Its so frustrating to see all these cool new costume ideas and implementations only to see that they're Rebirth.

[irishhawk]

I know I can't be alone in that feeling.

Edited October 17, 2021 by irishhawk

[The_Warpact]

Well you can always go over there and play.

[Aurora_Girl]

29 minutes ago, The_Warpact said:

Well you can always go over there and play.

 

34 minutes ago, irishhawk said:

I know I can't be alone in that feeling.

 

Can we have your stuff?

[Glacier Peak]

Just play on both if it is that big a deal to you. I prefer my costume pieces not clipping through my costume or breaking my gameplay experience. And more and more costume pieces get added with every page, so if you have patience it becomes a nice surprise.

[irishhawk]

I stay here due to population.  Rebirth just doesn't seem to have that many players, so this is not me saying how awesome Rebirth is.  This is me wishing some of those more stable cool things were with us.

 

And no you can't have my stuff!  😛

Edited October 18, 2021 by irishhawk

[JnEricsonx]

:::still just happy he can play again::::

[Sovera]

Same, but, it's a package deal. To get the costumes they neglected other areas. We got the other areas here but not the costumes.

 

It's easy to focus on the costumes or power sets the other servers have but not the... well... everything else.

[Ruin Mage]

And its not like we don't get new costume pieces (or other things that x server has). We just don't throw out massive amounts.

[The_Warpact]

The thing you also to have to consider is that low population servers are going to try to "pop" out things as an immediate response to try to garner more peeps. The more popular items..new shiny ATs, wow we can do that costume pieces, and other such flash things are just that.

I'd rather have a dedicated group take the time to do things right instead of just trying to appease people to get them on that server.

 

Final note

Thats why there has to be a push from the player base to get into beta when stuff needs tested. The more people to help the better, quicker things can be implemented to improve....well everything. 

This in turn allows the player base to have a vested interest in the longevity of the game AND helps them understand the mechanics involved to get out a superior product. 

 

[Mariposa]

I agree I love HC that's why I stay here but having existing assets, maybe from NPC would be awesome.

Always wanted Desdemona and Mother Mayhem hairstyles and clothes, same with Penny, Diabolique, Belladonna and so on.

 

If I have to choose? I rather take new content, TFs, misions and powersets or even new ancillary pools over new costumes.

But lets not fool anyone, we all would love to get new costume pieces added.

 

[Without_Pause]

At some point the people on other servers are going to have to accept coming over to HC and helping out here is far more beneficial for COH in the end.

[Snarky]

I would rather have a sensible dev team and a great community.  If i wanted hot garbage i could always play champions

[macskull]

1 hour ago, Without_Pause said:

At some point the people on other servers are going to have to accept coming over to HC and helping out here is far more beneficial for COH in the end.

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.

[macskull]

Just now, Krimson said:

At this moment...

 

Rebirth: 23 players

Homecoming: 1443 players

 

Hardly what I call competition

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

[Without_Pause]

10 minutes ago, macskull said:

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

There's a difference between running and being competition. I could run a server. It doesn't mean it would be competition. Lets not forget the number of spiritual successors to CoH which got announced and how many look to have panned out.

[macskull]

1 minute ago, Without_Pause said:

There's a difference between running and being competition. I could run a server. It doesn't mean it would be competition. Lets not forget the number of spiritual successors to CoH which got announced and how many look to have panned out.

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.

[Ukase]

Just my opinion, but it makes no difference to me if your avatar is short, fat, male, female, naked or not. I'm zoomed out so far - I honestly can't tell whose costume looks like what. That's why I use the RNG for the costume creator most of the time. Costumes are ...well, meaningless to me. 

Rebirth does a lot of things "right" - as in, in the spirit of the way the old CoH was played. But, I like the improved incarnate system, getting those lumps of Emp merits & threads. I do like the cheaper converters. I also like being able to sell or trade away surplus catalysts. Ya can't do that on rebirth. 

But - hey, nothing says you can't play here and there. 

[Ruin Mage]

You can play on as many servers as you want.
# of players online does not mean the other servers - which get a fraction of what we get on a daily basis - should just shut it down and stop.
What they have does not mean it's as easy as 1-2-3 for it to be over here.

To iterate on the last point;
HC's stance is thorough testing, careful consideration, and keeping to a design philosophy that they've alluded to through prior updates. They would rather things work and work right - as best as it can at the very least. If something isn't working out they scrap it and take it back to the drawing board. See the Dark Melee changes they were doing and kind-of walked back on. Or any other change they walked back on.

Just because one server has it does not exclude it from happening here, but HC will do it on their own time and in their own way if they so desire. Making the 50th thread (I can see that its hard to find these threads as they get buried) on what x server has doesn't do anything positive - in opinion at least. It's the same thing every time - if HC is going to do something like it, they will but at their own style.

