Join the Paragon City Heroes team on the World Community Grid!

[Cococabana]

If you want to send a positive message about the impact CoH has had on you, consider joining the Paragon City Heroes team on the World Community Grid!

The World Community Grid (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org) is an international grid computing project sponsored by IBM. The WCG hosts research projects for clean water initiatives, clean energy development, children's cancer, diseases and more.

Here's how it works:

• To start, you register, then download and install a small program or "agent" onto your computer.
• When idle, your computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid's server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work. Each computation that your computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research.

The WCG launched in 2004 (The same year as City of Heroes... Coincidence?) . According to Wikipedia, as of this month it has over 600,000 registered users.

By joining the Paragon City Heroes team, you'll take part in a visible demonstration of support for CoH, one which is easy to participate in and best of all (in truly heroic fashion, of course) will help make the world a better place for everyone.

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Visibility: Participants can form teams (yet another coincidence... Hmmm...) to compete in events, trying to rack up research points within a time limit.  If our own team, the Paragon City Heroes, recruits enough people it would make a great story on for CNN's iStories, or as an online press release. If we can get 100 people to join the team, I'll pay for an online press release MYSELF, though PRWeb.

Easy to Join: You can set up an account and install the program in less than 10 minutes. Once its running, it's hands-free - it will automatically be tasked with work and run quietly in the background. Your only expense is the electricity your computer is using, and the use of your processors.

Results: Your contribution will help develop meaningful, actionable research on some of the greatest issues facing our world.

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We all should be aware that our efforts to save CoH may be for naught. We may not succeed. But the spirit of the game, and its community, could continue on the World Community Grid, in the form of a giant team of real-life heroes, on a long-term Task Force to fight real problems and truly make the world a better place.

What better tribute could there be to the game, its developers and its community?

So join today! Visit http://www.worldcommunitygrid.com, set up an account (use your hero or villains name!) and download the agent. That'll take just a few minutes to set up.  Once the BOINC client is installed, you'll have to select "World Community Grid" as the project. When you're good to go, open your profile, in the left-hand navigator, you should see a Teams option. Click that, there should be a Join or Find Team option, then look up Paragon City Heroes. I'll be there, using the name of my first CoH character, von Stroheim.

Welcome to the team!

[chaparralshrub]

I'm having problems. I downloaded the Boinc manager, but it's not giving me an option to go to my profile, nor does it have a teams menu. Did I get the wrong thing? How do I get the right thing?

[unladenswallow]

I've actually been running BONIC for several projects for quite a while including the World Community Grid. There are several other cool projects to hook up to. You can run more than one project on BONIC at the same time. I run four.

BONIC is the Open-source software that the World Community Grid and several other projects use for their volunteer grid computing projects. Some map the galaxy, look for cures for diseases, or work on chemistry or mathematics problems. If I remember correctly groups can be set up in most of them. So if any are interested in a particular area they can create a group and like minded people can join.

I'll look up the "Paragon City Heroes" and join it.

Thanks for posting about this. Great idea!

[unladenswallow]

I'm having problems. I downloaded the Boinc manager, but it's not giving me an option to go to my profile, nor does it have a teams menu. Did I get the wrong thing? How do I get the right thing?

You have to click on "Add project" then select a project then put in your profile name and password.

[Jerlstrom]

Done.

Don't forget that the project you add to BOING needs to be the World Community Grid if you want to join the team.

97 team members to go...

[Burnt Toast]

How I joined was to install the client. Once comp rebooted went back to the main web page and signed in. Then I clicked on MY GRID on the main page... did a team search with the word Paragon and voila.. clicked JOIN

I'm having problems. I downloaded the Boinc manager, but it's not giving me an option to go to my profile, nor does it have a teams menu. Did I get the wrong thing? How do I get the right thing?

[Burnt Toast]

Oh yeah.. joined btw LOL! Shame you can't see who is on your team...unless of course you can and I just have no idea how to find that info LOL!

[Vulpy]

Distributed computing is the only practical way to solve some of the world's biggest problems. I'm glad this issue got some press here.

[supus71]

Already a member I have several PC's running BOINC actually (remnants of my want-to-be render farm). All part of my evil master plan!!!


--- I just play a villain. I'm a hero IRL...or maybe a vigilante

[chaparralshrub]

You have to click on "Add project" then select a project then put in your profile name and password.

Select which project? CoH isn't one of the options.

[Mold]

Well we are up to 8 people now . I could add a project, but to join the team I had to do that from the website.

[Aggelakis]

Select which project? CoH isn't one of the options.

.....World Community Grid, like it says in the OP?

[Vulpy]

Select which project? CoH isn't one of the options.

The project should be World Community Grid. You can set your group by logging in to the WCG website in your browser. I was a little confused at first, too.

[Burnt Toast]

Come on people... only 8 heroes have signed up for this (and I was #7 almost 24 hours ago!) hehehe

[Mystic Cross]

looks like I'm #10... we've broken the two digit barrier! looking forward to continuing the fight as a Paragon City Hero

[Cococabana]

Welcome aboard everyone!

That's right, we are now a force of 10 - if we can get 90 more, the press release goes out!

10 may not seem like much, but when it started, the Paragon City Heroes was #9,817 in team placement on the WCG, now its #3,030. We're moving up! Plus, unlike the other teams, we have capes!

I decided to bump our first challenge up, it kicks off this weekend and runs for 2 days. We've got another one lined up right after that. Both of them are "All Projects" challenges, so we'll be contributing to all the research initiatives.

One request, please set yourself up to receive team emails in the WCG.

[Cococabana]

Oh yeah.. joined btw LOL! Shame you can't see who is on your team...unless of course you can and I just have no idea how to find that info LOL!

Hi Burnt! Actually, you can see the names of the other active members, go to My Team, and in the main window, scroll down to the "Team Member Details and Statistics" section. In the Sort selection, click Member Name.

It does seem like there should just be a link somewhere for a team roster.  This is my first team in the WCG - maybe I'm missing something! Will learn as I go along.

[Windy]

If our own team, the Paragon City Heroes, recruits enough people it would make a great story on for CNN's iStories, or as an online press release. If we can get 100 people to join the team, I'll pay for an online press release MYSELF, though PRWeb.

I know that PRWeb probably gets more general news hits.  But maybe think about http://www.gamespress.com/.  It's free to submit and game industry related.  Releases usually get posted by Gamasutra in their press release section.

Here's the how-to--->http://www.gamasutra.com/pressreleases/

You can send press releases and assets to inbox@gamespress.com.

A couple of tips:

Word docs or plain text files are best, or simply include your text in your email body. Please DON'T send press releases as PDFs: they're hellish for us to copy and paste from.
Please include any images as attachments rather than pasting them into your email body.
Please note that, in order to keep our bandwidth under control, print-quality (i.e., non-watermarked) versions of images distributed using our free service can only be downloaded by users of our Games Press Pro system.

Good luck!

[Cococabana]

Thanks for the idea Windy, if we can get 50 people I'll send the press release to that one as well. At this point I think the more attention, the better.

We've got 11 people on our not so little Task Force so far, can we get 39 more? My fingers are ITCHING to write a press release. In our current Team Challenge, we are #25 out of #47, just ahead of a team from Southern Illinois University. So far our work has contributed to research projects for AIDS, clean water and energy initiatives, children's cancer and more.

Want to join? It's easy! Click this link:  http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/reg/viewRegister.do?teamID=MRRRPQ6L12 , which will register you with the Paragon City Heroes team. You'll still have to download and install the BOINC agent, and select the World Community Grid project,