City of Heroes is a comic book-inspired superhero/supervillain MMORPG released in 2004. Characters are created by picking a role that determines your archetype (ie: controllers have a focus on crowd-control with some party support, while scrappers have a focus on melee DPS with some personal defense) as well as a primary and secondary powerset from a given pool for that archetype, allowing players to create a wide variety of power combinations for almost any given role. The exception to this is the epic archetypes, which only have one given primary and secondary powerset but are more complex than other archetypes. Players pick between starting as a Hero in Paragon City or a Villain in the Rogue Isles. However, they can switch alignments between Hero, Vigilante, Rogue, and Villain by performing alignment missions, allowing access to the opposite alignment's areas. Although the game's server officially shut down in 2012, many private servers have been running since the game's closure. Homecoming: City of Heroes, one of the largest of the private servers, has obtained an official license from the game's publisher, NCSoft, to host and update the game.