Titan Network
Community => Task Force Hail Mary => Topic started by: GUGuardian on March 30, 2015, 03:32:11 PM
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I specialize in ridiculous questions, so I'm going to ask this (or, rather, these):
How big a waste of time would it be for the entire CoH-loving community to BOYCOTT NCSoft? Are the other games they offer really that good that no one would put them aside to demand NCSoft stop dictating to us what's playable and what's not? Would anyone be willing to make the effort to demand either a re-release, a sequel inside of a year, or a standalone game (standalone or able to link up with people without servers)?
How much do we want our City back?
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None whatsoever. It didn't help us before and will actually harm the current efforts.
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None whatsoever. It didn't help us before and will actually harm the current efforts.
That's not true. There is no indication that it would make a difference to "current efforts" one way or another.
Personal opinion o' Tony is as follows:
I'm personally boycotting NCsoft games. Not so much because of City of Heroes specifically (though that is part of it), but because they have shut down five games now that I know of: Exteel, Dungeon Runners, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, and City of Heroes. A sixth is, in my opinion, likely on the cusp of being shut down, Wildstar.
The MMORPG genre is particularly conducive to spending inordinate amounts of time, effort, and money on games to be successful. Personally, I probably spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 on City of Heroes, if you count three trips to California to meet up at Player Summits, two subscriptions for almost the entire run of the game, bonus packs and "Paragon Points" on the market after the launch of CoH: Freedom, hosting costs for the Paragon Wiki, these forums, and the Titan Network sites, plus miscellaneous expenses. (But not including probably $2000 or $3000 over the course of the years in computer upgrades that I probably would have foregone were it not for me wanting to see Ultra Mode in all of its glory...)
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't regret spending that. I know people who have hobbies such as golf, woodworking, or car stereos that spend a lot more. I genuinely enjoyed playing the game and being part of the community it fostered. But there's also still no denying that the day they shut down the servers, I felt like most of that investment was simply gone without any kind of visible trace.
So hopefully it's pretty obvious when I say that I have been extremely reluctant to invest in any MMORPG since then. I have at least tried Champions Online, Star Trek Online, Elder Scrolls Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Neverwinter, and probably two or three more games that I don't even remember. None have really "stuck" in that right now, I'm not playing any of them. I even went so far as to buy the "Hero of the North" or whatever the top tier perk pack was called was Neverwinter and some Zen (currency) to burn on some extra in-game swag thinking that surely I would stick with that game, but after about a month or two of playing, I just kind of fell away from it. I just didn't feel like sinking a crapton more money and time into another game knowing that eventually it will probably shut down also, without any kind of effort to ensure the community that once they decided to pull the plug, the community won't just be hung out to dry.
So in that sense, I genuinely feel that NCsoft has poisoned the well when it comes to MMORPGs for me. And if I'm not eager to really engage in other MMORPGs, I sure as hell am not going to reward the company that made it clear in no uncertain terms that it prioritizes some nebulous long-term business strategy over a profitable game and dedicated community. If other people just plain find Guild Wars 2, Lineage I or II, or Wildstar so irresistible that they're willing to throw money at them even after what happened especially to Tabula Rasa and City of Heroes fans, then more power to them. But I urge each and every one of them to seriously consider before spending one cent in those games, what if NCsoft decides tomorrow that their game isn't in the long-term business interest of the company? Would you still shell out your hard-earned money knowing that the game is living on borrowed time?
As for "current efforts," I surely do wish that people would stop trying to guess what's in the heads of NCsoft executives. I assure you that whatever it is you think they're thinking, you're almost certainly wrong. Under the current management, there's no amount of "respecting their culture" or "avoiding making waves" that will change their mind about City of Heroes. The truth of the matter is that NCsoft is engaged in a political battle with Nexon (http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/Article.aspx?aid=3002429) right now that puts any kind of squabbles over City of Heroes really low on their radar. In fact, there's some question over whether NCsoft is even the right company (http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2015/02/133_173838.html) to be approaching over releasing City of Heroes.
My point is that people saying that doing X or not doing Y will positively or negatively impact us getting City of Heroes back are just plain wrong. That die was cast in August of 2012. At this point, my sincere advice is to avoid NCsoft games not as some kind of political statement, but because I believe you'd be wasting your money if you don't. And stop worrying about what NCsoft does or doesn't think about the City of Heroes community, because the harsh truth right now is that it's highly doubtful that they're thinking anything about us.
And no, that's not some nihilistic statement of resignation. Things change. Politics shift. Properties change hands. Once we have new players to work with or a new opportunity presents itself, we'll try again. I'm still 100% certain that at some point, we'll have our city back, with or without NCsoft's help.
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I have quietly boycotted ncsoft games since the COH closure. I was actually following Wildstar development with interest as a. It looked interesting and b. It's "by" the same people who had coh. Keep money in the family.
Obviously I was more attached to ncsoft then they were to me.
I hope for the best with the Wildstar community, but I will not sub until I can log into coh again.
I have been good since IronWoof asked to tone down the anti-ncsoft rhetoric during the current negotiations.
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I won't have anything to do with NCSoft since the shutdown. I tried Aion and GuildWars before the end but neither held my interest long enough to wait through an update. They have nothing else to interest me even if they didn't have my animosity from the CoH sunset. . .
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Once we have new players to work with or a new opportunity presents itself, we'll try again. I'm still 100% certain that at some point, we'll have our city back, with or without NCsoft's help.
Does this mean that there are no current negotiations about acquiring CoH, and that they will be on hiatus until there is some resolution/change in the landscape?
If so, that would be significant news to me.
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NCSoft are on my personal boycott list too. Not buying another of their games until CoH is back online.
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Does this mean that there are no current negotiations about acquiring CoH, and that they will be on hiatus until there is some resolution/change in the landscape?
If so, that would be significant news to me.
Good question....
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How big a waste of time would it be for the entire CoH-loving community to BOYCOTT NCSoft?
Total waste. It's been tried, and did not do jack except harm more civil attempts.
Are the other games they offer really that good that no one would put them aside to demand NCSoft stop dictating to us what's playable and what's not?
There were few enough of CoH players for NCSoft to not change their position on canning the game in three months before the announcement and closure.
Your belief ex-CoH players are a significant portion of those games' paying player base that NCSoft would actually react to such boycott is completely baseless.
Would anyone be willing to make the effort to demand either a re-release, a sequel inside of a year, or a standalone game (standalone or able to link up with people without servers)?
The only option you named that's anywhere near realistic is a re-release, and far as we know someone's already in talks with NCSoft about that right now, see http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,9675.0.html
How much do we want our City back?
I'll take "enough to play it cool instead of harming the best chance we have" for however long it takes.
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Negotiations are ongoing for the purchase of the COH IP.
Does this mean that there are no current negotiations about acquiring CoH, and that they will be on hiatus until there is some resolution/change in the landscape?
If so, that would be significant news to me.
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I know a lot of former CoH players boycotted NCSoft games. Immediately following the announcement of the closure...many efforts occurred to try to show NCSoft that they should keep CoH open.
As stated by a few others... there are already ongoing negotiations that are taking place for the purchase of the CoH IP. Unfortunately due to a Non-Disclosure Agreement (Which is common place during negotiations) nothing can truly be said except that: negotiations are ongoing.
We are all here because we loved CoH and we want our game back. Unfortunately all we can do now is wait for either a "Yes the deal is done etc etc" or a "No the deal fell through etc etc." Please know though that even if the deal does fall through (cross your fingers and toes that doesn't happen) that the current negotiations will provide valuable insight into any further attempts and that IF that were to happen... that one "NO"... does not mean we will stop trying... ever!
I specialize in ridiculous questions, so I'm going to ask this (or, rather, these):
How big a waste of time would it be for the entire CoH-loving community to BOYCOTT NCSoft? Are the other games they offer really that good that no one would put them aside to demand NCSoft stop dictating to us what's playable and what's not? Would anyone be willing to make the effort to demand either a re-release, a sequel inside of a year, or a standalone game (standalone or able to link up with people without servers)?
How much do we want our City back?
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Negotiations are ongoing for the purchase of the COH IP.
That was my understanding of things. I just didn't know how else to interpret the portion of TonyV's post that I quoted.
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Just remember that any news regarding the purchase attempt will be reported directly by Downix...or be in the PURCHASE ATTEMPT thread started by Codewalker.
That was my understanding of things. I just didn't know how else to interpret the portion of TonyV's post that I quoted.
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Well said, Tony, and I couldn't agree more.
Thank you for speaking up; it's good to see you coming around here again actively. :D
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Does this mean that there are no current negotiations about acquiring CoH, and that they will be on hiatus until there is some resolution/change in the landscape?
If so, that would be significant news to me.
No, that's Tony's personal speculation, he's not directly involved either way.
No news is no news.
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Will I give NCSoft another cent - no
Is this a "ragequit" - no, I just will not give my money to a company that will shut down a game that wasn't failing, taking away a goodly amount of my money both spent and unspent sitting there as points. Had I already bought another NCSoft game, would I play it free ? sure if I liked it, I just won't invest in something which might be taken away in my view without proper reason, denying me value for my investment.
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I have quietly boycotted ncsoft games since the COH closure. I was actually following Wildstar development with interest as a. It looked interesting and b. It's "by" the same people who had coh. Keep money in the family.
Obviously I was more attached to ncsoft then they were to me.
I hope for the best with the Wildstar community, but I will not sub until I can log into coh again.
I have been good since IronWoof asked to tone down the anti-ncsoft rhetoric during the current negotiations.
I agree with you duane, I too have boycotted ncsofts games. However for me it started a bit earlier before the closure.
A year and a half ago I started to let go of my hate and anger for Ncsoft, and I have been a good person :D.
I also agree with Tony.
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That's not true. There is no indication that it would make a difference to "current efforts" one way or another.
We were asked to keep a low profile and specifically not to conduct a letter writing campaign. Until I hear different I think it is a bad idea.
