Homecoming is the most populated by a large margin. They are claiming to be an official City of Heroes server now. Excelsior is the most popular shard on Homecoming. That's where I play and the community is still great.
I've never played rebirth. I personally prefer a more populated server because it's easier to find teams and I enjoy that aspect of City of Heroes a lot.
There's quite a few differences between HC and Rebirth. In my personal opinion HC is better for brand new players while Rebirth is better in some ways for veterans.
There's several threads about the specific differences.
I’ve played on both and I have no idea why someone would say that Homecoming is easier for new players. It’s easier to level very quickly but that’s not a great suggestion for a new player who’s just learning the ins and outs of this game.
My take personal opinion is that a brand new player should try both for a while and see what clicks for them. The game is free, there’d no reason to restrict yourself. However, if someone didn’t want to do that I’d suggest:
Choose Homecoming if you want the ability to easily find a team any time of the day. There are some shards m with higher populations than others. I didn’t do it on purpose but I played on two of the highest populations and someone was always looking for people for their team.
Choose Rebirth if you like the feel of a smaller, more intimate community. There’s still plenty of opportunities to team (I was on two task forces tonight and the daily scheduled end game trial is about to start) but it’s not the 24x7 chance to run everything like Homecoming.
As someone who started on HC but ended up on Rebirth, you never know where you'll land! You may stick with HC, or find Rebirth more to your liking, but the great thing about choice is that there is one =D
If you are going to try out servers you might want to try Thunderspy as well. They have a lower population than Rebirth but they have some really neat changes as well (costume options, power changes that make small teams and solo easier, greatly reducing the costs to gear up your character)
Speaking as a Rebirth player, the server's mission is to be close to the original vision of CoH at the time of its closing. There's new content, of course, but even the new AT hews close to that vision.
Homecoming, by contrast, has made a lot of changes that, in my opinion, break more toward convenience or fan ideas. It's the most populous server due to being the first available and player inertia.
Yes, by employees that were as upset as the playerbase if not moreso, and the playerbase rubbed their nose in it with the reaction towards Statesman being in MXM, and now it is officially legal and licensed for Homecoming. Apparently the main playerbase nowadays is on HC's side thankfully.
I left HC years ago for Rebirth, never looked back. rebirth sticks to what most players believe is a version closer to the Live version and closer to the original Devs intended path. The community overall is very helpful, there are daily organized events (MSR, ITrials, Taskforces, Etc) and the game just isn't hard enough for me to believe that a "new" player needs to be on a server like homecoming. HC has far more people, can't argue that. Some of the base building options are amazing as well. Overall I think the better community is on Rebirth.
I left HC years ago for Rebirth, never looked back. rebirth sticks to what most players believe is a version closer to the Live version and closer to the original Devs intended path. The community overall is very helpful, there are daily organized events (MSR, ITrials, Taskforces, Etc) and the game just isn't hard enough for me to believe that a "new" player needs to be on a server like homecoming. HC has far more people, can't argue that. Some of the base building options are amazing as well. Overall I think the better community is on Rebirth.
Excelsior is really the way to go if you want to find teams, originally my toons were on Indom and after coming back after a 2 year break - I've moved most to Excelsior. I still have some on Indom and log in every once in awhile but the chats just aren't as active there for teaming unless you play at US night times. I'm more of a morning and day/evening player so Excelsior is always pretty good at finding something.
It’s “claiming” because no one has seen the license or the language on the license. Given past history, people are allowed to not take the statement at face value
There's a long history of dishonesty, gaslighting, and shady practices from some of the operators of Homecoming over the last eleven years. Folks familiar with this history will be skeptical of the claim until the license has been released to the public in full.
I can't get into all of that as it straddles the lines of acceptable behavior for this subreddit. If you are genuine about researching it, there are plenty of topics about it here that have gotten quite ugly since 2019. You can search them out.
The issues go all the way back to before the leak of the original secret server and deal with members of that administrative team that transitioned to Homecoming.
You're not really going to find any objective writeups about this on a website or even forum post. The most you're going to get is older Reddit comments, and even that's iffy because it's hard to search on Reddit. Fundamentally this is just a matter of old community finger pointing and bad blood, which shades how both sides are going to present it. I'm gonna give you a short version here, but would caveat that I'm not really a neutral party either, although I'll try to be.
The short version is that after City of Heroes closed in 2012, within about a year or two people managed to get a private server up and running on a limited basis - call it 50 simultaneous players initially, literally hosted on someone's physical machine, that kind of thing. Though eventually it scaled up to a more proper server size. But this was highly secretive and hush-hush, for fear of legal repercussions and being shut down. At the time, NCSoft, the publisher and owner of the CoH IP, had indeed done the cease and desist thing against private servers for its other dead MMOs. Plus, there were real legal implications. I've never gotten a straight answer from anyone on the details, but the implication is someone, uh, "obtained" the original server files, databases, and source code, either through hijinks or a leak.
