New efforts!

[Super Firebug]

I was watching a YouTube recording of the last half-hour or so of the game. Someone on the player's team said something in the Team channel, and, when I heard the still-familiar *beep* that signaled it, I AUTOMATICALLY looked down to the lower-left corner to see if it was something that I should respond to! After all this time. So it might not take me as long to regain the feel of the game as I might have imagined.

[Nitekilla]

I can only imagine all of the /t's Ironwolf will get the day CoH is back.......

We need to shower him with purple recipies

[Illusionss]

I think they should take it a step further and make IronWolf a trainer or character in the game to be immortalized along some of the other iconic characters... But only with your approval of course.

How about a statue of him in the zone of his choice?

[FloatingFatMan]

Whenever (hopefully) the word comes down that we're a go, I am going to appear to be stark raving mad as I whoop and leap around the house.

I just know it.

"Appear"!? :p

[Tubbius]

Page 190 on my screen.

Awesome.  Keep it up.  Here's hoping for positive resolution!

[Fridgy Daiere]

Start over, don't start over, have vet rewards and badges, don't have vet rewards and badges, have AE, don't have AE, have the auction market, don't have the auction market... none of that matters.

Noodles, don't noodles...  (I love that movie, sorry!)

Please understand I didn't do this for any kind of personal recognition.

We know, and we appreciate you anyway!

Would the mystery people allow you to their their Plan Z strategy with us?  Their plan if/when they decide to move on to bigger and better things will definitely affect the support they receive.  They must have solidified a plan, because that's one of the things that NCSoft will want to know as well before they sell.

...<lots of praise for the new team>...

I would have been satisfied with, "Patience, Grasshopper!"     I assure you that they have my heartfelt gratitude for everything they are doing, even if they ultimately fail.  Their answer to that question might mitigate a lot of apprehension that many are feeling about starting over with new characters, though.  Well, apprehension in general, really.

[Scendera]

So it might not take me as long to regain the feel of the game as I might have imagined.

After I quit EQ, it was ~3 years before I ended up finding a private server. Took all of 2 min for muscle memory to take firmly back over for my main class. Likewise after I kinda drifted away from messing around with emulation and went back to live after it went F2P.

You'll get it back very quick.

[ag88t88]

How about a statue of him in the zone of his choice?

Make it so! 

I'll go by and drop an /e Salute every time I'm in that zone.

[r00tb0ySlim]

If I could ask for one thing as a reward it would be to have Ironwolf reserved in the game, nothing else.

Absolutely!!  I hope this happens 

[LaughingAlex]

Honestly from day 1 I have made the assumption that we would succeed.

I never let it enter my head that we would fail. This effort is well along the path and all of the failed efforts I have data from added further information on how to proceed the next time. If this one fails - did I mention 3 other studios contacted me? This will be done by either this effort or another one.

I have zero doubt in it happening as contrary to what may have floated at one point, NCSoft is open to talks. The problem is it is a HUGE company and you have to find the right guy to get in the door. We have that guy and it is in his hands. Outside of the first Paragon buyout attempt they did not have the main contact. NCSoft is huge and mainly impersonal, what happened with the first effort and people involved is highly  unlikely to impact this effort with different folks.

I knew CoX couldn't be kept shut down myself, as I had seen trends in games before.  I thought of the fallout franchise, and something Cliffy B said, in that it was another company that brought the fallout franchise back onto the radar, I was left thinking "there is no way city of heroes could remain shut down, someone else will likely get rights to it sooner or later", and also thought when I was on that last day, and saw so many people on I was left thinking "This game is to popular to be shutting down".

I remembered that, in general, every good franchise has it's dark moments.  The diablo series for example, diablo 3 was a particularly poor game on both release, and up until "Diablo 3 2.0" came out, it wasn't fun at higher difficulties.  The total war series had empire total war, and napoleon.  Both very big departures from the game, but it had a come back with shogun 2(I won't say much about rome 2, that game released in beta).

It may be city of heroes being shut down was the start of one of it's dark moments.  It may be it's coming back may be the beginning of it's come back.  I'm still hopeful.

[Minotaur]

I am certain they will get around to us, since this is where it all started.

If I could ask for one thing as a reward it would be to have Ironwolf reserved in the game, nothing else.

I was just thinking some "unicorn" who was on these boards would pinch the name as fast as possible in the hope of getting a load of gifts, make sure you get it reserved. I'd imagine a gold title is prety likely too.

[Harpospoke]

An intense flurry of posts that are all a variation on "OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!" And then suddenly silence as soon as the game comes back online. Then the entire board will go virtually silent as the official boards go back online and the majority of the players go back to posting there.

I was thinking about that.

Would it be a way to reduce costs to just keep these forums as "the official forums"?

[LaughingAlex]

Financial data is highly doubtful - some folks have stated it may not be legal to transfer that when the product doesn't exist now. If the game was open - then it is fairly simple but after closure it could be illegal.

Character data - Your login and password could still unlock. I truly do not know if it is all there. I get emails saying they know someone inside and that they have compiled all the stuff at NCSoft and all of the data is there. Is this true or a troll? I have no way of knowing at this point. I pass this stuff on to the team and let them investigate.

Those kinds of things are fairly regular occurances and some I think are just trying to find out who the team is or to contact them for more direct information. I have learned to sniff those out pretty quickly. So you understand why I have held the cards close to my chest - since March when I got the stuff from Rae until now - I have been contacted by 4 studios about the game. The first group are the ones working on it now and I have sent all others to them for their consideration.