Personally, I'm not playing or buying NCSoft product. I haven't since the close and don't intend to. But that's my personal choice, not an organized effort of any kind.
I have also said that if they do sell the IP and image, the first month I am back in game I will subscribe to one of thier games or maybe buy Guild wars II as a "thank you".
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As for "current efforts," I surely do wish that people would stop trying to guess what's in the heads of NCsoft executives. I assure you that whatever it is you think they're thinking, you're almost certainly wrong. Under the current management, there's no amount of "respecting their culture" or "avoiding making waves" that will change their mind about City of Heroes. The truth of the matter is that NCsoft is engaged in a political battle with Nexon (http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/Article.aspx?aid=3002429) right now that puts any kind of squabbles over City of Heroes really low on their radar. In fact, there's some question over whether NCsoft is even the right company (http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2015/02/133_173838.html) to be approaching over releasing City of Heroes.
My point is that people saying that doing X or not doing Y will positively or negatively impact us getting City of Heroes back are just plain wrong. That die was cast in August of 2012. At this point, my sincere advice is to avoid NCsoft games not as some kind of political statement, but because I believe you'd be wasting your money if you don't. And stop worrying about what NCsoft does or doesn't think about the City of Heroes community, because the harsh truth right now is that it's highly doubtful that they're thinking anything about us.
I think its fair to say there's little we can do to improve things generally, and the threat of blackmail or the carrot of terminating one would certainly have no beneficial effect whatsoever. However, whether we can have a negative impact is less clear. I would say that when you have no upside and an uncertain downside, that's not a recommended course of action. However, this is in the context of a very public and visible coordinated boycott. What any individual person chooses to do in terms of buying or not buying NCSoft games probably has exactly no impact whatsoever in either direction, because that act would be financially unnoticeable.
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Just quickly commenting here on this then I'm out.
Please.. not this again. It doesn't help anyone.
If you personally want to not buy things from a company, by all means. But let's not rally or anything of that sort, ok? It would only hurt in some way, and we are *FINE* where we are in regards to NCSoft. Let us not mess it up.
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I think its fair to say there's little we can do to improve things generally, and the threat of blackmail or the carrot of terminating one would certainly have no beneficial effect whatsoever. However, whether we can have a negative impact is less clear. I would say that when you have no upside and an uncertain downside, that's not a recommended course of action. However, this is in the context of a very public and visible coordinated boycott. What any individual person chooses to do in terms of buying or not buying NCSoft games probably has exactly no impact whatsoever in either direction, because that act would be financially unnoticeable.
I wouldn't look at finances so much as reputation and the general nature of how boycotting and threatening would give us a bad image for NCSoft and lead them to think "maybe we shouldn't deal with this crowd".
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The only message I can send to NCSOFT is voting with my wallet. Does that suck for other companies under their umbrella? Yes it does, but that's the problem of collateral damage. That's going to be my policy with NCSOFT until I see some change that makes me reconsider that position.
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I'll likely get a little flak for this considering my involvement with Revival. But here goes...
Am I specifically going out of my way to "Boycott" NCSoft? No. There's no real point. The $60 I spent on Guild Wars 2 isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to the billions they pull from Korea, and China. I enjoy Guild Wars 2 decently enough every now and then, and that enjoyment (I feel) is worth more to me, than the money I spent on it is worth to NCSoft.
Boycotting them doesn't help getting the game back, nor do many other tactics people have considered or tried. Spamming their Facebook accounts doesn't help. They simply don't care, and our community is...truth be told... far to small compared to say...the Lineage II player base.
Also, if a large portion of us is being rude and demanding...it does make it that much more difficult for those of us who're trying to deal with them on a business level.
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Look, I know that some people are critical of my attitude towards NCsoft, but the simple truth is that during their negotiations with Paragon Studios, I bent over backwards trying to be as nice as I could towards NCsoft. I don't have a copy of the exact message I posted, but I was the guy who posted--and took quite a bit of grief for--the message on the official forums that "NCsoft is not our enemy." I conveyed many times that we the community simply wanted to ensure the continuity of the game, and warned NCsoft that there would be negative public relations consequences if they kicked us to the curb. I privately volunteered to do my best to help sell more copies of other NCsoft games, and does anyone remember even Mercedes Lackey volunteering to pitch NCsoft for free if they'd just work with us to keep the game running?
After which they promptly kicked us to the curb.
So yeah, I'm not exactly in the most conciliatory of moods towards NCsoft over this. And while I morally support the efforts of anyone who approaches NCsoft who thinks that they have a new and unique way of getting City of Heroes back up and running, the simple matter of the fact is that the "new efforts" have been ongoing for a year and a half now (http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,9675.0.html). While I know that they have the best of intentions, and I still hope that they're able to pull some kind of miracle out of their hat, how long are you willing to be strung along by NCsoft? Has anyone considered the possibility that NCsoft is telling people what they want to hear specifically to avoid the PR backlash that was getting out of hand? "If we just make nice, they'll be a lot more likely to sell! It won't hurt, right?"
Except that in my opinion, it does hurt. For one thing, I've seen people beaten up on the forums here and on Facebook for expressing the fundamental opinion that NCsoft sucks for what they did. For another, if there's no backlash and NCsoft gets away with it scot free, what kind of message does that send to them, and even to the industry as a whole? That you can shut down games and kick communities that have been loyal and dedicated to you for almost a decade without any negative consequence? If you want to send that message and are still under the mistaken belief that we have everything gain and nothing to lose by being nice, then by gummy, I won't stop you, everyone has a right to their opinion. But I'm not on board that train. And while I'm not actively encouraging people to be rude or obnoxious, I'm certainly not going to advice people against sending a stern message saying that this is unacceptable company behavior, and we will not financially support companies that engage in these practices.
Ultimately, if NCsoft parts with the IP for City of Heroes or in any way decides to relaunch the game, it's not going to be because the community made nice with them. We've done nice, and it didn't work. It's not even going to be because of the financial compensation for the game. They've been offered millions of dollars for it and turned it down. When it happens, it will be because either 1) they don't have a choice because they're being forced to by a higher authority or due to a dire need for money, or 2) we have a new boss in town with a different vision on how communities should be treated.
And yes, as Codewalker said, I am not with the team that's been communicating with NCsoft since September 2013 on trying to relaunch the game. All of that is my personal opinion. You are more than welcome to disagree, even post here that I'm crazy, and I won't hold it against you unless you're being egregiously confrontational. Like I said, I'm not trying to kill hope here because things will change and as I've said before, they can say no a thousand times but all it takes is one yes. I'm actually pretty optimistic, but it's a long haul game. After a year and a half of dealing with them on a business level, five months since any word at all, I'm assuming that any kind of negotiations have at best indefinitely stalled (at worst been deliberately strung out) until I hear otherwise. But hey... prove me wrong!
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I'll likely get a little flak for this considering my involvement with Revival. But here goes...
Am I specifically going out of my way to "Boycott" NCSoft? No. There's no real point. The $60 I spent on Guild Wars 2 isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to the billions they pull from Korea, and China. I enjoy Guild Wars 2 decently enough every now and then, and that enjoyment (I feel) is worth more to me, than the money I spent on it is worth to NCSoft.
Boycotting them doesn't help getting the game back, nor do many other tactics people have considered or tried. Spamming their Facebook accounts doesn't help. They simply don't care, and our community is...truth be told... far to small compared to say...the Lineage II player base.
Also, if a large portion of us is being rude and demanding...it does make it that much more difficult for those of us who're trying to deal with them on a business level.
Irish_Girl, do you consider as you progress what will happen to APR if NCSoft fades away and an IP deal never happens? I'm not being disrespectful here, because I truly admire everything you're doing, but I am curious. What will become of all that work of yours (and the work of whomever else is helping you, if there are others)? Just because they haven't appeared to notice much yet, they might hear about APR after it launches in one form or another and then serve you a C & D. I mean, you've even got a public website, Facebook and forums, no? How will that go over if a deal never materializes?
I do agree that NCSoft doesn't want some sort of mass spamming like at the closure. Even though people did this (for the most part) in what we consider a polite fashion, what amounted to initially leaking the higher-ups' emails then bombing them with "we love the game, don't shut it down!" emails as well as mailing capes and masks to them didn't go over too well. Clearly they were done with CoX and didn't like being harassed about it; unfortunately for NCSoft, freedom of speech is so engrained in US culture that it was natural for us to make our voices heard.
People have said that the South Korean public is also big on picketing, holding demonstrations and expressing themselves when they feel they've been wronged, but I don't live there so I don't know. NCSoft sure didn't like it when we did it, though.
I have no idea by this point if I23/CoX IP efforts have totally dropped off their radar, or if we were ever really on it to begin with (which even Nate said at the start might be the case). Either way, though, we aren't going to get anywhere unless they really want to budge. I'd imagine that, as the years go by and nothing happens, we will figure out the truth for ourselves as Tony said. ;) Either way, we're no worse off than we were before Nate Downes & Crew began their hard work, we're still grateful even if they try and fail, and hey, at least it has given us the tiny sliver of hope we haven't had in a couple years, right?
Personally I've never really had a totally concrete feeling either way about what will happen, but common sense does dictate that A.) if CoX was so wonderful to them, they wouldn't have shut it down in the first place and B.) if they wanted it back up, they could have made it happen WAY faster than this.
I just wish they would realize when they do something like look at Wildstar's total bomb here in the west that their own horrible reputation proceeds them. Doing whatever is most profitable for their company is their priority, but expecting gamers to be a mass of brainless sheep willing to close down one launcher and blindly open the next a minute later with nary a look backward is ridiculous.
It doesn't seem like NCSoft realizes their actions all have consequences. Or alternatively, I can only surmise that NCSoft feels the CoX player base was so tiny that the loss of us in other games won't affect them at all. However, if they would for once glance back at the big picture, each game they've closed has likely had a separate player base for each, and if you add us up together and it's a larger figure than they'd like to think. Plus, we tell our guildies, family and friends, then the press reports each closure for other MMO gamers to read and they spread the word even further, and so on....
