NCSOFT & Homecoming License Announcement

[Crystal Dragon]

4 hours ago, Lakitty said:

I am not 100% certain but I Do think a bit of gaming history have been made here.. AS fare I remember this is actually the first time a PRIVATE server for any MMO have gotten the Official blue stamp of an IP owner so yeah. GOOD JOB!! And Congratulation! 🙂

Second time actually, Project 1999 for Everquest received the grace as well from the original IP holder too. But yes, this is gaming history happening, right here, in our little home away from home. ❤️

[Hyperstrike]

4 hours ago, Jimmy said:

 

Just so you know, I'm keeping a list.

But are you checking it twice?

[Marathon Man]

3 hours ago, gameboy1234 said:

And Kotaku has an article about the new license.

 

https://kotaku.com/homecoming-city-of-heroes-mmo-fan-server-ncsoft-license-1851141864

 

Massively has also added an article... here you have the link, it's given me a few problems cause it firstly said it looked like spam, guess it solved itself once I added more text

 

https://massivelyop.com/2024/01/05/city-of-heroes-homecoming-talks-funding-the-city-council-and-the-impending-content-drop/

 

Edited January 5 by Marathon Man

[xMidKnightRider]

I was literally talking to a friend the other day about how much I missed CoH and CoV and wished he could have experienced it. I had no idea it was being revived. The work you've all done here is nothing short of amazing and I look forward to experiencing this all over again!

 

Thank you and see you all soon!

[Max Firepower]

3 hours ago, Jimmy said:

 

We couldn't agree on how to best nerf Regen.

 

I kept thinking NCSoft was going to wait, then shut it down... but then I realized... they could have agreed to this 4 years ago, and done it then if that was their sole motive.  I think I'm gonna trust the HC team - people with a sense of humor I can get behind - and just be happy with the result, and congratulate the many people who worked their tails off to make this happen.

 

I'm still (very happily) shocked at how quickly the donation window closes. I'm definitely not the only one who really loves this game.

 

Thank you, HC team.  You're superheroes - even the villainous ones (oops, they made a mistake, or... did they?) - for this effort.

[DoctorDitko]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you just add the HC Launcher to Steam as a non-Steam game and get the side benefits?

 

I would also hope the HC team will put CoH up on Steam as a way of advertising. As I understand it, since it is free to play, no fees would be involved.

[Snow Globe]

Congratulations on the status change!

[Angel Pheonix77]

3 hours ago, jtaega said:

Does this mean we would have access to our old builds from NCSOFT?

 

No, I would say that that information is gone when they server whipped the live servers. Companies don't tend to release that kind of information. 

 

If anyone knows for sure, please correct me if I'm wrong in this.

[AspieAnarchy]

2 hours ago, High_Beam said:

Here's the thing I have been thinking about after the initial news glow.

 

Will it bring new players and thus higher volume to HC.  I have seen scores (as opposed to SCoRE 🙂 ) of web sites announcing this and talking the talk about coming back.  Thus the natural flow of that question would be can the servers handle it.  I have to assume that there will be some more powerful whatever's procured if the number bear a surge in player base (if it happens) and the statements made throughout this seem to corroborate that.

 

But I think what should be most prescient to THE PLAYERS already on HC is to continue to be a welcoming group.  Sure there may be old players coming back but there will be new players, ones who never played the game on live and those are the ones we need to be extra friendly with.  But there are players in the game and in these forums who often, even if its unintentional come off as being elitist (myself included at times) and while they may well be elite (in play experience or simple time on earth), that means zero to a new player or one that was casual on live.

 

They are going to come in and they will have demands and expectations, a lot of which may have been expressed time and again but to them are new.  I started on HC in Jan of 2020, I know players who have been on longer.  hen there are the OGs of HC before it was HC.  But Now its public for real and there will be at least an initial rush.  CoH players and the fanbase is constantly getting its balls massaged over how welcoming they are but listen to chat and you start to realize that there are a lot of J-O's as well as nice ones.  You cannot dismiss that because it is what is seen at that moment.  These forums . . . time allows for some to think before they speak so there is less bad chatter, but it does show up as well.

 

I'm excited not just for myself but for the possibility of new blood and perhaps new ideas coming in.

 

Yeah, this all worries me, come to think of it; I really don't want the next step to be "history repeats itself in the most miserably predictable ways".

 

Somebody mentioned MYST earlier; PYST, I'm afraid, had a prescient lesson to teach.

