Homecoming Server Update (May 20th): What's Next?

[Jimmy]

Hello!

 

We’ve got quite a few things to go over today, but let’s start with the most exciting…

 

Memorial Day Event

Memorial Day is upon us, and that seems like a perfect opportunity for us to host our first large-scale event!

 

When?

Monday the 27th of May

• 12:00 - 15:00 Pacific
  
• 15:00 - 18:00 Eastern
  
• 20:00 - 23:00 UK
  
• 21:00 - 00:00 EU

 

Where?

Statesman Plaza, Kallisti Wharf, All 5 shards

• Heroes can access Kallisti Wharf from any monorail station
  
• Villains can access Kallisti Wharf via a Smugglers Submarine (from Sharkhead or Grandville)
  
• Praetorians cannot access Kallisti Wharf and must make new characters (To clarify: a Praetorian is only locked to Praetoria until level 20, then they become a Hero or Villain and can go to Kallisti Wharf)

 

What?

We’re going to start off with a giant costume contest.

• The winner from each zone instance of Kallisti Wharf will win 100 Reward Merits, be awarded the Fashion Victim badge, and be granted the title ‘May 2019 Costume Contest Runner-Up’
  
• We will then select a grand finalist from each shard from the winners of each zone instance, they will be awarded a further 150 Reward Merits and granted the title ‘May 2019 Costume Contest Finalist’
  
• One super-stylish winner will then be selected from the grand finalist of each shard - that lucky person will win a further 250 Reward Merits, 5 of each Super Pack (total value of 225m inf!) and the title ‘May 2019 Costume Contest Winner’

 

Please note that one finalist will be selected from each shard regardless of how many players turn up there. We strongly advise you to pop on over to a lower-pop server for this part of the event if you are able!

 

After that, we’re going to be spawning some Giant Monsters, Arch-Villains, and Heroes for you all to fight. We’re doing this for two reasons:

[*]It will help us nail down a crash bug some of you have been experiencing in large-scale battles (such as Mothership raids), as our GMs will be running a special debug build which will output crash logs for us to examine

[*]It’ll be hella fun

And for our grand finale, Rigo has challenged me, Jimmy, to a duel. By popular demand, we will both be creating special-purpose, brokenly overpowered GM characters, and then facing off against each other in the Arena, and Tempest will be livestreaming the match on his channel. We have no idea what will happen. Well, we do know one thing: Rigo is going down.

 

Disclaimer

We’ve never tried anything like this before. The zones may crash. Whole shards may crash. We may be forced to call off one (or more) parts of the event due to unforeseen technical issues. This is very much a trial by fire for us as far as running events goes!

 

European Maintenance Window

Reunion, the new EU server, has steadily been growing over the past few days as more and more of you migrate over. One key concern we’ve heard is that the maintenance windows aren’t very EU-friendly, so we’re going to be establishing a secondary EU-only maintenance window.

 

The new maintenance windows for Reunion Only are 1am - 3am UTC on Wednesday and Friday morning (Tuesday and Thursday night US time).

 

We will endeavor to keep all Reunion maintenance to this window, but we may still need to take Reunion down during the main maintenance window for certain operations (such as deploying patches). Of course, emergency maintenance can still happen at any time.

 

Community Reps

As you’ve probably noticed, our community has grown very large, very quickly. A few weeks ago we initiated a programme to put together a group of Community Reps to help us better represent and communicate with the wider community. These reps will be responsible for being the point of contact for various sub-groups, as well as helping us generally communicate any news and updates.

 

So, without further adieu, it is my pleasure to introduce the team:

• CR Tempest (RP community rep)
  
• CR ArachnosPhobia
  
• CR EV (AE community rep)
  
• CR Miss
  
• CR Arckont (French community rep)
  
• CR Banana Man aka Dr. Tomato (PvP community rep)

 

Please give a warm welcome to them all!

 

Name Release Policy

With 1000 character slots per shard, we expected you to make a lot of characters, but we’ve been blown away by quite how many… To date, you’ve made a total of 399,501 characters across 64,519 accounts. In fact, one of you has made a total of 277 characters!

 

Now, some of you have voiced concerns that many names are simply being sat on by level 1 characters that’ll never be played again. This is a fair concern, so we are implementing a system that will allow names of unused characters to be released back into circulation for use by new characters.

 

Characters will be flagged as ‘inactive’ when the following time thresholds are met:

• Level 1-5 characters will be flagged as inactive if they have not been played in the last 30 days
  
• Level 6-20 characters will be flagged as inactive if they have not been played in the last 90 days
  
• Level 21-49 characters will be flagged as inactive if they have not been played in the last 365 days
  
• Level 50 characters will never be flagged as inactive

 

When a character is flagged as inactive they are not immediately renamed. Instead, their name is simply no longer locked. This allows another player to create a character with that name, at which point the original character will be renamed.