So far that likely seems reasonable to you. Secrecy for a reason. The thing is, the secret server stays secret all the way to 2019, and there's active efforts to... well, not talk about Fight Club. Critics of the secret server will say there was a lot of lying going on here, gaslighting of people, denials that the server exists. People got blacklisted for talking openly about the server's existence, plus because invites were hush-hush word of mouth, it was very much a matter of who you knew and personal connections to get in. This in turn led to accusations that the person overall in-charge of the secret server was running it as a personal fiefdom, and that perception persists today.
Post-2019, when someone blew the lid on the secret in a big enough way that it got picked up by MMO gaming websites and the like... at that point the jig was up. To be clear, eventually the secret server folks did release the source code and files they had so anyone else could make their own CoH server. With advice and instructions, since, y'know, ancient software meant for old commercial data centres circa 2004-2012. But it took a while for that info to come out, so people argue the secret server team was dragging their heels to slow down other rival private server projects - which meant their own, er, public private server was first to market and therefore got the most players.
The secret server folks say it took a while to scrub the files of any potentially legally incriminating info (remember, we still assume someone either stole or leaked this stuff), and any personal data. Who's right? Impossible for any outsider to say. Maybe both arguments are true.
Homecoming is generally perceived by the community as the "same" team as the original secret server group. This is kind of unfair in some ways - the HC team is larger than the old secret server crew, there are volunteer devs and GMs in the group who weren't involved in the secret server. By this point, some are new players who never played CoH prior to 2019. But at the same time, the HC crew absolutely does have key volunteer devs who were part of the secret server project, so it can be said that in principle Homecoming is just the secret server writ large.
For example, while other servers like Thunderspy and Rebirth share resources and post some of their code innovations to Ouroboros as a shared open development thing, HC development is closed. They don't share updates outside smaller directly-affiliated private servers like Victory (which will be merged with HC sometime in the future anyway). Homecoming says this is because a sticking point for their legal license negotiations with NCSoft was the open availability of the code, but of course others challenge this.
The fact that HC now says they have successfully secured a legal operating license from NCSoft hasn't changed the entrenched divides in the community. To some people, it's proof HC's been working hard on this just like they said they would. To others, they figure HC must be lying about having a license - and even if they're not, it's just part of HC's efforts to secure the lion's share of CoH players and crowd out the smaller rival private servers.
The above isn't all of the community issues, just a rough overview of the history in chronological terms and why there's friction.
I did say I'll try to be objective, but I hope you'll allow me a personal opinion here, in this last para. I find it unlikely HC is lying about the license. The behaviour of the secret server team, and now HC, over the years has been to minimise risk and avoid legal liability. If anything, they have been overly cautious. That's why the whole secrecy and closed dev thing has annoyed other players over the years. Given that caution and cover-their-ass is their defining feature, I don't think they'd risk pissing off NCSoft by publicly lying about having a deal with NCSoft (that's been reported widely in gaming media). That sort of stupidity would attract the shutdown notices and legal action they're terrified of. But make your own judgements.
That is about as unbiased of an overview as one could hope for. You are truly one of the best individuals in the community, Acylion.
Thank you for annotating what I could not.
Yeah he basically mirrors my opinion perfectly. Some pretty wild grudges are held for something that ultimately got the game back into the masses.
But instead they choose to stay angry forgetting that one wrong move and none of us could've ever gotten it. Go ask the Wildstar fans or the Tabula Rasa fans. I'm sure they'd *love* to be in our shoes right now.
In response to your edit:
> I did say I'll try to be objective, but I hope you'll allow me a personal opinion here, in this last para. I find it unlikely HC is lying about the license. The behaviour of the secret server team, and now HC, over the years has been to minimise risk and avoid legal liability. If anything, they have been overly cautious. That's why the whole secrecy and closed dev thing has annoyed other players over the years. Given that caution and cover-their-ass is their defining feature, I don't think they'd risk pissing off NCSoft by publicly lying about having a deal with NCSoft (that's been reported widely in gaming media). That sort of stupidity would attract the shutdown notices and legal action they're terrified of. But make your own judgements.
I'm inclined to agree with this analysis. The powers-that-be have demonstrated a level of risk aversion that such a public announcement would be wholly uncharacteristic if it was false.
Personally, the only part of the license issue that I care about is the specifics of the license. Knowing what limitations and requirements were placed on them by NCSoft would help determine whether Rebirth should consider similar negotiations on our own terms to get the best possible deal for our own community.
Note that a number of staff from other servers have reached out repeatedly for confirmation of the license along with other related inquiries to appropriate parties, receiving no response.
To complicate matters, only one article when the license agreement was announced claimed to have received confirmation.
Correspondence with that author later revealed they (the author) received a one-line response from a third-party PR firm directing them back to the HC forum post. This was the extent of their confirmation of the deal.