 

In my experience, people who accuse others of "elitism", especially in the MMO context where that's really pretty overdramatic to start with, are crybullies - sometimes motivated by badly-handled inferiority complexes, other times by genuine "entitlement"- who DO wind up ruining the game environment.

 

Different things do attract different personalities, there are inevitably limits to who can be satisfied without expense to anyone else, and those limits inevitably lead to "drama" that nice people don't like to deal with, and so relegate to people who aren't as nice, and so on. This is all EXACTLY what has happened before, but for some reason there's been this incredible taboo against acknowledging that the "conservative" (meant literally, without the conventional American politics connotations) faction could possibly have valid points; I've always wanted to attribute this to the fact that the games were owned by profiteering corporations who cared about nothing but next quarter's bottom-line, so I'm really hoping that, since this is a nonprofit run by amateurs (again, meant literally, sans the colloquial connotations that make a good thing sound bad), that will be different this time around.

 

Sorry that this is bigger than it needs to be, but just to (literally) illustrate the point:

 

 

The central problem is groupthink, which social media has 'roided up and, I believe in hindsight, was responsible for the lasting paradigm-shift that changed MMO culture for the dramatically worse starting in 2006. After sticking around World of Warcraft for too long after that (until 2009, in my case) and for a little longer on Live, I never thought I'd come back to MMOs, and I was SO refreshed by how the culture on Homecoming, while still not what it was pre-2006, was far closer to THAT than after. I am now genuinely concerned that it all may happen again.

 

May I be the first to suggest, then, a means of attempting to divert both this and technical problems that would arise from "the rush": A controlled, limited queue (the proper term isn't quite coming to me atm) of new applicants, by no means permanently but maybe for a year or two?

 

Making history, as others have observed is indeed being done here, is normally something done with caution.

Edited January 5 by AspieAnarchy
replaced comic with better version

[Hyperstrike]

26 minutes ago, DoctorDitko said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you just add the HC Launcher to Steam as a non-Steam game and get the side benefits?

 

I would also hope the HC team will put CoH up on Steam as a way of advertising. As I understand it, since it is free to play, no fees would be involved.

Honestly, I have no clue.

Never trusted Windows OR Steam enough to even try it.

And the..."indie" nature of the game after 2012 was enough that I never even wanted to do it.

[Grey-Ghost]

I feel the best way to deal with new people is be as welcoming as possible and model the behavior that we want to see. Yes, there will always be trolls, but by-and-large most of the people on Homecoming are opening and welcoming. I do think that one of our big advantages is that the game skews older. Most of us have been through the MMO-Spam Wars and know we don't want any part of that.

 

Continue to be friendly. Explain things to new people and adhere to the Code of Conduct and I believe things will work out well.

[Fiddleback]

@Jimmy

 

I dunno how I feel about being labelled a Pepperonist. I've never subscribed to the tenets of Pineappleism, but by the same token, the Pepperonican view has never appealed much either. I was always more of a Linguican Orthodox by nature.

[Britannic]

Congratulations Homecoming Team, what a way to start the new year. 😁 🙌

[AspieAnarchy]

4 minutes ago, Fiddleback said:

@Jimmy

 

I dunno how I feel about being labelled a Pepperonist....

 

You want MOOSE-PIZZA, and you know it!!!

 

 

[DoctorDitko]

21 minutes ago, Hyperstrike said:

Never trusted Windows OR Steam enough to even try it.

Wise of you!

 

I run a severely hobbled Windows 10 at home, but at work, Fedora, and the game plays beautifully there. For graphics card tests. On my lunch hour.

My experience with Steam is minimal, mainly to cash in freebie game coupons, and I do what I can to hobble it also.

(I buy my games on GoG, like any right-thinking person.)

[AspieAnarchy]

15 minutes ago, Grey-Ghost said:

Continue to be friendly. Explain things to new people and adhere to the Code of Conduct and I believe things will work out well.

 

Nothing against what you're saying otherwise, BUT it has been pretty well proven to me by this point in my life that those who need/depend on an external code of rules of conduct are themselves exactly the sorts whom you don't want involved in your activity; those communities which took the bold, commonly-denounced (by those who are themselves the problem they fear since they can't fathom anyone else getting along without it) step of telling participants 'we're going to treat you like you're mature, if you're honest with yourself you know right from wrong, Don't Be A Jerk' have always proved to be the friendliest; a built-in benefit was that this rules-averse, individually-empowering policy itself helped scare off those who'd otherwise have become bad actors. I've seen some retract from that stance out of panic into something more litigious, and it accomplished nothing good.

