Okay, so I've not been around in a while, and to tell the truth, I read the writing on the wall before the F2P conversion (you know, Melissa's short lived tenure as the woman in charge after they realized it wasn't going to do well.)
Before you start the dogpile of "BLAH BLAH NAYSAYER EVIL EVIL GO AWAY" get over it. I DO have hands on experience in all the relevant areas one way or another. Sometimes from both sides. So a more complete tearing down of what is feasible and what is not feasible, you will not find. So let's dig in, shall we?
Purchasing the City of Heroes/City of Villains Intellectual Property
First thing to learn is that the assets are not the IP and vice versa. To do anything means you need the IP. That IP covers the artwork, promotional materials, trademarks, copyrights, copyrighted characters, and the nuclear waste of two very big lawsuits. That's also reusable assets measured by earning potential if put into another engine, universe, format, your pick.
Unless NCsoft is hellbent on unloading this property, it's not for sale. If it is, the sale price will be based on potential to earn presuming substantial investment. That means tens of millions of dollars, cold hard cash.
That's just how IP deals work. You buy the IP, you can now make official CoX t-shirts, box art, put Manticore on real lunchboxes, and sure, build a game too. This is what is called "A BRICK WALL." NCsoft is not going to let it go on the cheap to their fans because it's bad business sense.
LICENSING the City of Heroes/City of Villains Intellectual Property
Here's the only thing any one of you who does not regularly practice in front of a judge in this subject matter needs to know: GET A LAWYER. Would NCsoft be amenable to this sort of arrangement? It is possible. Maybe it's probable. But sixteen thousand rabid fans writing tear filled letters? Will not help this effort and never will. You need to have a team with lawyers who can go in today and say "we'd like to license and fund development of this, in exchange for publishing rights. What do you want?"
I'd rate it as "highly more likely to happen rather than an outright buy. Outright buy is right out. Deal with it. Chances are better that NCsoft would be amenable to a conditional license requiring a finished product by X date, if they're willing at all.
OPEN SOURCING the whole thing.
No. More proprietary code, documentation, and protected assets than the Caymans Islands. It is not happening, stop dreaming, and yes reverse engineering anything not exposed by API is illegal. Meaning no you cannot reverse engineer the client. Not ever gonna happen, not in a million years, so stop asking for it and stop saying it's possible. It's not.
Technical side of things...
It's a goddamn codewreck and a half and most of what you think you know is wrong.
I used to regularly chat with the folks that were really and truly in the know on the servers. And it's not as though Posi hasn't produced a mountain of evidence himself. Since the time was young, CoX servers, were Windows XP and 2K. Not only that, but the engine dates to around the same time, and has more crap hard coded into it than you can shake a redwood forest at.
Get any dreams of porting this to your religious platform of choice out of your head now, because I am here to tell you that you are stupid. And yes there is such a thing as people being stupid. Not an invitation to demonstrate.
What consumes 109% of my life these days is software development in a not dissimilar architectural arrangement. For your convenience and based on facts provided to me over the years by Cryptic and later Paragon employees:
- Forget the server code. Nothing can be salvaged there but the API, and even that's iffy.
- Databases are a proprietary and total disaster, vastly overtaxed and underdesigned for what was thrown at them. Total rewrite of the backend was needed, known needed, and blocked by...
- ...close to a decade of hard coding everything, most ESPECIALLY when it absolutely should not have been hard coded.
- ...doubly so when many of the hardcode segments are to fix bugs improperly in the first place.
Anybody who has actually been in the depths of the CoX codebase will tell you the same thing I just did: it is a disasterpiece that is so far past it's prime, the USDA would shut down any facility that tried to process it.
Any plan means having to start from square one across the board on everything. Textures can be salvaged, models can be salvaged, character creator can be salvaged, but that is more or less the grand sum of what can be safely salvaged. The only way to tinker forward means having to burn with cleansing fire.
Important Note, Database Rearchitecting
The block to server merge, to cross-server mail, to cross-server trade has always been the backend database. It's a custom monstrosity which should never have been borne. Nothing of it can be salvaged save the contents. When you want to go? You need a whole new database system, completely from scratch. Oh, and that database system would not be coming along either.
Operational Costs
Nobody's even brought this up except as "I run a bunch of servers." Hi. I used to run a bunch more servers. By which I mean a few ten thousand. These details are the ones people love to overlook. "Oh, I'll just buy a Dell 1950 on eBay!!"
Look. You want to run an MMO profitably, you load the servers up to the max. WoW's architecture is rack upon rack upon rack of HP BladeChassis 7000c's. CoX's was.. a bunch of whatever was laying around thrown under a desk or in a rack.
I presume we'd want to do better; it's possible. But it's yet another cost. You need two big servers ~$50K/ea for the database, which is always replicated. Then some high volume webservers, ~$8K/ea is plenty there. Then game servers which could run the range, depending how bad the code is.
Then you need to host them somewhere with good connectivity. Like Colorado. A rack with sufficient power and bandwidth there is going to cost you at least $5K/mo. (Starting to realize why I'm focused on going concern and not 'we can take it over'? Because the former has a chance of WORKING.)
Blah Blah Blah holds up process via X Y Z
See: GET LAWYERS. REAL LAWYERS. The fact is that A) it is money well spent B) likely to reveal information to you that will weaken NCsoft's negotiating position. This is a good thing. Also: yet to see any proof, only proof that various accused parties are not holding processes up or did not make any alleged bids on the property.