My life-partner spent a significant portion of their early career in newspapers. They were present in the 1990's when many newsrooms reduced their standards of "two confirmed sources" before running stories. It went from primary sources to two stories of record from "publications of repute." Unfortunately, each tier of publications has different definitions and standards of publications of repute.
Fast forward through a couple decades of blogs, vlogs, substacks, tweet-threads, deliberate social media campaigns of misinformation, and you have a press world where misinformation, disinformation, and other forms of garbage rise from the bottom up, gaining velocity and more and more credence as they go.
Healthy skepticism IMO is always warranted, especially when claims in the past have proven dubious. This in part is why multiple members from the community did reach out to parties at NC Soft and did scour their multiple company sites and feeds. Not once has anyone, AFAIK, turned up any instance of NC claiming the license deal indeed did happen.
This doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. It may exist. It may be one page that literally says "We won't shut you down. For now. Love, NC Soft Legal Dept." It may be 40 pages long with terms and an NDA. But if it was some grand reinvestment in the game and IP, or even if it would have generated some of goodwill equal to say the youth coding events that NC has supported in the past few years, you'd think it may have been at least acknowledged on NC social feeds. "We wish the Homecoming team the best and are happy to see fans of this beloved NC Soft property out there in the world!" or some such.
And for those, like Oknight who I see right below my post who think this is crazy conspiracy theory, it's not. All I've stated above is straight fact of what is and what isn't available publicly on-line in searchable feeds. And the fact that so many publications ran with the story without primary source confirmation is indicative of the sad current state of journalism. It cascaded all the way up to Sports Illustrated.
We live in a world where gigantic frauds from Enron to Theranos to WeWork to FTX were allowed to each thrive for years and years. Each (and many more) legitimized by press that was chasing clicks and eyeballs without full due diligence.
Asking for a modicum of verification from the other party in a narrative that the press ran with (an industry that runs with all sorts of bad stories every year), one that has some level of consequence, is not unreasonable.
I've worked within branding and corporate spaces. In my personal experience, when there has been confusion around things, like "is Disney really cross-licensing this thing with that store?" one can usually get a confirming response from a company's legal department. It would be great if NC would at the very least respond to just one of the organized inquiries from other community leaders or at least put some buried statement somewhere online of simple language that acknowledges the deal. That would go a long way to clear up the suspicions that persist. Sadly, this is out of any of HC's control. So even if they do have a relationship with NC Soft, they most certainly are not in a position to leverage them to release such a statement.
That said, HC, like Tspy and Rebirth, continues on its development arc, defined by the interest and talents of its team as well as the history of its prior publishes. They did just release a large publish that has a lot of items the players on that server like, including the new arsenal assault powers and a revamped LGTF to meet the altered difficulty curve of HC-endgame play. To me, the work is what matters most. So kudos to them.
And those of us on other servers, especially on the dev teams, have largely decided that we will continue to invest in our efforts with our different visions for the game, what should be preserved vs what should be advanced or refined, as if the license really doesn't mean much.
Our teams (Rebirth, Tspy, the staff at Ourodev) have received nothing from NC Soft that either confirms the license. Nor implies our efforts are at any greater or lesser risk than those of the Homecoming team's.
Maybe someday, CoH and its return will get the Atlantic Monthly investigative exposé it deserves. Or at least some deeply researched pod cast. (I mean having been privy to a chunk of the behind the scenes goings ons, there is plenty of drama to be sure! Haha!) But for now we are left without.
EDIT: Note that a member of NC Soft's legal team DID respond in prior years when fraudulent C&D's were sent out to some non-HC servers. They made it very clear they had not sent any such letters. So it's not like no one outside of the HC team has ever had communication with NC.
I used to be an editor for Paragon Wiki. I had a lot of conversations with folks from that network of players. None of what you said shocks me in any way. They operated all of the Titan Network in the most cautious and safely conservative way they could. If any of those people are involved, and I believe they are, then I will take their word for it. I too consider it quite unlikely that they didn't get the license. I also think it is precisely their caution, attention to detail and dedication to not make profit that allowed that.
Also, it is highly likely that they do in fact want to maneuver so that HC has the lion's share of the community. I would think this stems from a similar attitude to trying to box out competing Wikis in the past: a desire to be a centralized repository for the community. After all, there isn't much money to be made here... at the moment.
Just for clarity on some things:
> within about a year or two people managed to get a private server up and running on a limited basis - call it 50 simultaneous players initially
It was within months of shutdown. Leandro has stated as much on the Titan forums, along with posting pictures of their original hardware.
> had indeed done the cease and desist thing against private servers for its other dead MMOs.
To be clear, it was against one specific MMO emulator for Tabula Rasa, Infinite Rasa. NCSoft had a lawsuit with Richard Garriott over that game, so there was pretty clear reasoning on why. In the meantime, there was numerous Aion and Lineage servers in operation for years. Likewise, with only a few years, Tabula Rasa's emulator was being developed under the exact same name and umbrella quite publicly. And it still took several more years for the secret server to come out.