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You are more than welcome to disagree, even post here that I'm crazy, and I won't hold it against you unless you're being egregiously confrontational.
I think you're crazy! ;P
But hardly for your opinion on the matter. I think it's a very valid opinion, I can see and understand why you have that opinion...and you're certainly not alone in your lack of warm fuzzies for NCSoft.
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Irish_Girl, do you consider as you progress what will happen to APR if NCSoft fades away and an IP deal never happens? I'm not being disrespectful here, because I truly admire everything you're doing, but I am curious. What will become of all that work of yours (and the work of whomever else is helping you, if there are others)? Just because they haven't appeared to notice much yet, they might hear about APR after it launches in one form or another and then serve you a C & D. I mean, you've even got a public website, Facebook and forums, no? How will that go over if a deal never materializes?
Of course I consider that possibility, and Nate and I have had a few fairly long discussions on exactly that. I'm still hopeful that the deal will go through despite the delays, I am however not naive enough to think that everything always goes as one hopes every time.
Truth be told, I expected to see a C&D show up a couple days after I started talking about it publicly. (Which was just a short time after the sunset.)
Those of us who work on it understand that our plans might have to drastically change, or even just entirely go up in smoke. But we keep working because we love Paragon City and want to go smack some baddies there again some day.
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I am not a copyright lawyer or anything, but I don't think you are violating any copyright laws until you actually either make money on APR or have a playable game you invite others to play. I don't think there is anything illegal about recreating the physical layout of the game.
So hopefully you have some time before someone tries to pull the plug.
Of course I consider that possibility, and Nate and I have had a few fairly long discussions on exactly that. I'm still hopeful that the deal will go through despite the delays, I am however not naive enough to think that everything always goes as one hopes every time.
Truth be told, I expected to see a C&D show up a couple days after I started talking about it publicly. (Which was just a short time after the sunset.)
Those of us who work on it understand that our plans might have to drastically change, or even just entirely go up in smoke. But we keep working because we love Paragon City and want to go smack some baddies there again some day.
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if there's no backlash and NCsoft gets away with it scot free, what kind of message does that send to them, and even to the industry as a whole? That you can shut down games and kick communities that have been loyal and dedicated to you for almost a decade without any negative consequence? If you want to send that message and are still under the mistaken belief that we have everything gain and nothing to lose by being nice, then by gummy, I won't stop you, everyone has a right to their opinion. But I'm not on board that train. And while I'm not actively encouraging people to be rude or obnoxious, I'm certainly not going to advice people against sending a stern message saying that this is unacceptable company behavior, and we will not financially support companies that engage in these practices.
Objectively speaking, there simply aren't enough City of Heroes advocates to send any message to NCSoft except minor annoying ones. As an abstract goal, I believe, and have spoken about, the belief that there exist some social contract obligations MMO operators ought to have (discounting the legal ones) when they create, sell, and financially benefit from social communities. But there's a reason that threats of boycotts generally fail, and that's because MMO operators, like most game publishers, presume a certain number of disgruntled players will always exist. Demonstrating yourself to be one communicates nothing interesting to them. Without sufficient momentum, they don't have impact because they are comparable to threatening to make the sun go away at dusk unless your demands are met.
Whether someone *wants* to boycott NCSoft on principle is, in fact, explicitly a matter of principle. But if the question is whether it will have a positive impact or any impact at all, I'm afraid the objective rational reality is that it won't have a beneficial one to the community. That should not factor into stances based on principle, because stances based on principle shouldn't factor in their objective probability of having a beneficial outcome. If they do, they aren't strictly speaking stances based on principle alone.
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I am not a copyright lawyer or anything, but I don't think you are violating any copyright laws until you actually either make money on APR or have a playable game you invite others to play. I don't think there is anything illegal about recreating the physical layout of the game.
Technically speaking, copyright law grants to the copyright holder the exclusive right to create derivative works. However, as a practical matter, no one is generally held responsible for derivative works no one actually sees, and unlike trademark law a copyright holder can selectively choose to enforce copyright (you must defend all infringements against trademarks or lose the protection as a matter of law). So copyright holders could technically sue an eight year old who sketches Statesman on their bedroom wall, but of course no one ever does that. However, legally speaking, they probably could. Copyright law is kinda sticky in this regard, especially because copyright can be selectively enforced so caselaw is often spotty and inconsistent.
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Objectively speaking, there simply aren't enough City of Heroes advocates to send any message to NCSoft except minor annoying ones.
Nevertheless, I think that it's important. When NCsoft shut down City of Heroes, I'm firmly convinced that they did so with the expectation that few people would care, and most people would move on to other games, preferably one of theirs. This is an attitude that I think is very dangerous, as to me it represents a fundamental shift in why game developers develop games to begin with and shows a total disregard for how much time, energy, and money people tend to spend on MMORPGs. We're not talking about a $60 one-off game purchase, but we're being treated as if that's all the game was worth to us.
Maybe NCsoft doesn't care what the City of Heroes community thinks, but I for one don't intend to be a party to what is going on, with publishers focusing on maximizing (not even making, but maximizing) profits over communities.
That's also part of the reason why I think that the MMORPG genre has become so degraded today. People don't want to lay out hundreds or thousands of dollars and/or thousands of hours on a game just to have it disappear on them. Weirdly enough, the first generation of MMORPGs hasn't suffered much from the mentality plaguing other companies today. Everquest is still running, as is Ultima Online an a spate of other games that have been around since the very early days of MMORPGs. World of Warcraft seems to be pretty stable and not going anywhere. Outside of those, it's a toss-up whether any game you start playing today will be around in another year or two.
I still keep hoping that a company will come along that has what I consider a community-friendly sunset plan. Either maintain a single-player version of the game, or develop the server to be end-user friendly enough that when the game shuts down, people can buy the server software as a stand-alone purchase and keep the game running on a smaller scale. I know that a company that has a plan like that would definitely entice me to start shelling out the cash again.
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^ I agree pretty much with everything Tony's saying, and I'll add, I'm pretty much of the mind that the so called negotiations are pretty much dead. NO business in its right mind takes this long to seal a deal; it's rank incompetence at best.
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^ I agree pretty much with everything Tony's saying, and I'll add, I'm pretty much of the mind that the so called negotiations are pretty much dead. NO business in its right mind takes this long to seal a deal; it's rank incompetence at best.
I hope your not right, but I'm starting to feel the same way, I know people have advised that negotiations can go on a long time, but it does have a feeling of not going anywhere. We're at the end of March 2015 with nothing being mentioned since last year, people again will mention NDAs, but really what's to be lost by saying how the negotiations are going, just a run down of things. (I know we don't have any rights to know) but considering the community is still here after 2+ years after shut down say's a lot about our cotinued support for a game we all loved. (And would rather be playing than any other game!).
Just my thoughts, have no bad feelings towards anyone, just want to go back to my City.
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All of you have gone mad.
The light at the end Of the tunnel just got a little dim. So I hope you're wrong and we soon hear something.
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It has been stated, often, that we will be told if the negotiations are dead. Until then, I will wait.
Frankly, the time to make a stink was during the time between the announcement and the closure. We did that. AP33, Masks through the mail, snail mail to Korea. We got their attention, but it wasn't enough. I don't think we can do much to them as our numbers are pretty small and the people you could engage has shrunk greatly since the closure.
If you really want to commit to a campaign you will need an email marketing strategy, a focused social media campaign and events that are not only visible, but also unavoidable. (Holding a rally in an NCSoft game and making clear why we are all there kind of thing)
But it can take years to build momentum and get attention that you need. I have been working an NPO of chemical cleanup that everyone except the polluter's agree needs to happen. The county I live in just won a multi-million dollar law suit against them. We have been fight for 5 years to get to this point. Still not resolved.
I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it is very difficult and the people we could motivate with a campaign are probably not enough in number to be a threat to NCSoft. That's what corporations respond to, threats and money.
Look, I know that some people are critical of my attitude towards NCsoft, but the simple truth is that during their negotiations with Paragon Studios, I bent over backwards trying to be as nice as I could towards NCsoft. I don't have a copy of the exact message I posted, but I was the guy who posted--and took quite a bit of grief for--the message on the official forums that "NCsoft is not our enemy." I conveyed many times that we the community simply wanted to ensure the continuity of the game, and warned NCsoft that there would be negative public relations consequences if they kicked us to the curb. I privately volunteered to do my best to help sell more copies of other NCsoft games, and does anyone remember even Mercedes Lackey volunteering to pitch NCsoft for free if they'd just work with us to keep the game running?
After which they promptly kicked us to the curb.
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I don't think Nate's lying to us, I think NCSoft are stringing him along too.
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I don't think Nate's lying to us, I think NCSoft are stringing him along too.
For what reason?
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To prevent another PR issue, I'd imagine. CoH fans are more likely to stay quiet and wait if we think negotiations are ongoing.
There's not many of us compared to some other games, granted, but we're loud, and we have plenty of free time now that Our Game is gone.
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To prevent another PR issue, I'd imagine. CoH fans are more likely to stay quiet and wait if we think negotiations are ongoing.
There's not many of us compared to some other games, granted, but we're loud, and we have plenty of free time now that Our Game is gone.
That's convolutedly illogical. If NCSoft wanted us to go away, the absolute best, most obvious way to do that would have been for NCSoft to tell the negotiating team they had destroyed all copies of the server software and source code as part of the shutdown. Period, end of story, go away now. That's what I would have recommended, if it was my job to make the CoH playerbase go away. And I would have done it right from the start.
If they want to avoid a PR disaster, the best way to do that is to have no story at all. By propagating a fake negotiation, they are creating a story where none existed. Once you start ascribing that level of stupid to NCSoft, you have to assume its also possible the negotiations are taking a lot longer than you expect because NCSoft keeps forgetting how to communicate in English and has to relearn the language with a Rosetta Stone refresher course.
