Of course, there's doing it in a way that doesn't clash with I.P. But the key ingredients are sitting on most user's hard drives. Recreating all that artwork, zones, animations and powers would have been a formidable task.
This is why all fantasies of making a CoH Private server IP-free are pretty much out the window. Take how long it took the professional, paid developers to come up with all those art assets and all, and then multiply that by about 3. That's how long it would take us to completely re-make CoH with custom assets. Sure you could say "The community will help!", but that's what we all figured with SEGS, and look at it now: A team of 1, working on a source. The whole CoH community is there to help, but no one has the skills to do so. Leaving a project like this up to the community isn't going to help.
No matter what way you look at it, making a private server will involve "getting dirty". Though the state of CoH IS in purgatory, that doesn't make it any less against the rules to use this stuff.
Now am I saying we shouldn't do this? Crap, man, I'm saying I wish it was done a month ago on the 30th (Was REAAAAAALLY hoping for SCORE to release some nibble at progress on the anniversary of CoH's closing...
)
Even just changing the assets of the game to not involve CoH's IP wouldn't be enough. You're still using their graphics, their models... Even just the likeness of the PS to the real game is a candidate for a lawsuit. Avoiding this isn't something quick and easy, and I'm doubting any actual possibility. I want CoH back as much as everyone else, but we have to think logically about this.
Still - if there are any servers out there - they should STAY UNDERGROUND. At least until someone has figured out a way to release the code out "in the wild" in such a way that anyone can run it on a desktop or something. Propagate it such that nothing NCSoft can do will stop people from playing.
I'm curious why they don't just distribute the source to people via PMs, and those people distribute it to their friends, and etc. Or, websites like Ragezone hold sources for Private servers of games still running (E.g. Maplestory). As far as I know they haven't had any issues with that (And I know I saw someone there asking around for a CoH PS).
Once the code runs through so many people, if someone gets caught and is forced to "trail it back" to the source, NCSoft would have to go through a lot of different people in order to get to the original source, and even then they couldn't prove anything unless they had access to the PM (Which could be deleted, couldn't it?).
My guess though is that NCSoft doesn't care a crap about CoH anymore. They're sitting on that egg so hard I think they forgot it. Assuming that they're sitting there behind their computers, waiting for the second that a PS launches so they can sue sounds a bit conspiracy theorist to me. I'm sure they have people put to doing a LOT more important things than stalking a (supposedly) dead game's community. If that doesn't convince you, then I'd like to see how many employees are currently still employed to do with anything involving "City of Heroes". Though, I could always be wrong and it could turn out horribly.
It depends. Say that a server makes no changes to the underlying character design, and just adds a new powerset named Jedi Mind Tricks. Then a character made on the server with standard powersets should have no problem in porting over to another server.
If the server is looking for the assets labeled "Jedi_Mind_Tricks" and it fails it cause an error. Thus if the player somehow managed to get into the game on a server not running this "Jedi Mind Tricks" set, they'd have no powerset (or a broken one). See I'd assume that it will be possible to add in new things like that, and if a server's code doesn't support or have any record of this said set, it won't be able to load it in.
If that discussion is/was about whether we'll be able to have a universal database of all our characters, I'd say "no". It's HIGHLY unlikely, due to the modifications each individual server can have. It's not
impossible, but very highly unlikely.
Now for those of you afraid of CoH's community dying because of a lack of 1 unified server, lemme' answer with this:
What Titan Network can do is host one server. A huge server, with the whole community on it. Now obviously they wont be on all the time, but this could be the "official" server. SCORE could run it and everyone would play it. Why would everyone play it? Simple: Content. SCORE has the man power to create new content. Other servers would have to rig up the content in a patch-work way. Most likely it wouldn't be as official and clean as SCORE's code. Why play on a server with broken code stuck on the same 'update', when you can play on the "official" SCORE server hosted on everyone's favorite forum? That keeps the community generally centralized into one location. NOW: For those who want to run their own servers with friends (Like me), they get what they want, too! They can go and play their own server, and risk not being able to add new content (until they learn the language), or if they want to go in and do raids and stuff, they can go play on the SCORE server.
You're all forgetting this fact: Even if CoH came back as ONLY one server run by SCORE, with one server in that SCORE Server (e.g. Pinnacle, Virtue, Freedom), the community would be split. Think of how well Freedom and Virtue got along (If you don't remember: it wasn't very well. I played on Virtue a lot, and all I heard was bad things about Freedom). The community will be divided between PVPers, Casuals, RPers, etc... You honestly can't deny it. Sure, for awhile in the beginning it wont be like that, but once the communities start to be forced to collide, it'll get on everyone's nerves. What's the solution? Add different servers to the SCORE server (E.g. Pinnacle, Virtue, Freedom, etc)! Sounds good, right? Everyone's on one global server, and everyone can play together. But wait, you're dividing the game up. Now people on Virtue will be playing on virtue, people on Pinnacle will be playing on Pinnacle, and people on Freedom will be playing on Freedom.
Point is: No matter what you do, you'll find a split community to some degree. I feel like my incentive of "more content" is probably the best way to go... but what do I know? I'm biased towards my own opinion.
As for all of you saying you'd prefer to just have a single player experience and you hope for LAN or single player support: This actually can be all solved by distributing the server's source. Just run it over your LAN IP address and only you and others on your network can play. It takes the least amount of time to set up (I guess it really depends on the source, but usually it does).
Anyway that's my rant. Hope no one gets offended. I'm not trying to bash anyone, I'm really just stating the realism of all this. I do believe a private server is in the works, but I don't believe it'll be all we expect of it.