1,237.60 (Invoice where I gave up on redacting hostnames) 2x A5: $378.66 (Invoice) 1x A5: $153.83 (Invoice) This Month The consolidated billing on the first and fourth left us $1,444.37 in the negative after draining the contingency; this will be added to the total for this donation window. Here’s a breakdown of all of our recurring expenses and their associated cost, totalling $4,732.60. Note that all of our servers have been upgraded to the 1gpbs vRack option. We heard gifs were all the rage these days, so here’s a 30 second long gif of our main server invoice totalling $3,678.83. In case the first one wasn’t enough, here’s another one for the second server invoice totalling $683.34. On the 7th, we will be billed for our additional IP addresses, totalling $36.00. On the 10th and 14th, we will be billed for 4 SQL Server 2017 licenses, totalling $257.60. On the 23rd, we will be billed $10.00 for Atlassian Jira Cloud. All of that said; in this donation window we will be looking at $1,747.97 for recurring expenses until the last Saturday of the month and to pay back the negative balance, $1,250.00 to refill the contingency, and $964.00 to file for the NPO and 501(c)(3) status ($600 to the IRS (source) and $364.00 to our registered agent to file to open the NPO). The final total for this donation window is $3,961.97. 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 window’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 🙂 Update: Here's a screenshot of our PayPal transactions from the first of June to the 5th of July. And some further information:

Hopefully you have better luck with this than I have had. I had the same issue with the torrent where the last 0.2% was completely unavailable, leading to only a small percentage of recoverable files (from the tar). The direct download has now failed at 137/219GB 4 times in a row after hours of trying, so it appears there's an issue with the direct download as well. If anyone manages to get the full archive and wants to upload or seed it I can contribute more than just the 1,700 or so files that were recoverable.

Firstly, I'd like to preface this by stating again how appreciative we are for everyone's support - without you, the community, we simply could not continue what we're doing. Donation Window Poll We've been paying attention to the previous donation threads and other communication channels, and one thing we've seen is that people have been wanting to contribute but have felt like they were left out due to us opening donations at seemingly random times at the start of the month. So starting now and going forward, we will be opening a poll for the community to determine what time the donation window will open. This way everyone is aware of exactly when we'll be opening up for donations each month. Our current plan is to open donations at the voted time on the first Saturday of each month. For July, this will be Saturday the 6th. As usual, our donation window will automatically close as soon as the monthly upkeep has been met. Pop Culture Costume Contest Reminder that we're hosting a Pop Culture Costume Content this Saturday (June 29th) at 21:00 UTC in Kallisti Wharf on all shards, so make sure you're getting those costumes ready! There will be rewards consisting of piles of Reward Merits, Fashion Victim badges, and shiny new titles going to the top costumes on each shard. If you would like to see what time 21:00 UTC is for you, you may use this site.

Well this is interesting, thanks! I'll reach out on Discord today/tomorrow (I haven't slept yet :P - Monday the 24th) with some instructions to help gather information to figure this out.

Hey all - if you're still experiencing this problem after the maintenance / server patch that we did on the 20th then please let me know (through Discord - Cipher#0002, through this thread, or by sending me a private message). We're working on ways to diagnose this on the client side and can provide steps to help us gather information. Thanks!

We have been using the [Admin] global broadcast to all shards leading up to maintenance in addition to announcing it the night before + 2 hours before the maintenance window in Discord. Sorry if you've missed these - we'll look at how we can make this more clear for everyone. :)

Welcome to Paragon City (or the Rogue Isles if you're the Villain type)! City of Heroes has always been a welcoming and helpful community so don't be afraid to reach out for help any time. If you run into any problems, please feel free to reach out to any of our Game Masters, preferably using our support system available here. You may also find lots of good information and helpful people over on our Discord available here. Good luck and have fun! :)

I was talking to them for the time just yesterday! It's odd if it's not working now, something we can look into.

We're currently investigating some issues people are having when trying to connect to our servers.

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.