How did you find that CoH was back?

[TheZag]

Several posts from newly returning players got me thinking about how i stumbled into finding City of Heroes was back and i was wondering how others may have found their way here.  I try to spread the word that City of Heroes is up and running but im sure some methods have had more reach than others.  The poll has what i felt are the most common ways to find Homecoming and im not sure if they can be edited so there is a catch all choice.  Vote if you would like to,  you can leave a story too and if something else was how you found Homecoming,  it would be great to hear about it.

 

My story goes - I knew of city of titans and of the glacial pace of development so i would check back every few months to see if the project would ever get launched (i think they are a few years behind at this point).  One of the times i checked on the project,  i decided to do a search on why it was taking so long.  Scrolling through the search results was a snippet of a comment that basically said dont wait for city of titans,  just play city of heroes.  What were they talking about? City of Heroes was gone.  So i searched City of Heroes and pretty quickly found the Homecoming forums.

 

[InvaderStych]

By pure chance.

 

In early March of 2020 I went looking for an image of this scene from the movie Dark City:

 

 

... to post (... for ... um ... obvious reasons...) in a now defunct/replaced private forum run by RL friends and myself.

 

Something about my search terms wound up giving me a link to an article (Massively maybe?) that was about the shutdown of City of Heroes, the S.C.O.R.E. project and various revival servers including Homecoming. Checked out the forums here and a couple of the other active servers. Nothing looked as good as Homecoming so I fired up an account and the rest is proverbial history.

 

Edited June 9 by InvaderStych
typing before coffee is hard

[Veracor]

Pure chance.  I was randomly scrolling through imgur's "user submitted, newest first" out of boredom in February 2019 and saw someone post an image of CoH's login screen.  They were posting about news of the secret server getting found out.

 

I wasn't too into CoH back in the day for a numer of reasons but thought it would be interesting news to follow, if just to see how the situation legally panned out.  Two months later Homecoming launched.

[ZemX]

I'm not entirely sure, but I think I saw it randomly mentioned in a Reddit post or something like that and then did some searches.  Two years late to the party.

[JasperStone]

On a city of Heroes Facebook group.

 

Was back in the game in 15 minutes.

[Fire Chief]

My 25 yr. old son who played with me on live and was only 8 yrs. old then, what was funny was he thought I knew HC had servers and I was already playing but yea it didn't take me long to DL and launch HC.

[ranagrande]

There are many things I love about this game, but one of the biggest draws for me was the endless potential and nigh unlimited supply of player-generated content available via the Mission Architect system.

 

That was what I missed the most after the original servers closed, so I did some extensive searching to see if a similar system existed in any other games.  I ended up with Star Trek Online and its Foundry system.  I made missions, I played missions, it was great.  Then a few years ago, to much outrage and uproar, they removed the Foundry from the game.  I understood why they did it, but it made me sad.

 

So I started looking again to see if there were any other games with a system like that in place.  And that search led me here.

[Luminara]

It was around June, 2019.  I was becoming frustrated with mobile games, the portable HDD with all of my films and television shows had died, I'd read every book I owned, and I didn't have a television or an Internet connection suitable for streaming.  I had jack shit to do in the evenings, essentially, and was bored out of my mind.  I went poking around in the Wayback Machine, looking at the old CoH forums, and decided to see if there were any other archives.  Found the MassivelyOP articles instead.

[Glacier Peak]

I happened to have searched Google for a list of games I used to play as a kid, sort of intending to make a ranking of my favorites. I remember this one, but couldn't remember when I played it. When I put it in the search bar, it showed a thread on either reddit or some forum (pretty sure it was this one) and posters were talking about logging in to the game (or really it was complaining about the queue to log in was so long). 

 

I rolled a character in I think July of 2019? and heard the nostalgic sound of Atlas Park on first login. Good to be back!

[AboveTheChemist]

I honestly don't recall how I found out. It was in late April 2019, and I think Bree had opened but it was (not long) before the current incarnation of the HC servers. I purposefully stayed away for a week or two as I was wrapping up a master's degree and didn't have time for the distraction that I knew CoH would cause. Once my academic responsibilities were fulfilled, though, it was literally game on. I had originally intended to reward myself with a Nintendo Switch and Breath of the Wild once I wrapped up my degree, but those plans were abruptly changed once I learned of Homecoming's existence.

[nihilii]

Serendipitous timing for me. A good friend randomly brought up CoH about 2-3 days before the private server leak happened. Then, I don't even recall if it was him or me, one of us saw that leak as a result. So we hopped in right away on that first public server that got wiped (was that Bree?).

We both love the game but we're also both completely disconnected from any CoH community. We'd reminisce about the game every now and then, but to do that precisely before this happened, and to catch it despite neither of us usually using social media? A stroke of luck. It could have been months or even years before we heard of Homecoming.
 

Edited June 9 by nihilii

[MyriVerse]

I was in the Paragon Chat crowd and knew immediately. I remember the s-show about there being a secret server and how Homecoming spawned from that.

[Spaghetti Betty]

I was told by my dad back in 2019 ((yes, he still plays) yes we do play together sometimes). Unfortunately I was on hard times and without a PC then, so I didn't get to come back until August 2020. Logging in again for the first time was unreal.

[carroto]

4 hours ago, TheZag said:

a comment that basically said dont wait for city of titans,  just play city of heroes.

 

Exactly this.  I might have seen the same comment.

[furniturepolish]

1 hour ago, Spaghetti Betty said:

I was told by my dad back in 2019 ((yes, he still plays) yes we do play together sometimes).

replace "dad" with "mom" and thats how I came back.

[Charming Aloof]

It was in 2020 and I was browsing reddit City of Heroes posts and I found out about the private servers which included Homecoming.

[ZekeStenzland]

I saw something on YouTube as the secret server story was breaking. Couldn’t believe my eyes. Had to wait until I was able to make an account, log in, make a character, and see others in the Atlas Park before I could tell my friends that it was back. Would have been too heartbreaking otherwise. 

[Etched]

My wife set up a facebook page durin live called Slackers (@Slacker was my global), which was a channel i created back in the day to get to know our friends better. So when the game came back we were blasted by messages lettin us know to get back online. Unfortunately I personally was goin through a lot of health problems so it was about 8 months to a year before i could take the courage to create an account. 

 

The rest is history.

 

@Etched

 

My global now was a Toon name of a good friend (@Brickface).

Edited June 10 by Etched

[Greycat]

4 hours ago, furniturepolish said:

replace "dad" with "mom" and thats how I came back.

 

Betty's mom told you?

[furniturepolish]

41 minutes ago, Greycat said:

 

Betty's mom told you?

good grief im no good with the quoting. my mom came back and told me about it, not hers lol.

[Marine X]

I was a Paragon Chat diehard and saw Codewalkers post regarding " The elephant in the Room " , it wasn't long after that I was back.

[Major_Decoy]

Wait... City of Heroes is back? When did this happen? Tell me everything!

[twozerofoxtrot]

I'd been playing in private WoW servers since 2015 and so was in a few mmo pserver subreddits. The massively OP article wafted it's way into my feed from there.

 

I wasn't aware CoH had shut down In 2012. The story about SCoRE was just juicy reading until HC opened. I figured I'd pop in and see what it was like, as my last foray into the Rogue Isles ended in early 2009. 

 

Never expected I'd get as obsessed about it as I am today. 

[MrAxe]

To be more specific about my 'Something else' vote, my wife told me. Can't remember where she heard it. She's on Facebook all the time so maybe there.

[Braddack]

i was scrolling trough my YT Favs and "positive Gamer" had uploaded an Vid with COH is back..... i instant downloaded 😄