*raises hand...
I might have talked to TonyV once or twice...
Like others have said in this thread, I think your heart's in the right place, but I think this is premature. We have definitely talked about crowd funding, but this is a medium-term activity. Right now, we are focusing on more optimal solutions that involve getting City of Heroes transferred into the hands of another development studio and/or publisher.
IF those plans fall through, then we will continue down the list of options, which includes the possibility of crowd funding some sort of development effort to either reverse engineer and recreate City of Heroes (minus any IP rights we are unable to obtain) or development of a new game.
These options are further down in our priority list for two main reasons: First, we have a lot more time to consider and discuss these options, whereas getting City of Heroes in the hands of, for example, the former staff of Paragon Studios needs to happen
now if it can happen at all. Second, the time and costs to develop a new game from scratch are
extremely intensive. The original City of Heroes took something like four years (maybe longer) to develop, and that was just for the very first VERY scaled down version compared to today. Today's version has been under continuous development for over TEN years. If another game is to be developed, we'd be looking at a 2017 release date and millions of dollars, and even that might be optimistic. I'm not saying that it won't happen, but I
am saying that we need a
lot more of our ducks in a row before we even consider any kind of crowd funding.
Also, I've looked into Kickstarter specifically, and I do not believe that this project would be approved. I could be wrong, but after having read
the guidelines, this doesn't sound like a project to me. I'm almost positive that stated goal of "Let's obtain the rights to operate the City of Heroes MMO ourselves" would cause it to be rejected. I'm not trying to be negative, but the
only way I think this would get off the ground is if we use Kickstarter to propose an entirely new game. Even then, I think we would have to do some initial prep work have having developers, artists, and writers ready to get started on it to ensure any chance of success. If we do launch a crowd funding effort, unless it's a totally new game, I think we'll probably go with another more general crowd funding site like IndieGogo.
The reason I haven't put any kind of crowd funding effort together so far is because we are currently going through our list of options in a methodical manner. Frankly, we don't even know what the goal of our crowd funding effort will be until we get further down the list. Will Paragon Studios need a crowd funding effort to help them acquire the game? That's extremely different from a crowd funding effort to create a spiritual successor to City of Heroes. By holding off until we have more information, we risk confusing people and looking like we don't have a plan when, in fact, we do.
I don't want to stop members of the community from kicking off their efforts; neither TonyV nor the Titan Network have a monopoly on community efforts to save the game. However, we can't really encourage this right now, and I think we need to wait before starting such an effort.