Real City Hero
Tarja Rabito
To raise public safety awareness, conduct public safety patrols, participate in community service projects, and lend a hand when other RLSH groups might need more bodies in the Greater Puget Sound Area.[1]
ECHO was established on December 16, 2013 [2] by El Caballero and Dragon, following a split with Phoenix Jones and the Rain City Superhero Movement. The team is composed of a core of regulars and semi-regulars. Membership in other groups is allowed, and independent RLSH are welcome to patrol alongside.
In 2020, ECHO members gained notoriety for patrolling inside the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, a police-free zone established during the uprisings following the police killing of George Floyd.[3]. In 2022, ECHO members were featured in the podcast Superhero Complex, which highlighted the Seattle superhero community.
The green/gold scheme and space needle in their logo represent the city of Seattle, the three gray figures denote that their membership can include anybody, and the constellation of Sagittarius in the night sky represents the date of ECHO's founding. The design was inspired by the space shuttle mission patches.[4]
City of Heroes is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, or MMORPG. This is an Internet-based game in which multiple players can get together and adventure, playing the roles of superheroes or villains fighting against criminals, villains, heroes, and other adversaries. Characters gain experience by defeating adversaries, or by completing missions that take place on instanced maps (which some might call "dungeons" in the old RPG parlance). As characters gain experience, they can "level up," increasing their ability to take and give damage and gaining additional powers that let them do it in new ways.
If you're just getting into City of Heroes, you should probably wait to play a Going Rogue character until you're more familiar with the original game. It was designed as an "advanced" setting offering greater challenges for experienced players.
Like all MMOs, City of Heroes is made to promote teaming up. A good team-up, with characters who complement each others' abilities, can be a lot of fun. However, there are some times you just want to be by yourself. Fortunately, City of Heroes characters are balanced enough that it's possible to play nearly any well-built character solo through at least some content.
The game can seem fairly complex at first, and there's a bit of a learning curve. (That's why I'm writing these newcomer's guides, to try to provide a grounding in basic concepts that you can build on as you learn more.) But once you start to pick it up, you'll find it gets significantly easier. Some higher-level content can be especially challenging, but by the time you get there you should be able to play well enough to deal with it.
As for how difficult individual missions are for your hero or villain character to complete, that's largely up to you. There is a system of difficulty control built into the game that will let you choose how tough or easy you want your missions to be, and whether you want just a few or a whole lot of enemies to appear in them. If you're having too much trouble, you can lower the difficulty (though you'll get less XP for defeating less difficult enemies). Or if you want more of a challenge (and more XP), you can ramp it up.
There is a currency system in City of Heroes, called "Influence" on the hero side, "Infamy" for villains, and "Information" for Praetorians, abbreviated universally as "Inf". This currency actually doesn't have anything to do with financial money; heroes and villains are assumed to be just as rich or poor as they want to be. Instead, it's supposedly tied to how renowned the hero or villain is. It can be earned through adventuring, or by selling things on the in-game market. (It can also be earned by "farming" easily-repeated content, or by converting and reselling certain crafted items, but those are more advanced topics.)
In the "live" version of the game, Inf prices of rare items on the in-game market could and often did go through the roof, but Homecoming's economy has price controls that keep everything within a more affordable range. Super-rare items do cost a lot more money than a new player would have, but they can still be obtained with sufficient time and effort put in.
There are also a few secondary forms of reward currency, called "Merits," that are earned via completing certain types of content and can be used to buy certain rare items, but that's a more advanced topic to go into later.
Yes! Although the City of Heroes version of them is called "supergroups." These are organizations that characters can join to play alongside friends and players of other like-minded characters. Being part of a supergroup means you can see which other players in the group are online and what they're doing right now. It also means you have access to the supergroup base, which includes amenities like teleporters, item storage, access to trainers or vendors, and so on.
Supergroup bases used to have their own in-game currency called "Prestige" that characters would build up by playing, and could be spent to afford better bases. However, in Homecoming, all base items are now free, which means that it's possible to build some very impressive bases.
The vast majority of content in the game for both heroes and villains is PVE, player-vs-environment, in which human players cooperate or play singly against computer-controlled enemies. However, there are four "PvP Zones," which are areas of the game where players from both sides can enter and clash. Some of them have useful temporary powers offered as rewards to entice players into them. There is also an arena where players can set up PvP matches against other players. (There also used to be a specialized form of PvP called "base raids," where supergroups could raid other supergroups' bases, but that was taken out of the game when supergroup base construction was made free.) There are also several co-op zones, where players from both hero and villain factions can team up to fight common enemies in PvE.
No player is ever forced to engage in PvP, apart from being required to enter those PVP zones if you want to obtain those useful temporary powers. In fact, it's pretty rare for much PvP combat to happen at all, outside of the "unofficial PvP server," Indomitable.
No. The game is made available completely free to all players, and things in the game that used to cost real-world money are now either free or bought with the in-game currency Inf instead. (One of the in-game vendors is called the "P2W Store," a name that often confuses newcomers because "P2W" usually refers to paying real money for in-game advantages, but this is just a little inside joke; the store only deals in Inf.) In fact, anyone charging real money for anything within the game is against the Code of Conduct, and if you see someone making such an offer you should report it to the game masters right away.
In fact, Homecoming's administrators have been engaged in talks with NCSoft for several months to establish legitimacy for this new version of the game. Both sides are being very tight-lipped about the progress of the negotiations, but at least they do still seem to be going on. Homecoming passing its one-year anniversary without any significant trouble seems to be a pretty good sign.
All of these different servers forked the City of Heroes codebase that was originally leaked and took it in different directions. Some of them run servers as close as possible to the version that existed on the day the original ("live") version of the game closed down. Others (including Homecoming) developed new code on top of it, including their own new power sets or character classes.
This MassivelyOP article discusses differences between different City of Heroes server projects that existed as of May, 2020. Otherwise, if you want to find out more about the non-Homecoming servers, Google is your friend.
Great guide start to finish @Robotech_Master. Is there a section that can be added that alludes to the game's back story briefly or provides some more context besides it just being a super hero game? I mention this because I'm under the assumption that this is written for brand new players.
2. Controllers (with the right build) can solo almost as fast as many DPS characters; I watched my dad take on multiple groups of higher-level enemies at once with a Mind/Emp Controller (and I was able to achieve similar feats with an Emp/Sonic Defender).
I've never had any problem soloing my Tankers, and they've gotten even better since the bumps Tankers got in the most recent Page. And I don't doubt that it's possible to build high-damage variations of any class, but people just starting out in the game wouldn't be able to do that. I'm trying to avoid giving them too much information and confusing them. They'll have time to learn about the exceptions to the rules later on.
First of all, this has never been true. Certain sets underperform, but Tankers have always been much better at dealing damage than Defenders. Secondly, I don't think you've been keeping up with the changes on Homecoming. Tankers received a base damage increase and their AoEs are bigger and hit more targets than Brutes and Scrappers. At this point, when it comes to AoE damage, Tankers are top tier.
Twenty-three free major updates for City of Heroes were released before its shutdown. The final live update, "Where Shadows Lie", was released on May 31, 2012. On August 31, 2012, NCsoft terminated its Paragon Studios development team, ending all production on City of Heroes[3] with the last day of services on November 30, 2012.[4]
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