 

You can remove the inactive flag on a character at any time simply by logging them in.

 

We will not be activating this policy for at least a two weeks (possibly longer), so if there are any names you don’t want to lose, please ensure you keep the above guidelines in mind!

 

This is a first pass on this policy, and we may modify it at a later date, however we will give at least 30 days notice for any changes related to releasing names.

 

Multiboxing Policy

We’d like to set in stone the rules around multiboxing. Primarily, these are focused around ensuring that those who choose to multibox don’t have an overly large impact on other players by over-using server resources. The rules are as follows:

[*]You may not multibox on a shard that has more than 1500 players logged in

[*]You may not use more than 3 accounts at once

[*]You may not use more than one Mastermind at once (We've removed this restriction now, the above two rules still apply!)

We advise players that wish to multibox to stay away from Torchbearer and Everlasting, as they frequently go above 1500 players every evening.

 

If you are caught breaking any of the above rules when a shard has between 1500 and 1600 players logged in, you are expected to log off, and if you ignore requests to do so your accounts will receive a 24h ban. If you are caught breaking these rules repeatedly with more than 1600 players logged in, your accounts will receive immediate permanent bans.

 

This may seem harsh, but effectively policing this with a strike policy simply isn’t worth the effort - so if you want to multibox on the Homecoming servers, you need to play by our rules, and you need to take responsibility for monitoring the server population yourself. You can do this both on our website and in the #live-shards channel on our Discord.

 

Please note that this does not impact those of you who simply play together with friends and family on the same network. This only applies to those playing multiple accounts on their own at the same time.

 

 

And that’s all for today, thanks for sticking with us through that wall of text!

 

Now… Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls.

 

- The Homecoming Team

[Jaguaratron]

Sounds good

[Oneirohero]

I've never had a problem with finding names for my characters, but at least I know if I get them to Lv50 they'll never get released. If you ever get stuck with names, try using adjectives and words that don't come up in a dictionary too often.

 

As for multi-boxing, well, I've never multi-boxed, and I figure anything that might have been useful to do with it like exchanging items could easily be done via the email system. Folks are free to tell me why multi-boxing is useful, but all I know is I'm glad I don't have to worry about the rules surrounding it.

[Arkterusss]

Seems kind of an oddly Grand Finale that doesn't really involve the community, but other than that, seems cool.

[Noyjitat]

Not a fan of your naming policy, especially if the character HAS to be 50 in order to not be lost. Names were first come first served on live so I don't see why you'd stray from that. That said you need an option besides getting to 50... I'm obviously not going to get every character I have to 50 in a year while also working on incarnates and ios for my existing 50's. Could you maybe settle at 32 or even 38 by the time you have all your primary and secondary powers?

[Abraxus]

If you have recreated a dozen or more characters from the good old days before shutdown, as I have; an easy way to avoid being marked inactive is move your characters around to new Day Job locations weekly.  You get the badge, start earning another, and keep your name.

[magitek2]

Not a fan of your naming policy, especially if the character HAS to be 50 in order to not be lost. Names were first come first served on live so I don't see why you'd stray from that. That said you need an option besides getting to 50... I'm obviously not going to get every character I have to 50 in a year while also working on incarnates and ios for my existing 50's. Could you maybe settle at 32 or even 38 by the time you have all your primary and secondary powers?

 

Logging in for a few seconds resets the timer.

[Zerethon]

Specific question on "Multi boxing"

 

While we don't, there are 2 of us that play in the same home on different accounts, i'm assuming you're using the proper tech to differentiate single-machine MB and household multiple-machine multiple players?

 

I'd hate to see people who aren't multiboxing, but rather have many people in the same house playing be affected, friends of ours have as many as 6 people at the same residence playing on the same shard at once.

[VirtualViolet]

Not a fan of your naming policy, especially if the character HAS to be 50 in order to not be lost. Names were first come first served on live so I don't see why you'd stray from that. That said you need an option besides getting to 50... I'm obviously not going to get every character I have to 50 in a year while also working on incarnates and ios for my existing 50's. Could you maybe settle at 32 or even 38 by the time you have all your primary and secondary powers?

 

An above poster already beat me to it, but I'll elaborate. You don't have to reach level 50 to keep your name, just log in with the character every now and then (timing depending on the level of the character). Even if you never level the character at all, you only need to log in with it once every 30 days to make sure that you keep the name. Level it up to 21, and you only have to log in with it once a year. Seems pretty reasonable to me. And you don't have to keep track of how long it's been, the character select screen does that for you.