 

Order, I believe, is like an addictive drug that too many people are hooked on from birth (think Star Trek: TNG episode "Symbiosis"), and most of the worst behaviors one sees in the world are analogous to withdrawal; the Code of Conduct's always been there, of course (the game itself being a product of the Internet's 'First High Litigious Era'), I'm just saying why it's a bad idea to overemphasize it.

 

“What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter.”

― Baruch Spinoza

[Doc_Scorpion]

4 hours ago, Jimmy said:

 

Primarily administrative and security related costs, just keeping us above board really. Very boring in reality, and the amounts we're talking are quite minimal and probably wouldn't have even been noticed had we not called them out here (despite the fact we detail all non-security related expenses in the monthly financial breakdowns).

Does anyone other than me actually read those monthly financial statements?

[Crystal Dragon]

Just now, AspieAnarchy said:

 

Nothing against what you're saying otherwise, BUT it has been pretty well proven to me by this point in my life that those who need/depend on an external code of rules of conduct are themselves exactly the sorts whom you don't want involved in your activity; those communities which took the bold, commonly-denounced (by those who are themselves the problem they fear since they can't fathom anyone else getting along without it) step of telling participants 'we're going to treat you like you're mature, if you're honest with yourself you know right from wrong, Don't Be A Jerk' have always proved to be the friendliest; a built-in benefit was that this rules-averse, individually-empowering policy itself helped scare off those who'd otherwise have become bad actors. I've seen some retract from that stance out of panic into something more litigious, and it accomplished nothing good.

 

Order, I believe, is like an addictive drug that too many people are hooked on from birth (think Star Trek: TNG episode "Symbiosis"), and most of the worst behaviors one sees in the world are analogous to withdrawal; the Code of Conduct's always been there, of course (the game itself being a product of the Internet's 'First High Litigious Era'), I'm just saying why it's a bad idea to overemphasize it.

 

“What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter.”

― Baruch Spinoza

As a friend of Grey-Ghost, I'd like to point out that he's not trying to overemphasis on this, only that we do hold true to the code of conduct in many ways and aspects to keep the community both safe, and fun for all that join us. It's not so much order keeping, but rather just saying "Don't be a P---s about the game and the people playing it" sort of mindset.

[Crystal Dragon]

Just now, Doc_Scorpion said:

Does anyone other than me actually read those monthly financial statements?

I do, because I donate from time to time. I like to see where my donations are going to help fund the servers. 🙂

[Grey-Ghost]

Um yep, and don't worry, I didn't take any offense. Some people are jerks and I know this. But in RL I'm a teacher of HS students and I do find that if you treat them like mature adults and let them know what you expect, they generally respond well. I emphasized the Code of Conduct because it is the standard that we have in writing, the rest is a part of social learning. I think that if we act as friendly good examples, that's the response we will get.

 

[JS_1999]

I've never posted before but I can't let this news go by without saying Congratulations and Thank you to the Homecoming team. This news has made my new year. 

[Aracknight]

This is amazing news.

 

Great job team.

[Blackbird71]

30 minutes ago, AspieAnarchy said:

 

 those communities which took the bold, commonly-denounced (by those who are themselves the problem they fear since they can't fathom anyone else getting along without it) step of telling participants 'we're going to treat you like you're mature, if you're honest with yourself you know right from wrong, Don't Be A Jerk' 

 

Conversely I have experienced that those who eschew any sort of rules of behavior and reduce everything to "don't be a jerk" are those most likely to be jerks and to be in need of such rules.  In my life I've only known one person who was an exception to that, which is vastly outweighed by the number of experiences proving the point.

[Riverdusk]

1 hour ago, DoctorDitko said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you just add the HC Launcher to Steam as a non-Steam game and get the side benefits?

 

I would also hope the HC team will put CoH up on Steam as a way of advertising. As I understand it, since it is free to play, no fees would be involved.

 

Yes, you can and I've done so.  Only thing it won't do is track hours played (that I've seen anyway).  Handy for taking screenshots and easily sharing them though.

 

Can also add it in through GoG galaxy and there it will track time played (or time you have the launcher open technically).

 

Personally I think it would be cool for it to have an actual Steam page though.

[DoctorDitko]

2 minutes ago, Riverdusk said:

Only thing it won't do is track hours played (that I've seen anyway)

Have you seen if it enables the Steam Controller?

I assume our own entry would, but someone above was asking.

(And not tracking is a feature! If I kept track of hours played, I'd probably need to increase my medication!)