Development Process
This is what I took issue with at Paragon for years, and frankly, a resurrection requires someone like me. Not an egotistical statement - a statement of fact. Paragon was horrible about getting chummy with the users, and vice versa. Reporting was clear as mud. Achievables were wispier than Aine's house. Paragon got to stay purely because they were who was left.
And you're going to have to throw away your precious sentimentality and your apology factories. Most of the Paragon staff that were let go, should not be back on this project. Positron's out, War Witch is in, Manticore (THE REAL ONE) is in, Dr. Aeon is in, BaB is in, Arctic Sun is in, and that's all you've got out of what was left. (Unless someone can bribe CuppaJo to lead CM.)
Part of that is because to become competitive, you can't just be a Superhero MMO. Been done. Hi. You're looking to save it. Stupidity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. Reinventing CoX as it was, as it is, does not get you to a going concern. It just puts you in a worse boat, because you have nobody to back development cost overruns. So that means taking a long hard look at the game and throwing away the illusions of incremental improvement. It means reinventing the game from scratch. Building a true CoH2.
The Backend Replacement
I don't give two craps what your personal preference is. The only viable option for the type, style and amount of data required stored is PostgreSQL. It's exceedingly reliable, it's completely free, commercial support is available, and it's a world class package. The Centers for Disease Control runs all their mission critical systems on it, for heaven's sake.
Code? Start from scratch. It has to be done over from scratch. Or do people not remember all the zone limit problems? These are resolvable with a redesign of the backend server code, and always were. There was too much hard coding and bad design in the way. Apply cleansing fire and start from scratch on a more powerful platform instead of trying to port from Windows.
Hardware is just going to have to be cut way the hell down, no two ways about it. But frankly, I'd rather see a situation where CoH2:Resurrection launches with 4 servers and 3 months later announces free transfer weekend to the 4 they just added with profits. Yeah.
The Client Replacement
Look. You weren't around for the I17 chats I had with the I17 coders. Ask any of them. "Rat's nest of hardcoded crap that takes forever to try and fix, only to find it broke something else." You're dealing with a 2004 engine hardcoded to hell and back that barely speaks DX10 through four translators and one of them only speaks Slovenian.
The client engine cannot be salvaged, repaired, or recovered. Assets within it are salvageable; the bits that make them do stuff completely are not. Most of the people who CREATED them are long gone, and virtually all of them are devoid of documentation, comments or notes. By the time you fixed just the bugs from I17-I21, you could have written a whole new engine that performed tolerably on lower end systems.
Assembling a Team
This is a nonissue. But letting everyone in isn't an option. It leads to disorder, chaos, infighting, and so on. It's nice that everyone wants to contribute; it's just that not everyone will get to contribute the way they want to. Tough luck, that's how it goes. Otherwise, COD would just be crowdsourced by logging Xbla chats of 12 year olds.
The Finances Of It
All the backend finances are ugly as sin. Figure for each developer or artist on your team, a cost of $125K/yr. Programmers $75-125K. Shaking the leads out of that pool. CMs, well, CMs know the deal.
By the time it's all said and done though, excluding a huge amount of costs (which are substantial in themselves) for a 12 person team, you're looking at needing $1,500K ($1.5M) per year in recurring costs. At $15/mo, that's 100,000 subscribers just barely keeping the lights on. (Suddenly you understand why CoX has been on the chopping block. Their costs were much higher and subs were NOT higher.)
What Has To Change To Make A Going Concern
Rage all you want about "I WANT MY CITY" back. If you want your city back, you're going to have to accept a new city. To build a new, thriving city means making changes that bring old back and invite new players in. That means a lot of changes that frankly, people are going to be pissed off about, because for them development stopped at ED. The key things here are:
- Keep the character creator, improve it in real ways. (Code has to be total rewrite - BaB will tell you the hardcode hell there.)
- The community has to change. Don't like it? Tough. The community got to the point where it scared new players off, while insisting to itself that it never did that. Public drama, personal wars, not keeping OOC out of IC? No way, no how. Threads baleeted.
- Related note: may vBulletin burn in eternal hell because it is a steaming pile of shit.
- It needs a new story. It needs a new world. It needs a new feel. People got tired of 8 years of Paragon and parallel dimensions. This is why I want Manticore so freaking bad. He's the brains behind a lot of the writing and lore. Note; this doesn't mean old Paragon goes away necessarily. But it must change.
- It has to be more modern. A lot more modern. Nobody sane isn't going to point out that the graphics were dated. (Imagery is timeless. Textures and models, not so much.)
- It has to offer more than just 'go in door, kill skuls, collect loot.' ALL of these genre of MMO are seeing subscriber declines with good reason. Players. Are. BORED!
- You know those dream RP improvements you wanted? Yeah. It needs those. The combat ones? Those too. They're kinda standard everywhere these days.
But, that's just my $0.02; I've only been around since CoH release with my bunch of 50s and gods only know how many hours of RP with friends. It really was some of the best times of my life. That's why I'm so brutal with the evaluation here. I want CoH2 to have a chance, and I don't want to see my friends hurt when it goes down the crapper. No amount of letter writing, calling, crying, or press is going to change the fact that CoX is done. But we have an opportunity here to instead present to NCsoft a compelling and well reasoned argument to license the property to a newly organized game development studio, to create something better than what we had. Something bigger than what we had.
That is the best hope we have to save City of Heroes. To save the patient, we must accept it's inevitable death. And focus on the patient we can save - a new game, built by the people who understood it best, designed from the ground up to be a better experience for all.