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To prevent another PR issue, I'd imagine. CoH fans are more likely to stay quiet and wait if we think negotiations are ongoing.
There's not many of us compared to some other games, granted, but we're loud, and we have plenty of free time now that Our Game is gone.
Corporations tend to think on the impact to the bottom line and I think there are just not enough of us to be effective, no matter how loud we are. I doubt that many of the people who are ardent in this cause are not already passing on NCSoft offerings. So how are we going to hurt them further?
It's really frustrating, but there are fewer of us now then there were 1 1/2 years ago and there will be fewer every week. Think about the leaders who stepped up to head Task Force Hail Mary. How many are still active in this cause?
And I'm not talking about players who might come back, but people whose passion can be engaged beyond complaining about it on Facebook. While that is also a diminishing number it is far greater than the number of people who are willing to get involved.
We have been asked not to do anything and told that if there was something we could do, we would know. Until that changes or the deal fails, we should do that.
Even if it failed, I would recommend doing very little beyond going on to the next interested party and putting our support there.
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That's convolutedly illogical. If NCSoft wanted us to go away, the absolute best, most obvious way to do that would have been for NCSoft to tell the negotiating team they had destroyed all copies of the server software and source code as part of the shutdown. Period, end of story, go away now. That's what I would have recommended, if it was my job to make the CoH playerbase go away. And I would have done it right from the start.
If they want to avoid a PR disaster, the best way to do that is to have no story at all. By propagating a fake negotiation, they are creating a story where none existed. Once you start ascribing that level of stupid to NCSoft, you have to assume its also possible the negotiations are taking a lot longer than you expect because NCSoft keeps forgetting how to communicate in English and has to relearn the language with a Rosetta Stone refresher course.
Perhaps at least one Management person from NCSoft was formerly willing to mull it over a tiny bit *before* the Nexon takeover threat began, and *before* Netmarble and NCSoft subsequently had to exchange $635 million worth of stocks, but now things have completely stalled in the last few months since. All Nate, that NCSoft Management person and we can do is wait it out until the dust settles.
However, they alternatively may have been hoping we'd eventually go away if they strung us along for an inordinate amount of time, though. Perhaps they feared that saying outright "No" to Nate or changing their story yet again two years after the shuttering ("Oh, hey, we forgot to mention when all those other people tried to buy CoX that we destroyed all the server backups, silly us") would just whip up another storm of dissent in the press.
And I thought the deal has always been that there was no source code, hence the zombie mode i23 backup snapshot without the chance to ever modify, patch or add to the original CoX. Maybe that *was* their attempt to put Nate & Crew off, it just didn't work. ;)
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If NCSoft wanted us to go away, the absolute best, most obvious way to do that would have been for NCSoft to tell the negotiating team they had destroyed all copies of the server software and source code as part of the shutdown.
They can't do that precisely for the same reason they're not letting go of the IP: Because on some accounting sheet somewhere, it's listed as a line item as an asset that has some particular value that, in theory, makes the company worth more. If they went telling someone that they've effectively destroyed the asset, they wouldn't be able to claim it on their balance sheets.
(Incidentally, I believe that they also have everyone's user data stored somewhere for similar purpose; because that is an asset with value.)
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I don't think Nate's lying to us, I think NCSoft are stringing him along too.
Well! You're not gonna get an invite to the ITF with that attitude, mister! (Please don't take offense, I am just joking)
I don't think Nate's dumb.... if X months goes by and they don't return his call he will keep his word and tell us it's dead. It could be a year. I'm fine, it's not my $ on the line. I cannot imagine the price of his phone bill calling over the world for us.
With that said all we have is Nate. I don't know him, but I believe Titan Networks and all involved vetted him as legit. He will tell us when it's dead and until then I will keep giving him my faith.
As for NCsoft, I think no one can read into anything about their business practice and how they look at this deal. My only opinion is they are chasing the next "big thing" and customers are just an inconvenience to your money....and can be thrown away (in bulk) because there are always more.
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NCSoft made me cry. For that they will never see another dime from me.
But a community organized boycott won't get NCSoft to suddenly regret hurting people and make public apologies and bring the game back online.
Remember CoH was making profit when they killed. If CoHs net profit was such an insignificant amount that it wouldn't be missed, then a boycott will need to hurt NCSofts profits at least 2x/3x the yearly net profits of CoH to even register to them as anything more than an amusing glitch.
Not worth the effort IMHO
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They can't do that precisely for the same reason they're not letting go of the IP: Because on some accounting sheet somewhere, it's listed as a line item as an asset that has some particular value that, in theory, makes the company worth more. If they went telling someone that they've effectively destroyed the asset, they wouldn't be able to claim it on their balance sheets.
(Incidentally, I believe that they also have everyone's user data stored somewhere for similar purpose; because that is an asset with value.)
That too would be ascribing cosmic levels of stupidity to the company. It seems superficially reasonable to guess that NCSoft might have done that, but the fact is NCSoft would have been leaving money on the table, so to speak. When they shut down both Paragon Studios and the game, they had an opportunity to accelerate depreciation of all of the hardware and software to zero, which in effect would make them money on the books. Under no circumstances would you try to keep the game servers around as a tangible asset. That isn't just stupid, that's accounting malfeasance against your own company.
Keep in mind the Intellectual Property of the game hypothetically has value. The source code might have value - they could license it to someone. But the actual server instances had and have no material accounting value. NCSoft could easily have claimed they have source code repositories, but no actual working server instances and lacked the tools to create them from the source code. In fact, from what I know of server instances, its trivially easy to hand someone all the source code in its entirety and still leave them functionally incapable of standing up servers in any reasonable amount of time.
To make a server, you need the programs that comes from the source code. But you also need the databases that ran the game, that have to be configured in just the right way with just the right schema and just the right seed data (like all database-driven applications). You need configuration files to make the programs do what you need. You need hardware and software infrastructure of a specific configuration. You need the server-side data of things like powers and critters and missions and maps - the server side version of what we have in the client-side piggs. Without all of those things specifically configured and version-synchronized, you don't have a functioning game. A backup of a server instance would give a prospective buyer a quick-start ability to stand up a new CoH server. But if all you had were Castle's spreadsheets and the server source code and that's it? Maybe someone like Codewalker could eventually cobble a server together under those circumstances, after an extremely long period of time, maybe, to reverse engineer all of the rest of the infrastructure and tools. But you are talking about a Herculean level of effort.
Separately, the source code itself would have extremely limited value on paper. Who would buy it? Only crazy people like CoH fans that wanted to restart the game in theory would place any value on it. In industry terms, that code is basically worthless. Trying to value it significantly on the books would probably not survive meaningful audit. It would be far safer to value the CoH server software at zero because that could be rationally justified, rather than some arbitrary significant number that would be difficult to justify. Especially because there is a perfectly legal process for selling something that you had depreciated to zero in good faith (through a simple accounting adjustment).
But it would still be easy for NCSoft to say that all they had were source code repositories and they couldn't let anyone have them, and they didn't know how to create a viable server instance with that so they couldn't give one away, so long, thanks for all the fish.
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It is really hard to read doom and gloom (otherwise known in business circles as reality) every time I come here. I know it has been said before, but it is just as true now as the first time it was mentioned.
Essentially, what I get out of this is that there is no REAL incentive for them to do this, and IF it ever happens it will be only because they got tired of the untiring efforts (read:persistence) of Nate, and the community he represents, and only then after our patience has been pushed to the point of breaking while waiting.
Sorry, but sometimes the darkness creeps in, and then again, sometimes it comes rushing in like a tidal wave!
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It is really hard to read doom and gloom (otherwise known in business circles as reality) every time I come here. I know it has been said before, but it is just as true now as the first time it was mentioned.
Essentially, what I get out of this is that there is no REAL incentive for them to do this, and IF it ever happens it will be only because they got tired of the untiring efforts (read:persistence) of Nate, and the community he represents, and only then after our patience has been pushed to the point of breaking while waiting.
Sorry, but sometimes the darkness creeps in, and then again, sometimes it comes rushing in like a tidal wave!
There's no real business incentive I can think of for why NCSoft should sell the IP, unless they think they can get a reasonable price for it and there's no significant downside to the transaction. However, there's also no credible reason I can think of for why they would talk to any suitors for the property unless they were at least considering the sale in the first place, because no theory that suggests its a good idea to string the players along this much time after shutdown makes any sort of sense at all.
Unfortunately, I think things simply are what they appear to be, for good and bad, and theories about why they might not be I don't find to be more than highly improbable. Its easy to fill the absence of information with speculation, but speculation driven by logic absent information always seems more reasonable than it eventually turns out to be.
The fact that we haven't been told anything recently is not a data point. Absence of observation is not an observation of absence.
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Keep in mind the Intellectual Property of the game hypothetically has value. The source code might have value - they could license it to someone. But the actual server instances had and have no material accounting value. NCSoft could easily have claimed they have source code repositories, but no actual working server instances and lacked the tools to create them from the source code. In fact, from what I know of server instances, its trivially easy to hand someone all the source code in its entirety and still leave them functionally incapable of standing up servers in any reasonable amount of time.
I wasn't talking about the physical server instances that were running; I was referring to the code.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If NCsoft tells one group that the code is impossible to get back up and running but then claims it as having value in a list of company assets, it will be painfully obvious that they're lying to either one or the other. Best case scenario, it makes them look like idiots when it comes out that they told someone that they didn't have the code in any workable state when in fact they did. Worst case scenario, a future investor takes them at their word and accuses them of cooking the books to make the company look better.
Either way, the truth of the matter is that they do have the source code, and after seeing what amazing feats various hackers have accomplished over the years in various reverse engineering efforts, it is not only possible to get a real server instance running, but with the motivation that there would be to do so, highly likely to do so in relatively short order given the right team.