Hell, it'd be a balance nightmare but my pipe dream is freeform.

Edited October 18, 2021 by Shadeknight

[Without_Pause]

3 hours ago, macskull said:

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.

To my knowledge HC is the ones with the most influence from actual CoH devs as well. HC has been the most organized of the bunch and have reaped the rewards of it. I honestly wonder if Rebirth or others have even attempted to become official versions like HC has because if not, then I stick by my comment of not being competition.

 

It doesn't matter who came first or not. It is more about doing a good enough job to where your own numbers grow. Again, using CoH successors, City of Titans was to be the most faithful and own player base created one, and yet Ship of Heroes is the one I would put the most money on. It helps that's an actual game development company, but still. People will follow if you do good work. People aren't flocking to Rebirth. An article from April giving no reference to when the writer checked, said there were 25 playing at the time they looked. If it was 100 now, it would feel like they were building something, but they aren't.

[macskull]

1 hour ago, Without_Pause said:

To my knowledge HC is the ones with the most influence from actual CoH devs as well. HC has been the most organized of the bunch and have reaped the rewards of it. I honestly wonder if Rebirth or others have even attempted to become official versions like HC has because if not, then I stick by my comment of not being competition.

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.

 

1 hour ago, Without_Pause said:

It doesn't matter who came first or not. It is more about doing a good enough job to where your own numbers grow.

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.

 

1 hour ago, Without_Pause said:

Again, using CoH successors, City of Titans was to be the most faithful and own player base created one, and yet Ship of Heroes is the one I would put the most money on. It helps that's an actual game development company, but still.

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).

 

1 hour ago, Without_Pause said:

People will follow if you do good work. People aren't flocking to Rebirth. An article from April giving no reference to when the writer checked, said there were 25 playing at the time they looked. If it was 100 now, it would feel like they were building something, but they aren't.

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.

[Without_Pause]

Former devs needed to be involved since code was taken. Organized in the sense they got their stuff out first. Again, being first is a huge advantage, but that doesn't need to be the only way to determine who wins out. If your product is better, then people will go there. Being good isn't being better.

 

My point remains that people who work on those projects could come to HC and make HC better. I looked at a list of other servers and many of them don't have a functioning website and the article was from last year. There are servers for EU and RP players. HC has those, but now imagine if those teams came here and worked on those servers specifically.

 

FYI, I work in software development. I get doing your own thing even if it is on a smaller level versus going to work for the big named company, but this is a pirated software we are talking about. Make the best product you can while you can and pass the drinks around when its over.

 

I don't expect HC will ever be made official. The only way for that to happen would be more people coming here and developing the game and being official would still be a low maybe. You are happy with the many flavors of CoH. I would rather see HC's team double in size as an example and put out twice the content.

[Glacier Peak]

I think I will add some context to @Without_Pause comments and try to steer it back to the topic of the thread.

 

The HC team has been outputting awesome content for the past two years with fewer than a dozen developers (at least according those publicly stated on their Staff page). This makes me think of two things: 1) Wow, that is a really productive and creative bunch of volunteers, and 2) They care enough about this community to make sure the content they create is of the highest standard. That standard is secured through a combination of time and effort on behalf of the developer team, but also from the players in the community who choose to play test, break, and find exploitive or unintended behavior - so that when the goodies hit the shelves (costumes, powersets, missions, etc.), the community can be confident the content is true to the spirit of the game. 

[Cobalt Arachne]

This is the inevitable result of there being different servers. Every server is going to have their own interpretation of the game's future and what they feel City of Heroes should be.

That being said... We've been extremely busy ourselves! We're gearing up to draw back the curtain on the Page 3 update after the Halloween event concludes, which does includes some new costume pieces, as well as a LOT of other content.

It's shaped up to be one of our biggest content drops yet, and it should have something for every type of player.

Stay tuned!

Edited October 19, 2021 by Cobalt Arachne
Edit: Phrasing

[arcane]

6 minutes ago, Cobalt Arachne said:

We're just about ready to draw back the curtain on the Page 3 update shortly after the Halloween event concludes,

Did you just publicly state that we definitely won’t see patch notes until November?

[Cobalt Arachne]

9 minutes ago, arcane said:

Did you just publicly state that we definitely won’t see patch notes until November?

If you're referring specifically to patch notes for the Page 3 content update going to Brainstorm for public testing, Our goal is November.

Today's small patch was a fix for the Sinister Summoner badge art at low graphic settings and reducing Black Whip to an AV class enemy so he is quicker to defeat for players who want to get that badge on large numbers of their characters.

A forum post for today's patch notes should be coming shortly.