Sooooo...
I have to put this disclaimer in: I'm not a part of the downix licensing team, or for that matter a part of any of the CoH2.0 dev teams. So I'm most definitely not speaking for any of them nor claiming any special insider knowledge on that particular score. I have read the thread, and 850 posts and a bunch of emails telling me to read 850 posts, so I thought I would share my thoughts, mostly because this development is interesting and partially because I haven't posted a wall of text about City of Heroes in a couple of years. So, partially responding to whatever I remember from the thread, and partially responding to questions people have asked me out of band:
1. I'm sure downix has his reasons, but I'm not sure announcing a deal in the works to us was the best move prior to the deal actually being finalized. Go ahead shoot me now. Its energizing for the community, and that's great, but barring some special circumstance I'm unaware of, in all honestly I believe we can do nothing to help them, and we could always accidentally create a circumstance that hurts them, and I would rather they succeed than know about them trying. Mostly, I'm just saying this because more than one person has asked me. But I recognize the position they were in, and I'm not explicitly going to knock the decision. I just hope it all works out.
2. With MWM and H&V and whatever is behind door number [redacted], does this matter? Heck yes it matters. For me, I think if they succeed, the licensed engine could be the bridge between the original game and the successor games not necessarily in the way I think many others are thinking: somehow making characters there and eventually moving them to the successor game(s). I think the great thing about a licensed I23 City of Heroes is that it could be the community builder that preserves and grows the community and potential playerbase for any successor games that are almost certainly still years away. This community has remained surprisingly (to me) still active, if significantly muted, over the time since shutdown. But an actual playable game would be a useful anchor to the CoH community. It would be a sign of success we could all point to. It could be a way to evangelize the gameplay and player community we all miss and want back. And it could help bring success to 2.0 projects by priming a generation of potential customers and players.
3a. Without the source code, are we crippled in terms of adding or altering content? Not necessarily. The game content was not explicitly "programmed" into the game engine, it resided in database files that its no secret people have been decoding and reverse engineering since the days of Iakona (and me, and Codewalker, and lots of others). It is possible, if difficult, to add things like power sets to the game without the explicit source code. It might require some hacks to make work, but nothing outside the wheelhouse of, say, Icon's developers. When Codewalker threatens to keep nerfing regen in I24, that's not just possible, but way too easy for him. Without the appropriate dev tools, some things would be a lot harder than others - like say making those damn escort critters actually follow your ass correctly - but nothing's impossible, even without source. Difficult, possibly prohibitively so in some cases, but anything that only involves data (geography, entity definitions, power definitions, basic mission design) is probably at least somewhat modifiable without source.
3b. Why is source off the table? Almost certainly IP issues. High risk zero reward for NCSoft.
4. Why license the engine and the IP, but not the character data? Its possible NCSoft doesn't want to open a legal can of worms. Legally, I believe they have the right to relicense that data due to the provisions of the EULA, but what if some players do not want us to have their character data? Its possible. They may not have a legal leg to stand on, but its probably not worth it for NCSoft to take that risk. And while I don't think this is true, if the only copies NCSoft currently has of the character data are in backup files that also contain other stuff, like say chat logs? They may not want to go anywhere near the stuff, or take the one in a hundred chance that some operator somewhere accidentally releases the wrong thing to a third party.
5. Is there a conflict of interest in having MWM people form an entity to control the licensing of CoH IP? I certainly can't speak for them, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The question is what the mission statement of that entity becomes, if they succeed. If their up-front mission statement is to in effect create a sort of RAND licensing model for allowing all reasonable projects that want to incorporate that material access to it, and those terms are explicitly and publicly stated, I don't see a problem. Part of that mission statement would be a completely hands-off approach to how any downstream project eventually forks that material into their own vision for their own game. If they can do that, I don't see a problem.
I should also point out that alternatively, there's no explicit requirement to "play fair" as it were. Its great if they choose to do so, and they seem (from what I've read) to want to go in that direction. But worrying about whether they can live up to that seems highly premature before they actually reach a deal and before they actually announce the specifics of how they intend to manage the property if they acquire it. I would say if they manage to pull this off, they are entitled to more than a little latitude in how they decide to manage its use. It sounds like a tremendous amount of effort sustained over a long period of time. If they succeed, as far as I'm concerned they've earned the right to handle that part any way they want.
6. Should we be worried the game client won't work by the time they get access to the game? Well, on the one hand the game client did work in Win7x64, and I think I tested it in Win8 beta successfully. Win9 might break it, but if it does it will likely be in the OpenGL support, which might be tweakable to make it work regardless. Personally I don't think this is as big a deal as downix suggests.
Also, Windows 8 sucks. Even Microsoft is backpedaling from it faster than a bear with an umbrella at the circus.
7. About that game server. If they get it, I wish them luck making it work. Its not impossible, of course, but I know a little something about how the game servers worked, and without saying something that will get me banned from the ... oh wait, I forgot, I'm not rambling on the game forums this time. Because I'm not affiliated with any group or team, I can't get anyone in trouble but myself here, so I'll just say for those speculating, no, the game server wasn't a bunch of Linux boxes or anything like that: it was Windows based. It had several moving parts. It was clunky. When someone decided to herd up all of Crey's Folly and nuke it and crashed the entire Freedom server, someone was probably RDPing into something and restarting something. Like manually. Running CoH servers on a large scale (i.e. enough players to run a Magisterium or more) is not just about spinning up some AWS instances and running the installer. Its about loading the right hamsters in the right wheels next to the right water bottles and then cleaning their cages periodically while making sure they don't fall asleep or eat each other.
And they get hungry.
8. Am I concerned MWM solicited Kickstarter money when they were working to try to license CoH? Not at all. This was, and still is a long shot. I funded the Kickstarter knowing that many Kickstarter developments fail, that even if it succeeded in shipping a game it might not be a game I ultimately wanted to play, that no matter what happened it would be years before I saw final results, and knowing that there were other things in motion that might or might not preempt that work. I don't know anything more today than I did when I funded the Kickstarter, and I don't honestly believe anyone else really does either.
9. My vision isn't trite.
10. Power Arc X: when the servers come back on, come see me for those purples.
11. Pherdnut: I spent over six months getting to about 70% awareness of how the animation system worked and how it interacted with the combat engine when the game was still alive, circa 2007ish. At that time, I probably knew the details as well as anyone. It almost melted my brain. Every other question I asked BaB was "Why? Why? WHY???" And he'd just shrug. The game implementation is like that, only more of your brain leaks out of your ears. That's why Codewalker is the only player I fear. He likes it. That's Cthulhu kinds of wrong.
12. Irish_Girl: I'm happy to see all that work on glintercept is still being used.
13. Nyx:
http://www.octanecreative.com/ducttape/duckvsduct.html14. TonyV: notice I posted the off-topic stuff in a post with a ton of on-topic stuff. I still remember my forum-jitsu.
-A