[BLOG] City of Heroes: Paragon Weekly News - Issue 1

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Darsch
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[BLOG] City of Heroes: Paragon Weekly News - Issue 1

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Greetings my fellow Heroes and Villains! The beloved City of Heroes is back with a vengeance! For the past few days I have had the pleasure of playing City of Heroes homecoming, a set of servers currently being hosted privately but open to the public. The game is working great and even has unreleased content that was never seen before, due to the NCSoft shutdown of the game prior to the release of the content.



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So let us go ahead and jump into some crazy stats real quick then we can get into other tidbits of info. 30,000 game accounts have now been created. The shards each have a player cap of 1,500-2,000 players per shard. As of the time of writing this article Over 86,000 characters have been created, with a total of 11,580,007,259 experience earned. Characters are currently holding 13,065,748,305 influence (CoH version of gold) total and 10,000 people just in the Discord!



Character archetype breakdown
11,323 Brutes
10,815 Masterminds
10,785 Blasters
9,466 Scrappers
7,855 Controllers
6,914 Tankers
5,963 Defenders
5,224 Corruptors
4,419 Sentinels
3,918 Dominators
2,982 Stalkers
1,446 Peace bringers
1,328 Arachnos Soldiers
1,304 Warshades
985 Arachnos Widows



As you can see the servers have been crazy busy, those stats were just for torchbearer and excelsior. The homecoming server shards have been so popular the Homecoming team had to set up a login queue to maintain stability. At one point yesterday the CoH Discord had 17,625 users chatting. CoH homecoming is now up to 4 server shards, with a fifth temporary shard that will be spun up and down as needed. Torchbearer, Excelsior, Everlasting and Indomitable are the normal server shards, Halcyon is the temp. Everlasting and Indomitable were just added on April 28th.



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Yesterday the 27th of April, I had the pleasure of making some new friends while playing my widow Ariela on the Excelsior shard and discussing the return of City of Heros. It was clear that many people are thankful the game has returned and the game had a profound impact on them. Here are some direct quotes from the team chat:
Insanguinata: “This game has haunted my dreams for the past 7 years, literally waking up in utter disappointment when I find out it was just a dream that I was playing CoX”
Godfather: “yeah I know that feeling”
Ariela: “I legit cried when I got to log in the other day and play”
Crimson Wolf: “Same”
Godfather: “I stopped playing when they announced it was shutting down. I'm a grown man but I wept like a little kid whose favorite toy was ripped out of his hands by the neighborhood bully. I always had and have fun playing this game, no matter what, and it was like losing a limb, or a loved one. one outlet for creativity gone for no reason. I hated myself later for not playing those last few months, but I really, I'd think about CoH and tear up and have to find some way to stop thinking about it”
A big thank you for allowing me to quote you guys!



In other more sinister CoH news, someone has been going around impersonating Prominent community members and staff asking for donations and talking about a patreon. DO NOT GIVE THESE PEOPLE MONEY! This a scam plain and simple. There is another server not affiliated with homecoming that is also asking for money and does not even have a playable server up yet. I would advise against donating to that as well. The homecoming team is not taking donations or accepting money; they are currently bearing the cost themselves. This is well over $2,000 a month to do this for us. They have also been working tirelessly to make this dream a reality, so cut them some slack when the servers go down for maintenance.



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In more fun news there was a costume contest being held on the homecoming forums. A big congrats goes out to Kenwe, Harvest, and LycraBoy, they won special titles unique to them, 200 reward merits and The Fashion Victim badge. Way to make history as the first place winners of the first Homecoming Costume Contest and the first costume contest held for CoH in over 6 years.



