After the shutdown in 2012, there were rumors of fans keeping the game alive, but I was never involved in any of it. They kept information under wraps to avoid any legal issues with the owner of the intellectual property rights, and to avoid a big crowd on their servers. But about a month ago, that all changed.
The Homecoming project is a fan-run organization that has set up City of Heroes servers for anyone to freely play on. They had some growing pains initially as the demand was overwhelming, but over the last few weeks have done a fine job stabilizing the system so the 20k+ players (around 9000 concurrent at peak) have a place to be super. That takes some money, of course, so they had a donation drive to raise about $6600 for server costs. It took 20 minutes - that's the kind of hunger the community has to keep this game available.
The game itself is changed somewhat from the old days. Quite a few quality of life changes, some new content that was in the works when the shutdown happened, and it's a lot easier to level up a character and obtain the end-game items and powers. The incentive to keep progression to a slow pace is gone when the game is being run for fun rather than profit.
I've really enjoyed getting back into the game and revisiting all the old haunts that I used to know so well. And more importantly, the characters. The first thing I did was recreate several of the characters I had on the old servers, looking as close to the same as I could remember. I'm far from alone in that, almost everyone who used to play the game has done the same thing. This is a major nostalgia trip for thousands of us, as well as being a fun game that we still enjoy playing. If anyone wants to find me in-game, PST to @ineffablebob!
The future of the Homecoming servers is uncertain. It depends on the core Homecoming team continuing to be willing to volunteer their support, and avoiding legal issues. For now, though, I'm not worried about the future, just enjoying being home.
