City of Heroes servers
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[edit] Servers
There are two separate geographical locales in which to play the massively multiplayer online role-playing computer game City of Heroes: American and European. Each locale has its own set of servers. A different client and registration key is required for each locale; it is not possible to play on both sets of servers with a single client.
Nothing prevents a European player from purchasing an American registration key (the client software does not necessarily need to be purchased; it is actually freely downloadable, but cannot be used without the appropriate registration key) in order to play on the American servers (or vice versa); in fact, until the European servers were brought live in late 2004, any European wishing to play City of Heroes had to do precisely that. Many Europeans still continue to play on the American servers even after the European version is available due to having made friends or joined supergroups there, or simply not wanting to pay the more expensive European monthly fees. As of October 28, 2005, players can transfer their characters to European servers without purchasing the European game client.
Each server is its own instance of the complete game world; a player can have 8 characters per server. If a player owns both City of Heroes and City of Villains, however, then he may have 12 characters per server, in any combination of hero/villain.
With the exception of the Training Room (which is a special case), there is no way to move characters from one server to another. However, this is something that is on the developers' agenda to consider in the future.
[edit] American
There are 11 main American servers distributed among two locations. Although the servers are located in the U.S., any players worldwide with an American NCSoft account may play on these servers. Aside from their site locations and names, there are no official distinctions between these servers. However, most have gained an unofficial repution or have some historical note.
Each server has its own dedicated forum on the City of Heroes bulletin board. The City of Heroes website has a server status page that displays the current status of all eleven servers, plus the Training Room. Based on previous server crash information (including the 03/31/2006 outage), and the physical location, these servers share hardware or network connections, as they go down simultaneously.
[edit] Virginia Data Center
- Freedom - the most populated American server and a favorite of French-American and French Canadian players. Historically, this server was originally named Prime during the beta-test and was renamed upon release.
- Infinity
- Liberty - shares the reputation of "unofficial friendly server" with Triumph.
- Pinnacle - jokingly referred to by its players as "the drunk server."
- Triumph - considered to have the smallest population of the eleven servers and shares the reputation of "unofficial friendly server" with Liberty.
- Victory - has a reputation as "the unofficial Euro server" and "the unofficial GLBT server" because of perceptions that this server has the largest concentration of these two groups. Also the server where the original beta-testers of City of Heroes were able to reserve their character names from that period.
[edit] California Data Center
- Champion
- Guardian
- Justice - During the beta-testing period, Australians coordinated to make this server "the unofficial Australian / New Zealand server."
- Protector
- Virtue - the second most populated server since the launch of City of Villians. Also, this server has a reputation as "the unofficial role-playing server."
[edit] Training Room
The Training Room, also located at the California data center, is a special American server that requires its own separate and distinct version of the American client to access. The Training Room is Cryptic's testbed, where proposed new changes and patches to the main City of Heroes codebase are publicly tested before rollout to the eleven "main" servers. The test period can range from a few days for minor patches to several weeks or even months for expansion issues.
Characters can be copied to the Training Room from any of the eleven "main" servers; characters arrive at the Training Room without their Supergroup allegiance but otherwise unchanged (including retaining all of their accumulated Influence or Infamy, since a recent update). This is intended to allow testing effects of patch changes on higher level characters, but is also commonly used to test respecs or new power choices for characters before going through with them on a "main" server.
The test server is prone to instability and imbalance with major patches, usually has a very small population except when major updates are undergoing testing, and could theoretically be completely wiped at any time to start fresh (though in practice this has never actually happened and is generally considered highly unlikely at this late date). However, there is a small but dedicated number of players who treat the Training Room as their "main" server—playing characters exclusively there from beginning to end. They feel that the lower population and higher technical barriers to entry lead to a smaller, more intelligent clientele than the main servers.
There is another server, called the Shibboleth, that occasionally shows up in the Training Room client's server list. This server is a private server for in-house developer testing, and is inaccessible to ordinary players.
[edit] European
The 4 main European servers are as follows:
- Defiant - English-language server.
- Union - English-language server, unofficially the European role-playing server.
- Vigilance - French-language server.
- Zukunft - German-language server.
The European servers also have a Training Room, that is mainly in English, though can be swapped to German or French at any time.
Each server has its own dedicated forum on EU City of Heroes bulletin board. The EU City of Heroes website has its server statuses on the main page.
[edit] External links
- Servers at paragonwiki.com
- The FAQ entry on the City of Heroes support site that gives the locations of the U.S. servers
