To create an account, first create a forum account for the forum I linked above. Then sign into the forums. Then go to the game account creation page: https://score.savecoh.com/account/
Of the five “Homecoming” servers, the one that’s the “unofficial RP” server (aka the new Virtue) is Everlasting. We have C.E.C.I.L. up and running there. Contact @thermocline, @dangerosa or @balanced via global chat to get an invite.
All of my toons are fortuitously on Everlasting, so I’ll join up. I originally rolled them all on Reunion, when it was still called Halcyon and not labeled “(EU)”, simply because it was showing the lowest server load. Used the pile of transfer tokens they handed out to move everybody over.
I’m really enjoying the new i24 stuff. So far running into some pretty cool story arcs in Kings Row, complete with some slick cutscenes, something I don’t recall seeing much of before.
I suggest people read all the way through that thread before installing anything. Leaving aside the installation difficulties, there seem to be malware and re-sizing difficulties that need to be addressed.
Look at all these people willing to pay substantial sums of money so that complete strangers can play for free, and tell me NC Soft didn’t err.
A note about setup: while the instructions Brainiac4 linked above worked for me, they recommend starting in windowed mode. For the first week or so, I experienced terribly long delays and crashes to the login screen every single time I entered a city zone. Teaming with me was terrible, because every time we finished an instance, I was useless for 5-10 minutes. It was 100% reproducible, although the crashes to login were about 1 time in 4 or so.
Then I changed away from windowed mode to full screen, and the issue completely disappeared. So if Windowed gives you issues, try changing to full screen.
If you want to recreate your original characters, particularly their backstories, check and see if you were tracking them on the City Info Tracker. The character profile includes the name, backstory, powersets, and badges obtained.
I never played it back then and likely won’t now, but I was given a tour a few weekends back* and I really enjoyed the names/costumes people come up with. Lots of really corny pun-ishment but I lol’d because I’m easy to please like that.
*After “let’s see if I can get this running in Linux” and two hours of cursing while I played another game. She eventually succeeded.
OK. “NCSoft didn’t err.” First, the number of people willing to play something for free isn’t a good indicator of how many will pay for it. More importantly, they had the actual books – I’m sure they were capable of complex calculations like “greater than” and “less than” and determining if they were achieving their financial goals or not.
The frustrating thing about the closure was that City of Heroes was making money when it was shut down. NCSoft wanted more focus on things in their portfolio where they saw greater ROI. And hey, that’s the kind of decisions that corporations get to make. But it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea of turning off something that is making money.
Then add in the additional information that seven years later there are thousands of people - tens of thousands - who are willing to install a special installer, work through technical issues and engage in something that’s quite possibly illegal. That’s a level of desire for a game that’s pretty remarkable. And on the (modern) financial front, the Homecoming servers raised the $6600 they asked for in something like 20 minutes.
So hey, maybe they didn’t err. Or maybe they did, and they could have had a nice cash cow for the past 7 years.
I’m not entirely clear how to contact a global handle (@thermocline, etc.) via Global chat. No matter what I type in the text-entry line (which I have set to “Global” gets converted to [ Local ] in the chat window and just puts a speech bubble over my head.