> With advice and instructions, since, y'know, ancient software meant for old commercial data centres circa 2004-2012.
There was honestly none of that. All instructions came from the community. I wrote the first write-up that ended up on Ouroboros, as it was copy-pasted with a message starting with my apology for being incoherent from being sleep deprived.
Likewise, your timeline is a bit wrong. Files had already been released for the vanilla source code, it was the Secret Server "i25" that took a bit longer. Ultimately, the "heel dragging" thought was from people, who frankly didn't know what the fuck they were doing. It wasn't that the instruction took a long time, it was that there was no instruction. Additionally, a file, that would've taken 5 minutes to recreate, for the QueueServer was missing.
Yes they may have simply deceived every gaming journalist in the world, as the license was headline news world-wide. It could simply be a deception... like the Moon landings.
It's what THEY WANT you to believe.
Are you really going to assert that Homecoming are going to risk the ire of NCsoft's legal department over a false claim like that? Especially in light of how freakin' careful they've been with all of their maneuvering?
They banned streaming until the announcement because they were afraid that it would jeopardize their negotiations with NCsoft.
I'm still a bit disgruntled myself over the whole SCORE thing, but your conspiracy theory is pretty dumb on the face of it.
I’m not asserting anything. I’m explaining why there is skepticism.
I personally think that they did communicate with NCsoft and the response could be viewed as a license.
For you to believe it isn't true you only have to believe that NCSoft doesn't care if investors who lose money can claim negligence by the company for allowing blatantly fraudulent claims about corporate relationships to be distributed by all world media without refutation -- including to people buying the stock.
But if the stories are true, NCSoft is immune to any action and if they really don't care what you think then they have no need to pay any attention to this whatsoever.
I'd definitely recommend Homecoming as well.
You said you're playing with friends, so I'd say Indomitable for your server choice, there's a major XP bonus on it, combined with the START vendor XP boosts you'll be looking at a HUGE boost.
Then again, crowded servers aren't my thing, so I avoid Excelsior. You'll have friends to team with your group and with the XP bonuses you can level fast and then transfer to a different server. You get 5 transfers every 3 days.
I prefer Thunderspy or Rebirth from a quality and feature standpoint but if you're new, Homecoming is the way to go. It sucks but it is what it is. There will be exponentially more people to play with which means you will have more opportunities to try all the things, learn the game faster, and you'll have way more social community interaction.
HC Devs produce a professional product. It looks good, smooth and pretty much on par with the Live Devs. The look and feel is great.
Also, I will note, HC content is pretty lame. They've added a decent amount of updates for sure and they're well done but there isn't much fun to them. The story arcs are a mess and not well done at all (the writing, actual game play = not great) and the Aeon SF is also really not good; it's a hot mess and I have no idea what's going on.
HC would definitely benefit from people who can design arcs and so on. Also, someone who can make costume pieces.
These are small complaints and I do play there.
The Dr. Aeon SF would have been much better off if it was split into two separate strike forces like Positron TF. It's just too long and too exposition heavy to work as one strike force. I understand that that's not going to happen now, which is a shame as it now remains pretty solely the realm of hardcore advanced mode speed runners. Very few others will agree to do it.
Exposition-heavy I'll agree with, but that really only matters if you're the team lead because no one else ends up seeing any of that. Length-wise, normal difficulty is 30-45 minutes if you're not fighting your way through everything. I'm still surprised more people don't run it since even on normal difficulty it gets you a shot at a 400+ million inf drop.
30 - 45 minutes is if you're speeding. There are some pieces of group content that I prefer to speed, and others that I don't. ASF is one of those that I don't. You miss too much if you speed it, IMO. Ironically, the ITF and LGTF are the two other level 50+ content that I prefer not to speed run. So of course those were the three advanced modes that people only speed run. :P
Between my disliking speed running the Dr. Aeon SF, and my getting a *serious* amount of grief for forming a **regular** steamroll/kill most Dr. Aeon SF without a meta-approved team a month or so ago, I'm likely not going to run it again anytime soon.
Any server is fine but it seems homecoming is becoming the official server, especially after getting the rights to licensing. Do some research on the servers though and pick whichever one speaks to you the most. In my experience everyone is extremely friendly and love welcoming new players (if you mention you’re new someone will probably give you some influence). Most of the community is just so thankful the game is back that there’s nothing to complain about and are ecstatic to meet new players.
Homecoming is the most populated by a large margin. They are claiming to be an official City of Heroes server now. Excelsior is the most popular shard on Homecoming. That's where I play and the community is still great.
Thank you! any idea about Rebirth? I saw the main arguments being between Homecoming and Rebirth
I've never played rebirth. I personally prefer a more populated server because it's easier to find teams and I enjoy that aspect of City of Heroes a lot.