And yes, that means that if NCsoft ever were to claim that they don't have the source code or user database, that they deleted it all, I would immediately accuse them of lying because I simply wouldn't believe them. That would be like, I dunno, Pepsi claiming that they deleted the formula to make Mountain Dew. My reaction would be, "Yeah, right."
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That's convolutedly illogical.
Yes, as Leonard Nimoy used to say, illogical. However, it is consistent with NCSoft's prior behavior, which can be described as seemingly convoluted and illogical.
After the game shut down, Matt Miller related that Paragon Studios had been in discussions with NCSoft about allowing the studio to go independent and keep the game running... he indicated negotiations were ongoing almost to the very end... only one more signature was needed... things looked like they would work out... right up until they didn't.
Why did NCSoft do that? Why wouldn't they instead say, "No. The decision has been made, and it stands."
We've discussed the reasons over the ensuing years, including:
- The Korean cultural concept of kibun, which seems somewhat related to the multi-cultural concept of saving face. Negotiating with Paragon Studios--and later Nate Downes' group--was a way for NCSoft to show respect for the other party without committing to (or necessarily having any real intention of) agreement.
- NCSoft is a huge corporation with many different parts. People in different parts of the corporation don't necessarily know what's going on throughout NCSoft, they're just handling their immediate responsibilities.
Hence, when Nate approached NCSoft "like another Korean company" with a proper introduction, the contact person referred Nate to a part of the corporation that handles such requests. There, Nate's group was entered into a program, and their request is being processed ... and that's where they've been for many months (as far as we know).
It doesn't mean the key decision-makers at NCSoft intend to approve (or are even aware of) the deal. The longer the "negotiations" go on, the more it looks like NCSoft is just stringing along the request as a way to maintain business relations and avoid embarrassing either party.
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It doesn't mean the key decision-makers at NCSoft intend to approve (or are even aware of) the deal. The longer the "negotiations" go on, the more it looks like NCSoft is just stringing along the request as a way to maintain business relations and avoid embarrassing either party.
Yeah, the longer this goes on, the bleaker it looks for any actual deal to go through. Personally, I'd prefer a fallback position of just buying the IP - so that APR can continue with the rewrite.
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"the company that made it clear in no uncertain terms that it prioritizes some nebulous long-term business strategy over a profitable game and dedicated community"
Love it.
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i don't know squat about business but it occurs to me that there's a bit of collective cognitive dissonance going on here between the belief that nc soft is a huge company that doesn't really care about such a small transaction and the belief that the negotiations should have been done by now. those two beliefs don't really seem to mesh well.
i'm choosing to believe that the negotiations are ongoing and progressing until i hear otherwise, but that the people nate and company are negotiating with have a lot of other things on their plate as well. meanwhile i'll keep MIDSing.
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i'm choosing to believe that the negotiations are ongoing and progressing until i hear otherwise, but that the people nate and company are negotiating with have a lot of other things on their plate as well. meanwhile i'll keep MIDSing.
THIS !!!
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i don't know squat about business but it occurs to me that there's a bit of collective cognitive dissonance going on here between the belief that nc soft is a huge company that doesn't really care about such a small transaction and the belief that the negotiations should have been done by now. those two beliefs don't really seem to mesh well.
i'm choosing to believe that the negotiations are ongoing and progressing until i hear otherwise, but that the people nate and company are negotiating with have a lot of other things on their plate as well. meanwhile i'll keep MIDSing.
I agree, I understand how some people are starting to doubt our game will ever return. However, I like Vee choose to believe talks are on going, maybe not as fast as we would all like. But I have to think it still going. We have to remember the team has to play by NcSoft's rules which are based on Korean laws. There is a saying "slow and steady wins the race."
Do I think the reason the team is not talking is because of an NDA, yes. Before the Sept. post by Nate some of the now known team has made posts, now it is like the rug has been pulled out from under us; I get that. I think we just need to give Nate, the team, and Ncsoft time to hash the agreement out. And unfortunately negativity would only hamper the sell, not increase the time to our game to be bought.
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Yeah, the longer this goes on, the bleaker it looks for any actual deal to go through. Personally, I'd prefer a fallback position of just buying the IP - so that APR can continue with the rewrite.
I just hope Nate has the brass to tell us all is lost so we don't end up 5 years from now with no news. Do not be a cruel tease.
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I agree, I understand how some people are starting to doubt our game will ever return. However, I like Vee choose to believe talks are on going, maybe not as fast as we would all like. But I have to think it still going. We have to remember the team has to play by NcSoft's rules which are based on Korean laws. There is a saying "slow and steady wins the race."
Do I think the reason the team is not talking is because of an NDA, yes. Before the Sept. post by Nate some of the now known team has made posts, now it is like the rug has been pulled out from under us; I get that. I think we just need to give Nate, the team, and Ncsoft time to hash the agreement out. And unfortunately negativity would only hamper the sell, not increase the time to our game to be bought.
Nate has given some subtle hints as well. Did you see the unofficial "Phew" comment on FB the other day? That seems to indicate that he was glad there was not a hostile takeover of the current NCSoft management team... you can draw your own conclusions from that if you like... or not.
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If the negotiations fall through it will be posted. If they fail...that will not be the last time a purchase attempt is made.
I just hope Nate has the brass to tell us all is lost so we don't end up 5 years from now with no news. Do not be a cruel tease.
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Nate has given some subtle hints as well. Did you see the unofficial "Phew" comment on FB the other day? That seems to indicate that he was glad there was not a hostile takeover of the current NCSoft management team... you can draw your own conclusions from that if you like... or not.
I know, I was just going with the "official" saying. Yea I caught his comment on FB. Don't get me wrong, I really believe that the team and Nate will be successful.
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If NCsoft tells one group that the code is impossible to get back up and running but then claims it as having value in a list of company assets, it will be painfully obvious that they're lying to either one or the other.
I'm afraid this is simply incorrect. The intellectual property value of the source code to the game engine has nothing to do with whether it is even compilable. For example, if NCSoft was licensing that code to someone else there would be a revenue stream attached to that source code even if NCSoft no longer had a viable copy of it. At one point Cryptic was licensing the engine to NCSoft, and that means that source code had material value even if Cryptic itself lost its own copies of it.
And as a matter of objective fact, if *all* you had was the source code itself, it would be *impossible* to bring the game back up. As I said in the previous post, there's a very specific inventory of stuff you need to get the game servers running again, and either the source code or the compiled executables are just one of those things. And because its possible none of the people who ever got a server running from scratch were NCSoft employees other than the Paragon staff, its also possible exactly no one at NCSoft would even know what those things were, unless they had an exact copy of a server shard to go off of.
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honestly, wildstar was destined to fail from the start. they designed the game for the hardcore gamers. the "nothing is ever difficult enough" crowd. there are not enough of these people to support a game, yet they get their claws into dev staffs by playing on ego. swtor recently did this with an entire closed beta filled with nightmare raiders. the operations are way over tuned and it seems like none of the rest of the game was even tested. 4 months after release it is still a buggy mess that is losing subscriptions.
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I'm afraid this is simply incorrect.
And as a matter of objective fact, if *all* you had was the source code itself, it would be *impossible* to bring the game back up. As I said in the previous post, there's a very specific inventory of stuff you need to get the game servers running again, and either the source code or the compiled executables are just one of those things. And because its possible none of the people who ever got a server running from scratch were NCSoft employees other than the Paragon staff, its also possible exactly no one at NCSoft would even know what those things were, unless they had an exact copy of a server shard to go off of.
I know this is off topic, in your opinion does the snapshot, include that specific inventory of things needed to restart the game?
Also, if they don't have these things, do you think it is possible fudge (create them with arbitrary values or data) them into being?
Is it possible that this is why, even if they have the account, full restoration isn't possible?
I understand that you probably have no concrete knowledge, but in a thread with rampant speculation, please indulge.
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Hold the course, stay hopeful and not bitter.
Nate from all of my dealings with him is someone who truly still loves the game. If he can't get it done it will be picked up again. The next time if needed we would be able to find out what went wrong and carry on.
Paragon Studios tried to do a buyout and failed. TFHM tried to buy it out and failed. Nate and the new overlords of the game are still working on a deal and without all the personalities that caused the first 2 efforts to fail. I know you aren't aware of the personal issues that arose - but they were real and very nasty. I won't name the parties and who knows once free from the hands of NCSoft it may be possible to reach out to some of those who had experience to help - that can't help right now.
You might like to know all of the dirty secrets but it is best for the supporters to not know how the sausage is made sometimes.
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I'm afraid this is simply incorrect. The intellectual property value of the source code to the game engine has nothing to do with whether it is even compilable. For example, if NCSoft was licensing that code to someone else there would be a revenue stream attached to that source code even if NCSoft no longer had a viable copy of it. At one point Cryptic was licensing the engine to NCSoft, and that means that source code had material value even if Cryptic itself lost its own copies of it.
And as a matter of objective fact, if *all* you had was the source code itself, it would be *impossible* to bring the game back up. As I said in the previous post, there's a very specific inventory of stuff you need to get the game servers running again, and either the source code or the compiled executables are just one of those things. And because its possible none of the people who ever got a server running from scratch were NCSoft employees other than the Paragon staff, its also possible exactly no one at NCSoft would even know what those things were, unless they had an exact copy of a server shard to go off of.
This is what I personally think is happening - they are working to get the things necessary to restart the basic game. The game was not stopped with a thought to ever running it again. It was stopped in a manner to protect IP rights. The original source is - somewhere. It may not resurface for many years if ever in the wild. It will take time for the new group to either find the original stuff or where needed to rewrite programs to mess with the disk image. The least thing needed is a new launcher for one. Then the market software and accounting to set up new accounts. It is a big venture.
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I know this is off topic, in your opinion does the snapshot, include that specific inventory of things needed to restart the game?
Also, if they don't have these things, do you think it is possible fudge (create them with arbitrary values or data) them into being?
Is it possible that this is why, even if they have the account, full restoration isn't possible?