The homecoming team has made 3 types of Super Packs available for purchase at the Auction House. From an official post found here https://score.savecoh.com/index.php/topic,1204.0.html
“The value of each Super Pack is roughly equivalent to 10 Reward Merits & some goodies
Each pack contains 5 things
The prices are likely to increase over time and without notice
The drop tables may also change without notice
It’s possible you may encounter issues, packs and items may disappear before or as you claim them - until this has been tested thoroughly, use them at your own risk as there will be no refunds for lost influence or items
The money spent on these packs is removed from the game, it isn’t going to another player (essentially, this allows us to combat inflation)
Super Pack: Heroes and Villains
Cost: 10 million inf
Contains most of the items listed on this page
Some items (such as the costume pieces) aren’t included as they’re now free
Other items (such as Brainstorm ideas) have been added
Drop rates are generally more generous than they were on live
Super Pack: Rogues and Vigilantes
Cost: 10 million inf
Contains most of the items listed on this page
Some items (such as the costume pieces) aren’t included as they’re now free
Other items (such as Brainstorm ideas) have been added
Drop rates are generally more generous than they were on live
Super Pack: Lords of Winter
Cost: 25 million inf (price will be reduced during the Winter event)
Contains extra-special Winter enhancements
Contains some Winter-event themed goodies (temporary powers, candy canes, etc)
Also contains most of the same filler content as the other two packs”


Also: a bit on Architect Entertainment which is the player made mission content system from the same forum post linked above,
“The AE XP reduction will be remaining in place for the foreseeable future. Soon, however, we will be making a change to allow any arcs flagged as ‘Dev Choice’ to give full XP like any other non-AE mission.

To reiterate, the primary reason for the XP reduction is that the traditional farm maps used by many players put an incredibly high strain on the server’s CPU (this isn’t related to any memory leaks as some have suggested). It was causing everyone to have a degraded experience, which just isn’t fair.

In addition, some of you may have experienced issues editing and updating AE arcs you uploaded in the first week or so of the servers being online. This was caused by the AE databases not being shared by the different shards when we first brought Excelsior online. We’ve since rectified this issue and all new AE arcs are now fully accessible across all shards, but there are some older arcs that have been stuck in limbo.

We’re looking at various options for fixing this and aren’t completely certain on which route we’ll take first, but we would like to request that everyone make frequent offline backups of their AE content for the time being, as we may need to wipe some or all of the AE database in order to fully resolve this issue. If a wipe is required, we will give you a minimum of 3 days notice.”


For the final bit of news this week, you can join me in game on excelsior, my chat handle is @Darsch and I am more than happy to give you an invite to the OFFICIAL Sanitarium.fm Supergroups The Sanitarium on Villain side and Sanitarium.FM Heroes side, where we will have weekly Task force and strike force runs, weekly Hamidon raids, weekly pvp events and regularly scheduled costume contests! We are always accepting new and veteran players alike! If you would like to join us just message me for an invite in game or on Discord or in the comments below.



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You can join us in game by downloading Tequila and selecting SCORE to play! Account Creation
1) Create a Forum account at https://score.savecoh.com/index.php?action=register
2) Create your Game Account. This is the account that you will actually use to log into City of Heroes. To do this, click "Game Account" on the forums after signing into your forum account. You can find this just above the Announcements category. Alternatively, you may use this click: https://score.savecoh.com/index.php/board,1.0.html

Install CoH
1) Download Tequila if you're on Windows from http://patch.savecoh.com/tequila.exe, or Island Rum if you're on Mac OS from http://ir.powermad.net/islandrum-mac.zip.
2) Install the game in whatever directory you want. *For Windows 8 and above, it is important that this is not in your Desktop, Documents, or Downloads folder due to permissions. We recommend installing to C:GamesCity of Heroes. It is also important to make sure Tequila goes into the same location as CoH.
3) Tequila and Island Rum should automagically download the client once you start them, but note that due to server load, your download may be slow.
3A) For faster downloads you may use the magnet link magnet:?xt=urn:btih:FD5ADD155E5FD01D6013B026A8766E56C2841E3D&dn=City%20of%20Heroes to download most of the City of Heroes data.
4) Once Tequila or Island Rum have finished updating, ensure that "SCORE" is selected at the top left and click "Play".



See you in game folks, and check back next week for more news and join us in Discord to chat about the game!
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