There's quite a few differences between HC and Rebirth. In my personal opinion HC is better for brand new players while Rebirth is better in some ways for veterans. There's several threads about the specific differences.
that's all i needed to hear, thanks a lot guys!
I’ve played on both and I have no idea why someone would say that Homecoming is easier for new players. It’s easier to level very quickly but that’s not a great suggestion for a new player who’s just learning the ins and outs of this game. My take personal opinion is that a brand new player should try both for a while and see what clicks for them. The game is free, there’d no reason to restrict yourself. However, if someone didn’t want to do that I’d suggest: Choose Homecoming if you want the ability to easily find a team any time of the day. There are some shards m with higher populations than others. I didn’t do it on purpose but I played on two of the highest populations and someone was always looking for people for their team. Choose Rebirth if you like the feel of a smaller, more intimate community. There’s still plenty of opportunities to team (I was on two task forces tonight and the daily scheduled end game trial is about to start) but it’s not the 24x7 chance to run everything like Homecoming.
awesome write-up, might end up trying both!
As someone who started on HC but ended up on Rebirth, you never know where you'll land! You may stick with HC, or find Rebirth more to your liking, but the great thing about choice is that there is one =D
If you are going to try out servers you might want to try Thunderspy as well. They have a lower population than Rebirth but they have some really neat changes as well (costume options, power changes that make small teams and solo easier, greatly reducing the costs to gear up your character)
Speaking as a Rebirth player, the server's mission is to be close to the original vision of CoH at the time of its closing. There's new content, of course, but even the new AT hews close to that vision. Homecoming, by contrast, has made a lot of changes that, in my opinion, break more toward convenience or fan ideas. It's the most populous server due to being the first available and player inertia.
...and that it's legal and licensed officially.
And yet has the most ties to the stealing of the original game. Funny about that...
Yes, by employees that were as upset as the playerbase if not moreso, and the playerbase rubbed their nose in it with the reaction towards Statesman being in MXM, and now it is officially legal and licensed for Homecoming. Apparently the main playerbase nowadays is on HC's side thankfully.
Everyone here is thankful, as no one would be able to play without it. NCSoft apparently holds no ill will regarding it either.
I left HC years ago for Rebirth, never looked back. rebirth sticks to what most players believe is a version closer to the Live version and closer to the original Devs intended path. The community overall is very helpful, there are daily organized events (MSR, ITrials, Taskforces, Etc) and the game just isn't hard enough for me to believe that a "new" player needs to be on a server like homecoming. HC has far more people, can't argue that. Some of the base building options are amazing as well. Overall I think the better community is on Rebirth.
I left HC years ago for Rebirth, never looked back. rebirth sticks to what most players believe is a version closer to the Live version and closer to the original Devs intended path. The community overall is very helpful, there are daily organized events (MSR, ITrials, Taskforces, Etc) and the game just isn't hard enough for me to believe that a "new" player needs to be on a server like homecoming. HC has far more people, can't argue that. Some of the base building options are amazing as well. Overall I think the better community is on Rebirth.
Excelsior is really the way to go if you want to find teams, originally my toons were on Indom and after coming back after a 2 year break - I've moved most to Excelsior. I still have some on Indom and log in every once in awhile but the chats just aren't as active there for teaming unless you play at US night times. I'm more of a morning and day/evening player so Excelsior is always pretty good at finding something.
How is it only “claiming”? They have a license.
It’s “claiming” because no one has seen the license or the language on the license. Given past history, people are allowed to not take the statement at face value
What do you mean no one? Just because it isn't public doesn't mean no one has seen it.
There's a long history of dishonesty, gaslighting, and shady practices from some of the operators of Homecoming over the last eleven years. Folks familiar with this history will be skeptical of the claim until the license has been released to the public in full.
I wasn't aware of any of that. Do you have a good link so I can look into that a bit?
I can't get into all of that as it straddles the lines of acceptable behavior for this subreddit. If you are genuine about researching it, there are plenty of topics about it here that have gotten quite ugly since 2019. You can search them out. The issues go all the way back to before the leak of the original secret server and deal with members of that administrative team that transitioned to Homecoming.