[Marshal Valor]

The naming policy is awful. It goes overboard. It's too much. A better solution would be to tie character names to Global Handles and then people can have whatever name they want because there is only one @Marshal Valor. So if I decided to make Steel Phoenix as a character, as far as the character process goes, it is Steel Phoenix@Marshal Valor. Another player could also make Steel Phoenix and his name in the system would be Steel Phoenix@Arbiter. Doing it this gives everyone what they want. I tried so hard back in the day to get the devs to implement this. I urge you to consider it, please. We know how horrible it is with the naming and people not able to get names that are taken. Also even though you let level 50 characters keep their name indefinitely, what will happen then when they never come back? That name is forever lost. FOREVER. It's not hard to get to 50 at all. Please implement this. It would benefit everyone and then everyone could have any name they wanted.

[KillaD915]

 

As for multi-boxing, well, I've never multi-boxed, and I figure anything that might have been useful to do with it like exchanging items could easily be done via the email system. Folks are free to tell me why multi-boxing is useful, but all I know is I'm glad I don't have to worry about the rules surrounding it.

 

i know on the live servers multi-boxing was often used for leveling alts for many, a good portion of who were more concerned with PvP characters. However this was before many of the quality of life improvements that have come up over time. its hardly necessary between early options like DFB, the ease of difficulty changes, and of course options for double XP. That being said if someone would rather farm for influence, recipes, etc. on their 50 and level an alt a the same time its still viable.

 

i know some look at this as an "exploit" but in reality you're doing much more work than if you just sit in another persons farm. not to mention, back when you were paying for 2 accounts, who was to say how you should use them together?

 

outside of farming having an emp on follow with heal other on auto (and occasional buffs), you can make a pretty mean duo alone. equip one of them with teleport and this can also make badge collecting much quicker.

[Dr. Gemini]

I think the naming policy is horrible. It is incredibly short. I wouldn't mind 6 months or a year. For me, I don't play one game exclusively all year. I play a game for a few months, then put it aside for a few months and play something else. On the old game, I had 128 characters, because I like trying different things. I don't play one character constantly, I don't power level, it took me 4 years to get my first 50. Now, I'm being forced to play one character exclusively to 50 or lose my name because I'm not going to be logging on and mucking about with dozens of characters that I would otherwise have, especially when I'm not playing. To me, this basically says "we don't support alititis", which is, frankly, what makes this game so great.

[Kosmic]

The naming policy is awful. It goes overboard. It's too much. A better solution would be to tie character names to Global Handles and then people can have whatever name they want because there is only one @Marshal Valor. So if I decided to make Steel Phoenix as a character, as far as the character process goes, it is Steel Phoenix@Marshal Valor. Another player could also make Steel Phoenix and his name in the system would be Steel Phoenix@Arbiter. Doing it this gives everyone what they want. I tried so hard back in the day to get the devs to implement this. I urge you to consider it, please. We know how horrible it is with the naming and people not able to get names that are taken. Also even though you let level 50 characters keep their name indefinitely, what will happen then when they never come back? That name is forever lost. FOREVER. It's not hard to get to 50 at all. Please implement this. It would benefit everyone and then everyone could have any name they wanted.

 

While yes, that is a great idea, but the game wasn't programmed that way and it would take a great deal of code rewriting to change it.  It is not in the scope currently of what can currently can be done.  The policy isn't overboard and fairly reasonable considering the current situation of things.

[Healix]

To our new Reps

 

    CR Tempest (RP community rep)

    CR ArachnosPhobia

    CR EV (AE community rep)

    CR Miss

    CR Arckont (French community rep)

    CR Banana Man aka Dr. Tomato (PvP community rep)

 

[Marshal Valor]

While yes, that is a great idea, but the game wasn't programmed that way and it would take a great deal of code rewriting to change it.  It is not in the scope currently of what can currently can be done.  The policy isn't overboard and fairly reasonable considering the current situation of things.

 

How do you know? Are you a programmer or a Dev? Alot of things can be done these days with programming. The policy is fair in your opinion. To be honest I dislike it enough to consider leaving and I have heard some other people say the same thing already. I shouldn't have to be punished and have names stolen just because I am too busy to play a "login all my characters" game. That is just unfair.

[WanderingAries]

I wonder how the naming policy is going to affect the login/map servers as people cycle through their dozen(s of) alts to keep them active? I didn't think that 30days was unreasonable, but I'm already at 20 on some of mine due mostly to base editing and not being ingame. O.O

[Waypoint]

The naming policy is awful. It goes overboard. It's too much. A better solution would be to tie character names to Global Handles and then people can have whatever name they want because there is only one @Marshal Valor. So if I decided to make Steel Phoenix as a character, as far as the character process goes, it is Steel Phoenix@Marshal Valor. Another player could also make Steel Phoenix and his name in the system would be Steel Phoenix@Arbiter. Doing it this gives everyone what they want. I tried so hard back in the day to get the devs to implement this. I urge you to consider it, please. We know how horrible it is with the naming and people not able to get names that are taken. Also even though you let level 50 characters keep their name indefinitely, what will happen then when they never come back? That name is forever lost. FOREVER. It's not hard to get to 50 at all. Please implement this. It would benefit everyone and then everyone could have any name they wanted.