Two other studios tried to get the game previously but could not get a valid contact to work it through. We got the contact and that is the difference - it seems fortune smiles on our efforts. I have also passed on I believe 4 or maybe 5 offers to help with funding. Not to mention the people who message for job opportunities! I do pass all of these through and job offers obviously are a bit premature in most cases - but they are accepted.

I guess what I am saying is once we get the game back - almost everything may be there - or it may not, I am starting to think the character data may be available, the financial accounts I highly doubt.

My guess, the financial data is part of the NCSoft Master accounts, which tied to every game account.  The Master accounts had the data you used to pay for the games you were playing, while the game accounts refered to that.  NcSoft wouldn't want to give the master accounts to us because they'd be physically unable to do so without compromising themselves.  The master account is tied to other games besides city of heroes, it'd if anything make more sense for them to transition the game accounts from being tied to the master account to a new server with it's own financial account data system and tie the account to that.  I'd seen this done before with CO, everyone had to tie the account to perfect world after a certain time period when perfect world obtained cryptic.

[Harpospoke]

I am not going to re-build up my virtual sandcastles only to have them knocked down again later. You know how many purple and pvp sets I'd managed to collect among all my level 50 characters? My WP/DB Tank was totally awesome and had a spiffy costume to boot.

There's a reason why I made so, so many backups of the SC4 metropolises I created. Two gigs worth of add-ons. I wish it had been compiled as a 64-bit application. But that's another game.

<Sour_Bill>Not making the same mistake twice.</Sour_Bill>

Another reason I might be too discouraged to even try to rebuild everything I had.  Losing it once was bad enough!   

[Harpospoke]

I could care less about the data, been playing the game since 2004 and to be honest I just want the game back, characters can be rebuilt  and if you think NCSOF is handing account information and character data, keep dreaming.

To the team that is trying to get the game, thanks so much for trying to get us the city back and don't compromise that over data, I hope they are ignoring this thread and just focusing on getting the game back, because the greed in this thread is real.

I hear ya.   Have you read this thread?   Just about everyone here is not satisfied with Icon and wants to use powers and play with other players!   Sheesh...how greedy can you get?  Why can't they just be happy with what they've got?

[Harpospoke]

I appreciate people want their chars back and have ties to them but I think it would create an instant imbalance on the relaunch of the game.

It would?

I said this before, but I think wiping everything would make things even more out of "balance" (I'm assuming you mean "have and have nots").    I played for 8 years or so and only had about 15 lvl 50 characters.   It took me that long to get to the point where I could kinda join in with the "haves".   Starting that whole process over would put me hopelessly behind the curve again as others who really know the game better than me get their former characters back much quicker.  I'm sure I'll see a lvl 50 in Atlas Park the first day or so as my first lvl 10 is training.   I probably won't even have made my first trip to WW at that point.  (What could I possibly have to sell?)

[Harpospoke]

This is one of the many great hearts of CoX, IMO. For me, it was all about spending TONS of inf getting the right IOs (Franken or Sets, or both) to have a toon SO efficient and effective that doing missions was very little challenge - for what I loved about the game wasn't the hard fights, but the EASY ones where I was wiping the floor with the baddies and feeling like a GOD.

But I also LOVED it that other people could do a concept build, and still others could choose to embace challenging play.

Cox was truly a game that could be played however you liked. I think we should all embrace that spirit and never demand that people who don't power play start, NOR demand that people who are very powerful be curtailed.

It doesn't matter that someone plays the game differently than someone else, or that they are more or less powerful - its all about people pursuing whatever they feel as FUN for THEM.

For me, it was effortless and godlike power, achieved through careful and meticulous MIDS work and tons of rare IOs.

+1

...And then you have players like me who liked it both ways at times.

Sometimes I would sign on to that one Scrapper I built who was almost impossible to hit.   I could wade into a big group of baddies and just wipe them out.

Other times I would sign onto my Ice/Storm Controller and be a role player on a team.   The "feel good" was making everyone else safe.

Truly loved how this game gave me all that.

[Harpospoke]

For me it'd all be in the presentation.  Lets say CoH was relaunched but all acct data was lost, everything I'd accumulated over 8 years gone, but a in-game shop was put up allowing me to buy back everything desired where I could get back to where I was for, say, $250 total... I'd likely respond to that poorly.  But if I was instead offered up-front to be granted everything back for a one-time $250 donation to the project, I'd likely say "here is $500, make it so for the wife's account too".

I don't want to be nickle and dime'd to death.  But I *do* want to support this project.  If it means paying for something I'd already paid for, so be it.  And frankly I don't see a way for the CoH Relaunch project to be financially viable without at least some of this re-buying stuff going on.  But there are definitely better motivational-methods than some others to pass the plate around.

I don't mind rebuying stuff myself.   It's just money...ultimately not important to me.  (I'm not rich either)

Time though...that's what my life is made of.   That's why my characters which were created through time are more important to me than costumes which were available because I spent money.

[Relitner]

Page 190 on my screen.

Awesome.  Keep it up.  Here's hoping for positive resolution!

Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls.

[Happily Married]

I'm right there with him... I'm waiting with baited breath for Ironwolf to hop in this thread and bring the house down with something like "We got it."

All hell will break loose!

@Blissfully Married and I have done nothing but reminisce about our past exploits and former Guardianites. Oh, the TF's how I miss thee, let me count the ways...I am so excited, I can barely contain myself!!!

@Happily Married (aka Tennessee Bonfire)