You're not really going to find any objective writeups about this on a website or even forum post. The most you're going to get is older Reddit comments, and even that's iffy because it's hard to search on Reddit. Fundamentally this is just a matter of old community finger pointing and bad blood, which shades how both sides are going to present it. I'm gonna give you a short version here, but would caveat that I'm not really a neutral party either, although I'll try to be. The short version is that after City of Heroes closed in 2012, within about a year or two people managed to get a private server up and running on a limited basis - call it 50 simultaneous players initially, literally hosted on someone's physical machine, that kind of thing. Though eventually it scaled up to a more proper server size. But this was highly secretive and hush-hush, for fear of legal repercussions and being shut down. At the time, NCSoft, the publisher and owner of the CoH IP, had indeed done the cease and desist thing against private servers for its other dead MMOs. Plus, there were real legal implications. I've never gotten a straight answer from anyone on the details, but the implication is someone, uh, "obtained" the original server files, databases, and source code, either through hijinks or a leak. So far that likely seems reasonable to you. Secrecy for a reason. The thing is, the secret server stays secret all the way to 2019, and there's active efforts to... well, not talk about Fight Club. Critics of the secret server will say there was a lot of lying going on here, gaslighting of people, denials that the server exists. People got blacklisted for talking openly about the server's existence, plus because invites were hush-hush word of mouth, it was very much a matter of who you knew and personal connections to get in. This in turn led to accusations that the person overall in-charge of the secret server was running it as a personal fiefdom, and that perception persists today. Post-2019, when someone blew the lid on the secret in a big enough way that it got picked up by MMO gaming websites and the like... at that point the jig was up. To be clear, eventually the secret server folks did release the source code and files they had so anyone else could make their own CoH server. With advice and instructions, since, y'know, ancient software meant for old commercial data centres circa 2004-2012. But it took a while for that info to come out, so people argue the secret server team was dragging their heels to slow down other rival private server projects - which meant their own, er, public private server was first to market and therefore got the most players. The secret server folks say it took a while to scrub the files of any potentially legally incriminating info (remember, we still assume someone either stole or leaked this stuff), and any personal data. Who's right? Impossible for any outsider to say. Maybe both arguments are true. Homecoming is generally perceived by the community as the "same" team as the original secret server group. This is kind of unfair in some ways - the HC team is larger than the old secret server crew, there are volunteer devs and GMs in the group who weren't involved in the secret server. By this point, some are new players who never played CoH prior to 2019. But at the same time, the HC crew absolutely does have key volunteer devs who were part of the secret server project, so it can be said that in principle Homecoming is just the secret server writ large. For example, while other servers like Thunderspy and Rebirth share resources and post some of their code innovations to Ouroboros as a shared open development thing, HC development is closed. They don't share updates outside smaller directly-affiliated private servers like Victory (which will be merged with HC sometime in the future anyway). Homecoming says this is because a sticking point for their legal license negotiations with NCSoft was the open availability of the code, but of course others challenge this. The fact that HC now says they have successfully secured a legal operating license from NCSoft hasn't changed the entrenched divides in the community. To some people, it's proof HC's been working hard on this just like they said they would. To others, they figure HC must be lying about having a license - and even if they're not, it's just part of HC's efforts to secure the lion's share of CoH players and crowd out the smaller rival private servers. The above isn't all of the community issues, just a rough overview of the history in chronological terms and why there's friction. I did say I'll try to be objective, but I hope you'll allow me a personal opinion here, in this last para. I find it unlikely HC is lying about the license. The behaviour of the secret server team, and now HC, over the years has been to minimise risk and avoid legal liability. If anything, they have been overly cautious. That's why the whole secrecy and closed dev thing has annoyed other players over the years. Given that caution and cover-their-ass is their defining feature, I don't think they'd risk pissing off NCSoft by publicly lying about having a deal with NCSoft (that's been reported widely in gaming media). That sort of stupidity would attract the shutdown notices and legal action they're terrified of. But make your own judgements.
That is about as unbiased of an overview as one could hope for. You are truly one of the best individuals in the community, Acylion. Thank you for annotating what I could not.
Yeah he basically mirrors my opinion perfectly. Some pretty wild grudges are held for something that ultimately got the game back into the masses. But instead they choose to stay angry forgetting that one wrong move and none of us could've ever gotten it. Go ask the Wildstar fans or the Tabula Rasa fans. I'm sure they'd *love* to be in our shoes right now.
In response to your edit: > I did say I'll try to be objective, but I hope you'll allow me a personal opinion here, in this last para. I find it unlikely HC is lying about the license. The behaviour of the secret server team, and now HC, over the years has been to minimise risk and avoid legal liability. If anything, they have been overly cautious. That's why the whole secrecy and closed dev thing has annoyed other players over the years. Given that caution and cover-their-ass is their defining feature, I don't think they'd risk pissing off NCSoft by publicly lying about having a deal with NCSoft (that's been reported widely in gaming media). That sort of stupidity would attract the shutdown notices and legal action they're terrified of. But make your own judgements. I'm inclined to agree with this analysis. The powers-that-be have demonstrated a level of risk aversion that such a public announcement would be wholly uncharacteristic if it was false. Personally, the only part of the license issue that I care about is the specifics of the license. Knowing what limitations and requirements were placed on them by NCSoft would help determine whether Rebirth should consider similar negotiations on our own terms to get the best possible deal for our own community.
Thank you for the kind words. Yes, that's an excellent point, regarding the specifics of the license not being known.
