[BLOG] City of Heroes: Paragon Weekly News - Issue 2

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Darsch
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[BLOG] City of Heroes: Paragon Weekly News - Issue 2

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Greetings my fellow Heroes and Villains! The beloved City of Heroes is back with a vengeance! For the past few weeks 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. So let's carry on with coverage -



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Lots of news to cover this week folks! On the homecoming front we have a server donation and a server migration to a new host, an EU shard and shard rename, a new web based ticket system and server status page, and more! We also have a new challenger in the ring of City of Heroes servers!



First things first, Homecoming is now accepting donations during limited donation windows. They are opening up donations each month until they reach that month’s goal for operation costs. The first month of donations was closed after reaching their goal in 20 minutes. Donations came in so fast that Paypal flagged their account for review! This first round of donations covered some one off costs as well as the first month of hosting at OVH, where the servers are migrated to now. More on that later.



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Now I know in the last issue of Paragon Weekly News I stated they were not accepting donations and I warned people against donating to another group. At the time they were not willing to take donations because they did not want to put any unnecessary risk on the server, and donating to any entity without something to show first is a risky endeavor. It just so happens though that the Homecoming team were also in the process of setting up as a non profit organisation and on may 7th they set up as a LLC (the first step towards becoming a non-profit) and are in a position to be able to take donations in order to keep the servers online. The money is being handled by a new legal entity, Homecoming Servers LLC (registered in Delaware, file number 7407345). The ongoing costs will be roughly as follows:



Auth Server
1x A1 @ $102.99
Shard Database Servers
5x A1 @ $102.99 each, $514.95 total
Central Database
1x A3 @ 137.99
Mapservers
6x A5 @ $354.99 each, $2,129.94 total
Services Box
1x A1 @ $102.99



That is a total of $2,988.86 per month before factoring in software licenses, the one-off costs for the month, and including around $1,200 to pay off the remaining bill to Digital Ocean. Up until this point they have paid around $1,370 themselves, $500 to cover the remaining time spent on Digital Ocean, a $375 filing costs for setting up Homecoming Servers LLC, and a $1,250 contingency fund to cover any other unexpected costs or to spin up additional hardware if needed which equals an additional $3,225, for a grand total of $6,313.86. And they raised it in 20 minutes. Let that sink in.



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A quote from their forums states -
“There is absolutely no in-game benefit to donating, and there never will be - the one exception may be that donors get queue priority and/or some kind of forum title, but that is undetermined at this point (and definitely will not be happening for a while - we just want to be fully transparent about our intentions)”
“Homecoming Servers LLC is not currently a non-profit as it’s a multi-month process to set one up, but the eventual goal is to convert it into one”
“The primary reason for setting up an LLC is to give us tax protection - if the donations were funneled through an individual, they would be classed as income and as such would be taxable”
“We will post full receipts of all expenditure at the end of each month”


This all happened prior to this weeks move of the server shards to OVH, which appears to have gone off without a hitch. I have happily been playing without any issues since the migration completed. The Homecoming team has also set up a ticket system to get help from GMs, and a shiny server status page. This means we can check if the servers are online, how busy they are and what the balance of heroes to villains on each shard at a given time is. You can see the tickets page here and the server status page here.



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With the server migration we now have an EU Shard. 20 server transfer tokens were handed out so people could transfer to the new EU shard, Reunion! (formerly known as halcyon) They have also added custom xp rates as temporary powers on the special P2W vendor where you get your veteran rewards from. These Xp rates increase your xp earned, while decreasing your money looted and vary in rates from 25, 50 to double exp and can be obtained for free in 1 hour increments at 8 hours max. Wealso just got a special announcement on discord at 11:08 pm CST 5-18-2019 from Cipher regarding the server migration,
“The weekend has gone pretty smoothly so far!

We reached our highest ever concurrent player count of 7,950 tonight and found a way to increase CPU power by a considerable amount, which combined with the new server we setup earlier today, should provide a smoother playing experience going forward. As always, we'll still continue to keep an eye on everything.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that multiboxing is prohibited during times when queues are active or servers are entering Overload Protection. To check queue status and overload protection see #status-updates #live-shards #live-graphs

Thanks!”


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And for our last bit of Homecoming news; Tempest is looking to start doing a weekly streamer meet and greet,
“Hey, everyone! I'm about to be going to bed, but I wanted to give you a heads-up to a project I'm planning. No @ 's since this isn't a major server matter. Are you a streamer? Cool! I'm meeting so many of you lately and, honestly, it's really hard to keep up with how many new faces and old at once! So in an effort to try and get a chance to show up and meet and greet with all of you, I'm going to be working on a Streamer Saturday! (Possibly Sunday?) The idea would be that 7 streamers that want to can coordinate a time with me to show up on their teams and in discord for a simultaneous seven-way combined stream! If you want to participate in this streaming simulcast, coordinate in the #streaming where you and others can coordinate who'd like to show up! My hours on Saturday and Sunday vary a tad, so each week I'll pin what hours I should be home and free for such an event, and you can discuss plans and the like. Please keep non-related chatter in the channel to a minimum, is all I ask! Happy Streaming, and goodnight!”


Today has also seen a new City of Heroes server emerge, Rebirth! Rebirth is an issue 24 server.

There are 579 registered accounts holding 1303 characters so far.

You can find out more here I also have a quote from Retched at the CoH discord,
“The server is configured to grant everything it can that was originally microtransaction-only. Anything showing as locked in character creation can be earned in game. The following missing sets cannot be auto granted due to technical issues:
Black Knight
Halloween 2011 bundle
Assorted other Halloween parts (unreleased, likely intended for a 2012 bundle)

The following sets are not granted automatically due to being awarded via Paragon Reward Tokens. What to do about these is TBD.
Samurai armor
Tech sleek armor
Boxing set
Mecha armor
Tech Knight set
Fashion Boots/Awakened Gloves

A few individual pieces are also earned through reward tokens. Other than that, if anything else is missing, please let an admin know. Thank you! Also an addendum SOME Power Pools are still trapped behind the "MTX" (or Microtransaction) server. We're working on getting those out to everyone. The Sorcery Power Pool and Force of Will power pools are still trapped. We'll work on getting those out to people as soon as we can. ((EDIT: Force of Will will actually be removed outright. Evidently it's still too broken for release.))
As for Veteran Rewards, as announced, we're still trying to work on a way to let them out but we still want you to earn them via game play. We'll figure out what is the plan is once we can determine how to unlock it.”


Rebirth is not affiliated with Homecoming, and is running a different version of the game. Homecoming is Issue 25 whereas rebirth is 24. Homecoming has all costume pieces and powers unlocked at creation, but in Rebirth you still have to unlock them. I will bring more Rebirth news as I get it as well!



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And that is it for this issue, check back next week for more news and join us in Discord to chat about the game, until then, “Go, Hunt, Kill Skulls”!
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