I understand that you probably have no concrete knowledge, but in a thread with rampant speculation, please indulge.
In my experience, some of the information you need to make a system function exists within the minds of the people that operated or created it, and isn't ever written down explicitly. Most of that is easy to reconstruct if you have a functioning system to look at. Most of it is extremely difficult to reconstruct if you don't.
Most people see source code as comparable to blueprints. But in actual fact, source code is more like *parts*. When you open that box of IKEA furniture, the individual pieces of wood and screws? That's actually the source code. The instruction booklet itself would in software terms be the make files and the compile instructions and the configuration file templates to make the software work, not all of which are always stored within the source repositories. Those things are critical. Without them, all you have is a pile of wood.
Beyond that, all of that combined is the game engine itself. City of Heroes, like pretty much all MMOs, had (at least) *two* separate data repositories that drove it that were not contained within its engine or its software itself. There was a set of data that contained the game content. We saw part of that when players hacked the game clients and went "pigg-diving." Those "pigg" files contain the data of the game content. The game client contained part of it, but the servers contained data the clients did not (which is why ultimately Icon can't run missions no matter how crafty Codewalker gets - the game client doesn't contain that information to run). You'd need that or all you'd have is, well, multiplayer Icon. Separate from that, there was also a database that contained the server state. Basically, the player data. What characters exist on the server and what those characters state is. Without that data, which is completely separate from the game engine and the game content, you can't restore player characters to their state prior to the shutdown.
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This is what I personally think is happening - they are working to get the things necessary to restart the basic game. The game was not stopped with a thought to ever running it again. It was stopped in a manner to protect IP rights. The original source is - somewhere. It may not resurface for many years if ever in the wild. It will take time for the new group to either find the original stuff or where needed to rewrite programs to mess with the disk image. The least thing needed is a new launcher for one. Then the market software and accounting to set up new accounts. It is a big venture.
I have no direct knowledge of what is happening with the buyout team. But I suspect that two different things are happening. The first is that the technical details of how to even get everything up and running - and whether they have enough to do that at all - is being worked out. The second is that I suspect there were conditions to the buyout that the buyout team may have needed time to satisfy. For example, if I was NCSoft I would not negotiate with a bunch of individuals. I would only negotiate with an actual corporation, and that corporate entity would need to satisfy a set of basic requirements. Official incorporation, officers, audited financials or statement of financial viability, etc. Those things could have taken significant time to materialize.
Plus, if this is something that their contacts at NCSoft are doing unofficially in their spare time, and not as some actual official NCSoft project, its possible *everything* is taking longer just because its no one's top priority. You might send someone an email and you might get a reply days later. Something that could be hashed out in a two hour conversation could take three weeks to ping pong back and forth.
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You might like to know all of the dirty secrets but it is best for the supporters to not know how the sausage is made sometimes.
Unfortunately, I know a little of how sausage is made. Needless to say, I don't eat sausage very often.
I, also, will never eat Haggis, because I know some of the things that go into it.
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Unfortunately, I know a little of how sausage is made. Needless to say, I don't eat sausage very often.
I, also, will never eat Haggis, because I know some of the things that go into it.
Nothing wrong with a bit of offal. It's good for you!
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Nothing wrong with a bit of offal. It's good for you!
I've had haggis before. Mostly, I found it peppery, but otherwise inoffensive. Kinda tasty, actually, except for the fact the one I had was probably a bit overspiced.
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Nothing wrong with a bit of offal. It's good for you!
Kudo it all you want. I still won't have any. I guess that'll just leave more for you. ;)
By the way, I just got through watching that movie you stared in. Did that worm ever suffer any side effects after eating you?
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By the way, I just got through watching that movie you stared in. Did that worm ever suffer any side effects after eating you?
Nothing wrong with a bit of Harkonnen. It's good for sandworms! ;)
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honestly, wildstar was destined to fail from the start. they designed the game for the hardcore gamers. the "nothing is ever difficult enough" crowd. there are not enough of these people to support a game, yet they get their claws into dev staffs by playing on ego. swtor recently did this with an entire closed beta filled with nightmare raiders. the operations are way over tuned and it seems like none of the rest of the game was even tested. 4 months after release it is still a buggy mess that is losing subscriptions.
I think actually having to dodge is better than stat lottery where the game makes you automatically dodge. What I don't like is melee characters including tanks are too squishy where the majority of the stuff to dodge is in melee and that it takes too long to kill when your self buffs like buildup are on cool down. Wildstar also has a huge number of missions while leveling but they don't give enough xp for them so it's kinda bad to skip any of them. Above all I still enjoyed my time there for the most part.
I haven't raided in swtor since the explosive conflict update. The huge increase of difficulty from the games original two raids to what was added on that update was stupidly much harder even in story mode and most of the trash mobs couldn't be skipped. And being that I only raided with my guild we never were able to defeat the final boss on hard mode despite all we had learned. One little mistake and the fight is ruined and it wasn't always the same person.
Karagga's Palace an Eternity Vault were much better raids and had the just right difficulty associated with them in all difficulty modes but sadly they catered to hardcore raiding guilds and made all the difficulties harder than they should of been.
I still feel sad though because my guild basically stopped raiding and I still wanted to run all of the new raids but I was tired of guild hopping so I eventually stopped playing. I started playing again for rise of hutt cartel when it launched but stopped before I reached 55 and haven't touched shadow of revan. Perhaps I'll look for a guild again and start playing soon.
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Wow, and here I thought a few people would just flat out tell me I was nuts. I didn't expect to stir up a hornet's nest.
The only thing I wonder now is what the highest offer made was that they rejected.
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Most people see source code as comparable to blueprints. But in actual fact, source code is more like *parts*. When you open that box of IKEA furniture, the individual pieces of wood and screws? That's actually the source code. The instruction booklet itself would in software terms be the make files and the compile instructions and the configuration file templates to make the software work, not all of which are always stored within the source repositories. Those things are critical. Without them, all you have is a pile of wood.
I don't know how to say this tactfully, and I don't intend this in the spirit in which it will probably be taken, but have you ever actually done development? Because what you're describing simply isn't true.
What you are calling *parts* is akin to what I would call individual source code files. If all NCsoft had were a bunch of *.c and *.h files, I might agree with you. But in any modern development system, those files are bound together in a project file; in the case of City of Heroes, those would be Visual Studio project and solution files. Those files are most definitely akin to blueprints; they contain all of the references and relationships of how the files fit together to build a project. Now granted, they are probably old VS project/solution files, like 2008 or 2010, but the software really isn't that hard to come by to put it all back together again.
And I also understand a great deal about how databases work, too. Yes, it would most certainly be helpful to have a functional system up and running to do things like pull the schema so that you don't have to recreate it from scratch from the source code, but it's not that hard to recreate a schema from the source code. For example, if you see something in the code like:
char *sql = sprintf("SELECT acct_id, acct_name, acct_valid FROM accounts WHERE acct_id = %d;", acct_id);
Then you know that there's a table or view named accounts that contains columns acct_id, acct_name, and acct_valid. You also know that acct_id is almost certainly a numeric column since the select statement refers to it as an integer, and it's a pretty good bet that acct_name is a text column just because of its name.
I'll grant you that this is a very simple example, that real-world examples are much more complicated, but my point is that on a scale of one to ten, I'd only put reverse engineering a database from source code at a difficulty of five or so. It's not so much hard as it is tedious, and believe me, there are people who are plenty enough motivated to undertake such a task to put it well within the realm of the feasible.
Probably the hardest part of reverse engineering the code to get it running is if they hard-coded things based on specific hardware they're running. For example, if they wrote in short assembly routines that used CPU features specific to an AMD processor or something crazy like that, it might be kind of tough to port that to an Intel processor, but given that I've been told by several devs that the "physical" servers were actually VMs, I can't imagine that there is code at that low a level.
Look, I'm not trying to imply that it would be easy, I know that there are probably hundreds of source files that would have to be pored over. And having been a C++ developer in a past life, I know firsthand how much a pain in the ass it is picking up someone else's spaghetti code and trying to make sense of it when that person is gone and inaccessible. (At one point, I was on a team that developed a space planning solution that interfaced with AutoCAD, and when the former developer got a new job in another city, he picked up and left and we never heard from him again. My boss came to me and said, "Um... Tony, we need you to take over and finish this project. Good luck!")
It happens every day, and people deal with the challenges. Look at any of the innumerable open source projects that are abandoned or forked successfully if you want proof. Or hell, just look at how well known and picked apart the client is with exactly zero information from the developers and zero lines of source code. And you think that the server code and configuration would be indecipherable to a competent developer/hacker with the source code?
To be blunt, every developer likes to think that he or she is indispensable, that without him or her, the project would simply fall apart. Every developer also believes that every code base that he or she didn't personally develop from scratch is just an incomprehensible mess that no one else but him or her could figure out. I don't think it's disingenuousness on their part, it's just human nature. That's why when Positron would make comments kind of like what you're making here, my private response was always, I get what you're saying, and I know it would be difficult. But impossible? C'mon, man. I don't doubt his (or your) knowledge or ingenuity, but I do think that he (and you) underestimate the capabilities of a competent developer.
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I think actually having to dodge is better than stat lottery where the game makes you automatically dodge. What I don't like is melee characters including tanks are too squishy where the majority of the stuff to dodge is in melee and that it takes too long to kill when your self buffs like buildup are on cool down. Wildstar also has a huge number of missions while leveling but they don't give enough xp for them so it's kinda bad to skip any of them. Above all I still enjoyed my time there for the most part.
I haven't raided in swtor since the explosive conflict update. The huge increase of difficulty from the games original two raids to what was added on that update was stupidly much harder even in story mode and most of the trash mobs couldn't be skipped. And being that I only raided with my guild we never were able to defeat the final boss on hard mode despite all we had learned. One little mistake and the fight is ruined and it wasn't always the same person.