 

While yes, that is a great idea, but the game wasn't programmed that way and it would take a great deal of code rewriting to change it.  It is not in the scope currently of what can currently can be done.  The policy isn't overboard and fairly reasonable considering the current situation of things.

 

Not saying you're wrong, but I'd let a GM/CR/Coding Team Member answer that. I think what Marshal Valor suggested is what is in place on Champions Online, if I'm not mistaken.

 

I will say that I do think the window is a little too short, but it's not impossible to get to level 21 to ensure your name for a year, but otherwise it's a good policy to have in place. But for players who do like to take their time getting to Incarnates before they work on someone else, it does suck, especially if the name has sentimental value to them to some degree.

[BOTDuo]

I don’t see the naming policy as a bad thing at all. Get it to 21 and you only have to log it in once a year. Any good DFB team takes about 15 minutes to complete it, and with double experience, it will only take you 5 runs to hit 21. An hour and a half of time for a character you plan to play is not too much to ask. On the other side of that argument, “But I want to stay a lowbie for RP reasons or to play with my friends!” I can only say that you should probably be playing or role playing more than once every 30 days or you’ll fall way behind.

[WanderingAries]

Because I figured it'll come up...

 

For the Multi-boxing, what if you Start playing when load is fine but then it goes beyond the restriction? Are you expected to check constantly?

[Palad1n]

Not a fan of your naming policy, especially if the character HAS to be 50 in order to not be lost. Names were first come first served on live so I don't see why you'd stray from that. That said you need an option besides getting to 50... I'm obviously not going to get every character I have to 50 in a year while also working on incarnates and ios for my existing 50's. Could you maybe settle at 32 or even 38 by the time you have all your primary and secondary powers?

 

You get an entire YEAR of not being required to log in after you reach lvl 21, not sure how much more time you believe anyone needs? o.O 

 

I wish there they would reduce the amount of time as it is very easy to lock up as many names as you want by simply PL characters to 21 within an hour of doing DFB and using the F2P xp boosters. Then you don't have to worry about things for an entire 365 days. This is very generous from the dev team hosting this server.

[Vanden]

I'm gonna echo the sentiment that the name policy is too short. The permanent name lock should kick in much earlier, at the very least.

[ScorpionSovereign]

Bravo on implementing naming policy. It's not fair to park a name on a level 1 toon indefinitely that you're not going to even use. And at level 21+ you get a whole year (plus as long as it takes for someone else to try that name) to decide if you want to keep that name. The current system is more than fair, though I'd even Remove that middle tier, so it's just 30 days, 365 days, and Indefinite for simplicity's sake. It only takes a couple of hours to get to 21 now and if you can't be bothered to put at least that time in to a name then maybe you should just cool it with the altitis.

[KillaD915]

people are really that concerned about a characters name they might play a few times throughout the year, or even worse "eventually."

 

can you really make an argument against someone who will invest in it? i personally would much rather play with Statesman 5 times throughout the week than xx57atesman11xx while someones logging in as Statesman twice a year to RP in atlas. sorry not sorry.

[WanderingAries]

people are really that concerned about a characters name they might play a few times throughout the year, or even worse "eventually."

 

can you really make an argument against someone who will invest in it? i personally would much rather play with Statesman 5 times throughout the week than xx57atesman11xx while someones logging in as Statesman twice a year to RP in atlas. sorry not sorry.

 

Eh, I think it's more about the unknown life things that happen which "may" cause someone to miss the window. People get attached to their Alts big time in CoX. For those with a handful of alts, it's not a big deal. For those who have a *coughs* "mild" case of altitis, then it can be a problem.

 

TBH, I rarely have naming issues even at my initial CC time, but I also don't fear doing things like using non-English variants if something is taken. Heh, I'll actually USE that change to influence the alt's Bio!

[Blue Pulsar]

Not a fan of your naming policy, especially if the character HAS to be 50 in order to not be lost. Names were first come first served on live so I don't see why you'd stray from that. That said you need an option besides getting to 50... I'm obviously not going to get every character I have to 50 in a year while also working on incarnates and ios for my existing 50's. Could you maybe settle at 32 or even 38 by the time you have all your primary and secondary powers?

 

Actually, this is fairly similar to something they did on live. The old devs knew people were hoarding names. In fact, iirc, there were some that sat on names and were trying to sell them... Anyway, there was a period of time when the devs instituted a policy of low-level inactive toons getting their name's unlocked... Not erased, mind you. Just unlocked until they logged in again. ALSO CONSIDER that this was on a server with, what was it... a dozen shards? And now there are people making dozens, if not hundreds of toons on just 5 shards.

 

And as others have said, just log in on a toon if the name is THAT important.