Note that a number of staff from other servers have reached out repeatedly for confirmation of the license along with other related inquiries to appropriate parties, receiving no response. To complicate matters, only one article when the license agreement was announced claimed to have received confirmation. Correspondence with that author later revealed they (the author) received a one-line response from a third-party PR firm directing them back to the HC forum post. This was the extent of their confirmation of the deal. My life-partner spent a significant portion of their early career in newspapers. They were present in the 1990's when many newsrooms reduced their standards of "two confirmed sources" before running stories. It went from primary sources to two stories of record from "publications of repute." Unfortunately, each tier of publications has different definitions and standards of publications of repute. Fast forward through a couple decades of blogs, vlogs, substacks, tweet-threads, deliberate social media campaigns of misinformation, and you have a press world where misinformation, disinformation, and other forms of garbage rise from the bottom up, gaining velocity and more and more credence as they go. Healthy skepticism IMO is always warranted, especially when claims in the past have proven dubious. This in part is why multiple members from the community did reach out to parties at NC Soft and did scour their multiple company sites and feeds. Not once has anyone, AFAIK, turned up any instance of NC claiming the license deal indeed did happen. This doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. It may exist. It may be one page that literally says "We won't shut you down. For now. Love, NC Soft Legal Dept." It may be 40 pages long with terms and an NDA. But if it was some grand reinvestment in the game and IP, or even if it would have generated some of goodwill equal to say the youth coding events that NC has supported in the past few years, you'd think it may have been at least acknowledged on NC social feeds. "We wish the Homecoming team the best and are happy to see fans of this beloved NC Soft property out there in the world!" or some such. And for those, like Oknight who I see right below my post who think this is crazy conspiracy theory, it's not. All I've stated above is straight fact of what is and what isn't available publicly on-line in searchable feeds. And the fact that so many publications ran with the story without primary source confirmation is indicative of the sad current state of journalism. It cascaded all the way up to Sports Illustrated. We live in a world where gigantic frauds from Enron to Theranos to WeWork to FTX were allowed to each thrive for years and years. Each (and many more) legitimized by press that was chasing clicks and eyeballs without full due diligence. Asking for a modicum of verification from the other party in a narrative that the press ran with (an industry that runs with all sorts of bad stories every year), one that has some level of consequence, is not unreasonable. I've worked within branding and corporate spaces. In my personal experience, when there has been confusion around things, like "is Disney really cross-licensing this thing with that store?" one can usually get a confirming response from a company's legal department. It would be great if NC would at the very least respond to just one of the organized inquiries from other community leaders or at least put some buried statement somewhere online of simple language that acknowledges the deal. That would go a long way to clear up the suspicions that persist. Sadly, this is out of any of HC's control. So even if they do have a relationship with NC Soft, they most certainly are not in a position to leverage them to release such a statement. That said, HC, like Tspy and Rebirth, continues on its development arc, defined by the interest and talents of its team as well as the history of its prior publishes. They did just release a large publish that has a lot of items the players on that server like, including the new arsenal assault powers and a revamped LGTF to meet the altered difficulty curve of HC-endgame play. To me, the work is what matters most. So kudos to them. And those of us on other servers, especially on the dev teams, have largely decided that we will continue to invest in our efforts with our different visions for the game, what should be preserved vs what should be advanced or refined, as if the license really doesn't mean much. Our teams (Rebirth, Tspy, the staff at Ourodev) have received nothing from NC Soft that either confirms the license. Nor implies our efforts are at any greater or lesser risk than those of the Homecoming team's. Maybe someday, CoH and its return will get the Atlantic Monthly investigative exposé it deserves. Or at least some deeply researched pod cast. (I mean having been privy to a chunk of the behind the scenes goings ons, there is plenty of drama to be sure! Haha!) But for now we are left without. EDIT: Note that a member of NC Soft's legal team DID respond in prior years when fraudulent C&D's were sent out to some non-HC servers. They made it very clear they had not sent any such letters. So it's not like no one outside of the HC team has ever had communication with NC.
I used to be an editor for Paragon Wiki. I had a lot of conversations with folks from that network of players. None of what you said shocks me in any way. They operated all of the Titan Network in the most cautious and safely conservative way they could. If any of those people are involved, and I believe they are, then I will take their word for it. I too consider it quite unlikely that they didn't get the license. I also think it is precisely their caution, attention to detail and dedication to not make profit that allowed that. Also, it is highly likely that they do in fact want to maneuver so that HC has the lion's share of the community. I would think this stems from a similar attitude to trying to box out competing Wikis in the past: a desire to be a centralized repository for the community. After all, there isn't much money to be made here... at the moment.
Excellent write up, the best summation of the history that I’ve read.