Karagga's Palace an Eternity Vault were much better raids and had the just right difficulty associated with them in all difficulty modes but sadly they catered to hardcore raiding guilds and made all the difficulties harder than they should of been.
I still feel sad though because my guild basically stopped raiding and I still wanted to run all of the new raids but I was tired of guild hopping so I eventually stopped playing. I started playing again for rise of hutt cartel when it launched but stopped before I reached 55 and haven't touched shadow of revan. Perhaps I'll look for a guild again and start playing soon.
shadow of revan is a failure/ too many bugs still there 4 months in. the beta was nim guilds only, so the story modes have bosses with hm+ mnechanics. add in the bugs and most pugs dont even start temple of sacrifice. the gear they designed is horrible. every effort was made to extend the gearing path as long as possible, including leaving a bug that only gave 8 man drops for 16 man raids...for months. it isnt that hard to fix yet they left it. there are fewer raiding guilds now and no one does anything but the current 2 ops unless they are going for achievements.
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I don't know how to say this tactfully, and I don't intend this in the spirit in which it will probably be taken, but have you ever actually done development? Because what you're describing simply isn't true.
What you are calling *parts* is akin to what I would call individual source code files. If all NCsoft had were a bunch of *.c and *.h files, I might agree with you. But in any modern development system, those files are bound together in a project file; in the case of City of Heroes, those would be Visual Studio project and solution files. Those files are most definitely akin to blueprints; they contain all of the references and relationships of how the files fit together to build a project. Now granted, they are probably old VS project/solution files, like 2008 or 2010, but the software really isn't that hard to come by to put it all back together again.
And I also understand a great deal about how databases work, too. Yes, it would most certainly be helpful to have a functional system up and running to do things like pull the schema so that you don't have to recreate it from scratch from the source code, but it's not that hard to recreate a schema from the source code. For example, if you see something in the code like:
char *sql = sprintf("SELECT acct_id, acct_name, acct_valid FROM accounts WHERE acct_id = %d;", acct_id);
Then you know that there's a table or view named accounts that contains columns acct_id, acct_name, and acct_valid. You also know that acct_id is almost certainly a numeric column since the select statement refers to it as an integer, and it's a pretty good bet that acct_name is a text column just because of its name.
I'll grant you that this is a very simple example, that real-world examples are much more complicated, but my point is that on a scale of one to ten, I'd only put reverse engineering a database from source code at a difficulty of five or so. It's not so much hard as it is tedious, and believe me, there are people who are plenty enough motivated to undertake such a task to put it well within the realm of the feasible.
Probably the hardest part of reverse engineering the code to get it running is if they hard-coded things based on specific hardware they're running. For example, if they wrote in short assembly routines that used CPU features specific to an AMD processor or something crazy like that, it might be kind of tough to port that to an Intel processor, but given that I've been told by several devs that the "physical" servers were actually VMs, I can't imagine that there is code at that low a level.
Look, I'm not trying to imply that it would be easy, I know that there are probably hundreds of source files that would have to be pored over. And having been a C++ developer in a past life, I know firsthand how much a pain in the ass it is picking up someone else's spaghetti code and trying to make sense of it when that person is gone and inaccessible. (At one point, I was on a team that developed a space planning solution that interfaced with AutoCAD, and when the former developer got a new job in another city, he picked up and left and we never heard from him again. My boss came to me and said, "Um... Tony, we need you to take over and finish this project. Good luck!")
It happens every day, and people deal with the challenges. Look at any of the innumerable open source projects that are abandoned or forked successfully if you want proof. Or hell, just look at how well known and picked apart the client is with exactly zero information from the developers and zero lines of source code. And you think that the server code and configuration would be indecipherable to a competent developer/hacker with the source code?
To be blunt, every developer likes to think that he or she is indispensable, that without him or her, the project would simply fall apart. Every developer also believes that every code base that he or she didn't personally develop from scratch is just an incomprehensible mess that no one else but him or her could figure out. I don't think it's disingenuousness on their part, it's just human nature. That's why when Positron would make comments kind of like what you're making here, my private response was always, I get what you're saying, and I know it would be difficult. But impossible? C'mon, man. I don't doubt his (or your) knowledge or ingenuity, but I do think that he (and you) underestimate the capabilities of a competent developer.
im not going to get into that at all hahaha. my last programming project used punched cards
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I'm going to have to back Tony on this one. I'm a SQL Server Developer DBA, and I could reverse engineer all of the tables my stored procedures reference just by going through them. It would be tedious as hell, but I've actually done it for a few missing/deleted old tables on occasion by looking at the SQL statements that referenced them.
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The instruction booklet itself would in software terms be the make files and the compile instructions and the configuration file templates to make the software work, not all of which are always stored within the source repositories. Those things are critical. Without them, all you have is a pile of wood.
I'm curious why you would think that the project/solution files aren't stored within the source repositories. I've never seen a repository especially for a proprietary project that didn't contain the project files, and I literally cannot imagine a circumstance under which one would ever want such a thing, unless the project is specifically created to be portable across platforms, and even then, the repository would contain the makefiles.
...You'd need that or all you'd have is, well, multiplayer Icon.
Yes, and I'm absolutely certain that NCsoft has a copy of that. If they ever claimed that they don't, I'd call them a liar, because as I think I said above, that would be like Pepsi telling someone that they lost the recipe to Mountain Dew. I simply don't believe it; such a thing would be too valuable. If it were written in 1980, it might be plausible, but companies today keep everything that might even hint of being worth something someday, and working source code with 10 years' worth of updates is worth millions.
Separate from that, there was also a database that contained the server state. Basically, the player data. What characters exist on the server and what those characters state is. Without that data, which is completely separate from the game engine and the game content, you can't restore player characters to their state prior to the shutdown.
And I guarantee you that that data is also stored as well. There's not a company in existence today that doesn't understand the worth of such data. There are lots of companies whose sole value is such data. If nothing else, their legal department will force them to keep the data around at least a decade or so purely for legal reasons in case they're sued over something. There's not a snowball's chance in hell that their corporate lawyers would risk someone else having screenshots, chat logs, or other documented evidence of something that the company itself couldn't provide with additional context.
But aside from that, like I said, the main reason is because data is worth a lot of money (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/03/26/bankrupt-radioshack-wants-to-sell-off-user-data-but-the-bigger-risk-is-if-a-facebook-or-google-goes-bust/).
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Kudo it all you want. I still won't have any. I guess that'll just leave more for you. ;)
By the way, I just got through watching that movie you stared in. Did that worm ever suffer any side effects after eating you?
Oh man, I tell you. I stopped that bugger up for MONTHS! :p
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I'm going to have to back Tony on this one. I'm a SQL Server Developer DBA, and I could reverse engineer all of the tables my stored procedures reference just by going through them. It would be tedious as hell, but I've actually done it for a few missing/deleted old tables on occasion by looking at the SQL statements that referenced them.
I concur too. As professional developer, reverse engineering horribly complex code and DB schema is just a part of your everyday skillset. Boring as hell, time consuming, but not especially difficult to anyone competent at their job.
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Yes, and I'm absolutely certain that NCsoft has a copy of that. If they ever claimed that they don't, I'd call them a liar, because as I think I said above, that would be like Pepsi telling someone that they lost the recipe to Mountain Dew. I simply don't believe it; such a thing would be too valuable. If it were written in 1980, it might be plausible, but companies today keep everything that might even hint of being worth something someday, and working source code with 10 years' worth of updates is worth millions.
In my office, we have backups of our sourcesafe db going back to 1995, when our company was formed. There's even early VB3 prototyping code in there.
There's almost zero chance NCSoft have destroyed the game or server code and associated assets.
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In my office, we have backups of our sourcesafe db going back to 1995, when our company was formed. There's even early VB3 prototyping code in there.
There's almost zero chance NCSoft have destroyed the game or server code and associated assets.
Perhaps not, but as Paragon doesn't exist anymore, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the assets were not kept particularly well and are either lost or damaged now.
Heck, NASA taped over recordings from the early moonlandings so it's not entirely possible shortsightedness can beat common sense.
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If the process gets to the point where it is discovered the data is too incomplete to put back together I would still like to see the intellectual property purchase happen and hopefully land in the hands of a company that would make 2.0 happen.
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If the process gets to the point where it is discovered the data is too incomplete to put back together I would still like to see the intellectual property purchase happen and hopefully land in the hands of a company that would make 2.0 happen.
Me too! APR FTW! It's way better than never getting our city back at all, and I want the CoX i23 rez AND the APR approved equally as much.
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Me too! APR FTW! It's way better than never getting our city back at all, and I want the CoX i23 rez AND the APR approved equally as much.
Here! Here! I'm all for that! I would love to have CoX I(any number) available to play. ;D
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Ok, can someone who knows about disc images and what poor shape actually means answer this?: Would poor shape mean the code that runs the AI has been broken? That sounds like the major sticking point here. CoH ran all of the background numbers and AI from it's servers, etc. (if I'm stating this wrong, sorry!). You can't just run a home version without a server that can run the ENTIRE game.
I recently re-watched Matt Miller's Youtube interview after CoH's closure and he pitied the person(s) would have to follow up all the strings and things they had to do to get the game running as well as it did.
If the disc image is in bad shape are we talking graphically weirdness, loss of ragdoll, invisible characters (remember that bug when it was enemies that wouldn't show up?!) or are entire lines of code that make the actual game go just wibbledy, wobbledy, scrabbley bits of noodles all piled up chaotically now?
EDIT: Anyone have examples of re-launched games that suffered from a damaged image?
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It sounds to me as if most of the technical problems are solvable once the IP is available. As to the business side of things, most negotiations take longer than anyone imagines. Unless there is a REALLY pressing reason to move quickly. I would imagine that there isn't for any of the principals. Nothing appears to be on fire. I have no issue with waiting and understand the need to maintain face for all concerned. I think we need to acknowledge that we're probably not a priority for NC Soft, but they really won't waste time on a negotiation that has no chance. It's not in their best interests to string Nate and his team or the community along. They will simply say, " sorry not doable" and move on. The fact that that hasn't happened means that they're all still talking. And that's good. I'd really like to fly again.
