So this news is a week old, but I wanted to mention it here, as I know there are plenty of old school players. NCSoft has granted a license to Homecoming to run the game as an ongoing concern. So we’re out of the legal gray area of “I guess it’s abandonware so private servers are okay?” to a bunch of scrappy fans who refused to let the game die actually getting the keys to the car. Mind you it’s a licensing agreement, so all the IP remains the property of NCSoft, but I don’t know if anyone saw this coming. Servers have been PACKED since the announcement, so if you came back a few years ago, but didn’t want to invest too much time due to the kinda sketchy legality of the whole thing, now would be a great time to come back to Paragon City.

I've been playing on the Homecoming servers (Torchbearer) for almost four years, and the team there has done a great job caretaking. My hope is that NCSoft still has some development tools to share, so that we can get new animations, zones and costume pieces. HC has given us several new powersets, but the animations are recycled from other powers.

Cynically, I wonder if NCSoft finally agreed only because the time since abandonment had been sooo long (eleven years as of December 2023) and with HC running non-stop for four years, it feels like they would have might otherwise be sacrificing some of the property rights. IANAL.