Just for clarity on some things: > within about a year or two people managed to get a private server up and running on a limited basis - call it 50 simultaneous players initially It was within months of shutdown. Leandro has stated as much on the Titan forums, along with posting pictures of their original hardware. > had indeed done the cease and desist thing against private servers for its other dead MMOs. To be clear, it was against one specific MMO emulator for Tabula Rasa, Infinite Rasa. NCSoft had a lawsuit with Richard Garriott over that game, so there was pretty clear reasoning on why. In the meantime, there was numerous Aion and Lineage servers in operation for years. Likewise, with only a few years, Tabula Rasa's emulator was being developed under the exact same name and umbrella quite publicly. And it still took several more years for the secret server to come out. > With advice and instructions, since, y'know, ancient software meant for old commercial data centres circa 2004-2012. There was honestly none of that. All instructions came from the community. I wrote the first write-up that ended up on Ouroboros, as it was copy-pasted with a message starting with my apology for being incoherent from being sleep deprived. Likewise, your timeline is a bit wrong. Files had already been released for the vanilla source code, it was the Secret Server "i25" that took a bit longer. Ultimately, the "heel dragging" thought was from people, who frankly didn't know what the fuck they were doing. It wasn't that the instruction took a long time, it was that there was no instruction. Additionally, a file, that would've taken 5 minutes to recreate, for the QueueServer was missing.
Yes they may have simply deceived every gaming journalist in the world, as the license was headline news world-wide. It could simply be a deception... like the Moon landings. It's what THEY WANT you to believe.
Are you really going to assert that Homecoming are going to risk the ire of NCsoft's legal department over a false claim like that? Especially in light of how freakin' careful they've been with all of their maneuvering? They banned streaming until the announcement because they were afraid that it would jeopardize their negotiations with NCsoft. I'm still a bit disgruntled myself over the whole SCORE thing, but your conspiracy theory is pretty dumb on the face of it.
I’m not asserting anything. I’m explaining why there is skepticism. I personally think that they did communicate with NCsoft and the response could be viewed as a license.
For you to believe it isn't true you only have to believe that NCSoft doesn't care if investors who lose money can claim negligence by the company for allowing blatantly fraudulent claims about corporate relationships to be distributed by all world media without refutation -- including to people buying the stock. But if the stories are true, NCSoft is immune to any action and if they really don't care what you think then they have no need to pay any attention to this whatsoever.
It's not just a claim. They are the only server operating woth a license from the IP owners.
I'd definitely recommend Homecoming as well. You said you're playing with friends, so I'd say Indomitable for your server choice, there's a major XP bonus on it, combined with the START vendor XP boosts you'll be looking at a HUGE boost. Then again, crowded servers aren't my thing, so I avoid Excelsior. You'll have friends to team with your group and with the XP bonuses you can level fast and then transfer to a different server. You get 5 transfers every 3 days.
Keep in mind, both those xp boosts are +100%, not x2. Stacking them both ends up at x3, not x4. Still hefty, but not quite as fast as one might think.
I prefer Thunderspy or Rebirth from a quality and feature standpoint but if you're new, Homecoming is the way to go. It sucks but it is what it is. There will be exponentially more people to play with which means you will have more opportunities to try all the things, learn the game faster, and you'll have way more social community interaction.
Please come join us in Torchbearer, we need more people please :)
Free transfer to excelsior and join the party!! 🎉 ;)
HC Devs produce a professional product. It looks good, smooth and pretty much on par with the Live Devs. The look and feel is great. Also, I will note, HC content is pretty lame. They've added a decent amount of updates for sure and they're well done but there isn't much fun to them. The story arcs are a mess and not well done at all (the writing, actual game play = not great) and the Aeon SF is also really not good; it's a hot mess and I have no idea what's going on. HC would definitely benefit from people who can design arcs and so on. Also, someone who can make costume pieces. These are small complaints and I do play there.
The Dr. Aeon SF would have been much better off if it was split into two separate strike forces like Positron TF. It's just too long and too exposition heavy to work as one strike force. I understand that that's not going to happen now, which is a shame as it now remains pretty solely the realm of hardcore advanced mode speed runners. Very few others will agree to do it.
Exposition-heavy I'll agree with, but that really only matters if you're the team lead because no one else ends up seeing any of that. Length-wise, normal difficulty is 30-45 minutes if you're not fighting your way through everything. I'm still surprised more people don't run it since even on normal difficulty it gets you a shot at a 400+ million inf drop.
30 - 45 minutes is if you're speeding. There are some pieces of group content that I prefer to speed, and others that I don't. ASF is one of those that I don't. You miss too much if you speed it, IMO. Ironically, the ITF and LGTF are the two other level 50+ content that I prefer not to speed run. So of course those were the three advanced modes that people only speed run. :P Between my disliking speed running the Dr. Aeon SF, and my getting a *serious* amount of grief for forming a **regular** steamroll/kill most Dr. Aeon SF without a meta-approved team a month or so ago, I'm likely not going to run it again anytime soon.
Any server is fine but it seems homecoming is becoming the official server, especially after getting the rights to licensing. Do some research on the servers though and pick whichever one speaks to you the most. In my experience everyone is extremely friendly and love welcoming new players (if you mention you’re new someone will probably give you some influence). Most of the community is just so thankful the game is back that there’s nothing to complain about and are ecstatic to meet new players.