Quote from: Ghostmaker on January 24, 2022, 05:49:47 PM

Anyways, back to City of Heroes. I haven't been on recently, but I do know the folks running Homecoming not only got their hands on everything they needed to run the game as of the latest official patches before it was shut down, I think they also got their mitts on some prototyped stuff -- new powersets, etc -- that hadn't been ready yet. And put that out there as well for people to play with.

I gotta say, even with the engine's age showing, it's still a beautiful game.

Yup they've added a new archetype (Sentinel) and added new power sets as well like Seismic. They're doing a great job. I've fallen into the rabbit hole of base building because they reduced costs of everything in bases to 0 prestige so I've been doing a lot of that to make the base for me and my friends as cool as possible. The DM in me has also seen me start creating Archetype missions for the other members of the supergroup. I started with 5-mission story arcs detailing how our characters met.

CoH's options for creating your own content is genuinely the best thing in an MMO I've ever seen

I am still amazingly salty to this day over how NCSoft did City of Heroes dirty with the shutdown.

I was recently at a friend's house, and his sons were playing Fortnite. And all I could think was 'imagine CoH with those graphics and resolution'.

I am still hoping for a private runable server for COH so can try it on my own or just with a few friends. See how it compares to its sucessor Champions Online.

I would suggest against playing on Homecoming. They're a bunch of shady assholes who kept the entire pirated server concealed, with the owner, Leandro, doxxing all the users and threatening users who would want to share it with the community. Play on Thunderspy instead, since they have far more lax moderation, and aren't involved in Leandro's personality cult.

I am still hoping for a private runable server for COH so can try it on my own or just with a few friends. See how it compares to its sucessor Champions Online.

The Source Code is available, if you know where to look.
(at the time I was doing it, it was a link on the HC front page)

I got it running as a Virtual Machine, but an MMO is pretty boring, without other people...

I remember years ago a bunch of guys I used to play 40k with were playing Heroclix and City of Heroes.  I never really got into CoH.  Sadly, I don't have the time for it.

The Character Creator, while 15+ years old, is actually pretty robust.
It makes pretty neat characters you can save as images, for super- or fantasy-games (just ignore the hands!).

I would suggest against playing on Homecoming. They're a bunch of shady assholes who kept the entire pirated server concealed, with the owner, Leandro, doxxing all the users and threatening users who would want to share it with the community. Play on Thunderspy instead, since they have far more lax moderation, and aren't involved in Leandro's personality cult.

Based. Also, Homecoming consistently lies about being "in talks" with NCSoft to make their server official. They've been "in talks."  for nearly 4 years since Homecoming began. And ban you for questioning "the talks" at all. "The talks" just exist to fool clueless Boomers into thinking Homecoming is the "official" server when it isn't and it isn't even the best server.  That's before we get into the whole mess of the existence of SCORE, the original private server. Which was a secret server run by Leandro for over a decade whilst he cried crocodile tears that City of Heroes would never have private servers and the source code was lost. Whilst he intentionally sabotaged other efforts to make CoH private servers and ran a culty community with a fucking spider diagram of everyone he invited and who they invited. And banned and doxxed anyone who dared disparage the cult of Leo. He gaslit, bullied, doxxed, and ridiculed an entire community behind it's back.

Ignoring all of that. It's the worst running server because no one running it has any clue how to deal with the combination of old ass code and Leo's amateurish coding that actually makes the server run worse. Every other server uses another branch based on the last retail release (that Leo promised to give but never did. Until a german guy leaked it.) with coding improvements to make servers run more stably. Also there are resources and tutorials to start your own server if you wish.

Check out
Rebirth (just added over 800 new parts in their character creator, other than that it's pretty vanilla)
Thunderspy (Homecoming doesn't like this one because they were the first to start a server away from them using better code. It's the New Content server. New raids, new costume pieces, new content.)
We Have Cake ( The "fun" server. Has a freeform class allowing you to mix abilities but this isn't as fun as it sounds.)

All of these servers run better and are more stable than Homecoming. And the players aren't all Fire/Spines brute bots grinding in AE.

It is a pity and a blessing that Champions Online, CoH's more or less successor, is so fallow.
Why? Because it could be in the same horrible state as Neverwinter. And for a time it and Star Trek Online WERE in the exact same sinking boat. Cryptic is obsessed with change for changes sake and I am surprised they did not change CoH to death a hundred times over.

Champions still has one of the best character appearance customization of any MMO I have seen. Carrying over CoH's amazingly robust character appearance customization. And with a freeform slot on CO you have a pretty darn robust chargen too. Which I assume CoH had as well in some form? Their Star Trek MMO is built off the same engine as CO and has a fairly open character creation. Nowhere near as broad as CO on appearance options. But pretty good. And character abilities are 95% freeform. You get some department specific skills. The rest you can place wherever and unlock however you want.

Why Neverwinter lacks pretty much every one of these features is a mystery. And over the years they have only narrowed the choices. This last big change finally tipped me over into pretty much quitting NWO.