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Ok, can someone who knows about disc images and what poor shape actually means answer this?: Would poor shape mean the code that runs the AI has been broken? That sounds like the major sticking point here. CoH ran all of the background numbers and AI from it's servers, etc. (if I'm stating this wrong, sorry!). You can't just run a home version without a server that can run the ENTIRE game.
I recently re-watched Matt Miller's Youtube interview after CoH's closure and he pitied the person(s) would have to follow up all the strings and things they had to do to get the game running as well as it did.
If the disc image is in bad shape are we talking graphically weirdness, loss of ragdoll, invisible characters (remember that bug when it was enemies that wouldn't show up?!) or are entire lines of code that make the actual game go just wibbledy, wobbledy, scrabbley bits of noodles all piled up chaotically now?
EDIT: Anyone have examples of re-launched games that suffered from a damaged image?
It's not a video tape, you won't get bits not quite right, or glitches. It will either work as before, or not work at all. The problem then will be figuring out WHY it's not working, and fixing that. However, any disc image made of the server is likely to be a precise snapshot of the entire server HD. Restoring that to a new server would require almost identical hardware otherwise it will not boot when restored, so work will have to be done on it after restoration to repair the Windows installation.
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It's not a video tape, you won't get bits not quite right, or glitches. It will either work as before, or not work at all. The problem then will be figuring out WHY it's not working, and fixing that. However, any disc image made of the server is likely to be a precise snapshot of the entire server HD. Restoring that to a new server would require almost identical hardware otherwise it will not boot when restored, so work will have to be done on it after restoration to repair the Windows installation.
This has been my thought as well, but since we don't know for sure what is in the snapshot we'll just have to hope that is all we need. If it is, wouldn't they be able to get it running with VMWare? That would at least let the team see how it works so they could get it working on a modern OS.
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I concur too. As professional developer, reverse engineering horribly complex code and DB schema is just a part of your everyday skillset. Boring as hell, time consuming, but not especially difficult to anyone competent at their job.
What Tony is referring to, and what you're referring to, is not the same thing as what I was referring to. What I was referring to was not whether it was literally impossible, but whether it was possible for NCSoft to claim they had the source files but were unable, as a practical matter, to hand to an acquisition team a functioning server. And that's not difficult because all what you're describing are steps I know are hypothetically possible, but may not be for any of the people at NCSoft involved with the acquisition in any reasonable amount of time for them. Its not as simple as pushing a button and converting the pieces into a server instance.
Let's back up a bit and see this in context. I said:
If NCSoft wanted us to go away, the absolute best, most obvious way to do that would have been for NCSoft to tell the negotiating team they had destroyed all copies of the server software and source code as part of the shutdown. Period, end of story, go away now. That's what I would have recommended, if it was my job to make the CoH playerbase go away. And I would have done it right from the start.
And Tony replied:
They can't do that precisely for the same reason they're not letting go of the IP: Because on some accounting sheet somewhere, it's listed as a line item as an asset that has some particular value that, in theory, makes the company worth more.
That's explicitly false, for the reason I specified:
Keep in mind the Intellectual Property of the game hypothetically has value. The source code might have value - they could license it to someone. But the actual server instances had and have no material accounting value. NCSoft could easily have claimed they have source code repositories, but no actual working server instances and lacked the tools to create them from the source code.
That part is just accounting fact. But I did add:
In fact, from what I know of server instances, its trivially easy to hand someone all the source code in its entirety and still leave them functionally incapable of standing up servers in any reasonable amount of time.
Note: in any reasonable amount of time were the words I used, not "impossible."
Now, as to this question:
I don't know how to say this tactfully, and I don't intend this in the spirit in which it will probably be taken, but have you ever actually done development? Because what you're describing simply isn't true.
What you are calling *parts* is akin to what I would call individual source code files. If all NCsoft had were a bunch of *.c and *.h files, I might agree with you. But in any modern development system, those files are bound together in a project file; in the case of City of Heroes, those would be Visual Studio project and solution files. Those files are most definitely akin to blueprints; they contain all of the references and relationships of how the files fit together to build a project. Now granted, they are probably old VS project/solution files, like 2008 or 2010, but the software really isn't that hard to come by to put it all back together again.
That's in reply to this:
Most people see source code as comparable to blueprints. But in actual fact, source code is more like *parts*. When you open that box of IKEA furniture, the individual pieces of wood and screws? That's actually the source code. The instruction booklet itself would in software terms be the make files and the compile instructions and the configuration file templates to make the software work, not all of which are always stored within the source repositories. Those things are critical. Without them, all you have is a pile of wood.
If a City of Heroes server was a program then this objection would be valid. But its not: its actually a constellation of programs, and any credible software developer would presume such. As a result, even if you had the entire source tree including the make tree (in this case, Visual C++ project files) what that would buy you is the actual executables. You would still have to determine how they worked with each other, and that would be yet another time consuming step. Again, not impossible, but not trivial.
And all of this is under the context of how difficult it would be for NCSoft to do, not the acquisition team, because the stated premise of my original statement was that NCSoft might not want to disclose or sell the source code itself. How many developers does NCSoft corporate have that can do this and isn't doing something more important now? How many of those developers are even familiar with City of Heroes itself: a developer with no idea how City of Heroes worked in the first place would have a completely separate hurdle to overcome when trying to reverse engineer the operational state of the servers.
It would take longer just to make a list of all the things you'd need to stand up servers without a server instance image than its likely NCSoft would want to dedicate development staff to actually do. So if they wanted us to go away they could have simply lied about having backups of the server images, said they didn't want to invest the time to recreate them, and that would be that. You couldn't argue that it was so simple to recreate that NCSoft was lying about that, because the time required is substantial for a property they no longer care about. Its so high, that, as I said, even if the entire source tree was handed to the acquisition team and they *were* willing to invest the time, the time consumption would be, without outside assistance, extremely high. And that would be a motivated, dedicated group. Compare to the time it would take if NCSoft, an unmotivated non-dedicated group elected to undertake that, given there was no real upside worth the expense to them.
To answer the question directly, yes I've done professional development. I built a financial tracking system for a hospital, a secure healthcare messaging system, a security event correlation system, and an email system provisioning and auditing system. I've also done professional reverse engineering: everything from literal paper tape systems (HP2400) to much larger systems. When I say something is easy or difficult, trivial or time consuming, its within the context of the level of effort I know those things to take. If someone wants to debate those judgments on a technical basis, I have no problem with that. But in this case, I'm stating what I believe a reasonable colloquial estimate would be for a non-technical reader.
Here's a technical point: if I didn't actually state for the record that *one* of the backend databases for a City of Heroes server shard was a SQLserver, would you even know to search the source code for SQL in the first place?. All prior statements made by Cryptic about the game engine stated that they had made a custom database engine for the game servers that wasn't sql-based. If you're starting literally from zero, how much time would you estimate it might take for someone to determine just what the major components of a server shard were, from nothing but the source trees (which would include not just server source alone)? Days? Weeks? Months? (I'm guessing weeks myself)
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Actually the hardware is more secondary to the OS being similar. If it ran on a Windows 2000 server for example then installing and mapping the drives correctly isn't that difficult.
It is all the bolt on parts that can be a mess, global chat, accounting, market place and so on - things that weren't by default on the map server. Once you boot up the map server and it crashes because it can't find all the other boxes its looking for and you now have to perhaps even write the new databases and build the box it points to - then you have all the fun of figuring out why they built this code to point there and not over here and so on.
Edit - see Arcana's post above she puts it more exactly. I stated it generally.
I would also add to Arcana's post that all of this is being done with possibly no NCSoft help other than a file clerk handing you over disk images and manuals. They probably aren't turning a server expert or programmer over to the group to work stuff out.
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Actually the hardware is more secondary to the OS being similar. If it ran on a Windows 2000 server for example then installing and mapping the drives correctly isn't that difficult.
It is all the bolt on parts that can be a mess, global chat, accounting, market place and so on - things that weren't by default on the map server. Once you boot up the map server and it crashes because it can't find all the other boxes its looking for and you now have to perhaps even write the new databases and build the box it points to - then you have all the fun of figuring out why they built this code to point there and not over here and so on.
Edit - see Arcana's post above she puts it more exactly. I stated it generally.
I would also add to Arcana's post that all of this is being done with possibly no NCSoft help other than a file clerk handing you over disk images and manuals. They probably aren't turning a server expert or programmer over to the group to work stuff out.
This brings up an interesting question: What features of CoH could we go without having to get the game back up and running, and just let these features be rebuilt for the CoH 1.5 instead.
1. The Market
2. Email
3. Global Chat, this one should be a must restore if nothing else.
4. Supergroups
5. The Arena
6. The AE
and some others that I am not able to remember at the moment.
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This brings up an interesting question: What features of CoH could we go without having to get the game back up and running, and just let these features be rebuilt for the CoH 1.5 instead.
1. The Market
2. Email
3. Global Chat, this one should be a must restore if nothing else.
4. Supergroups
5. The Arena
6. The AE
and some others that I am not able to remember at the moment.
I could not live without the market, unless the Cash Shop is willing to sell us salvage and recipes.
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It's not a video tape, you won't get bits not quite right, or glitches. It will either work as before, or not work at all. The problem then will be figuring out WHY it's not working, and fixing that. However, any disc image made of the server is likely to be a precise snapshot of the entire server HD. Restoring that to a new server would require almost identical hardware otherwise it will not boot when restored, so work will have to be done on it after restoration to repair the Windows installation.
Hypothetically speaking, disc rot could flip a bit here and there and damage the software. But the only serious problem with that would be if the only copies of the software were compressed archives: damaged archives could be rendered impossible to decompress correctly.
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Hypothetically speaking, disc rot could flip a bit here and there and damage the software. But the only serious problem with that would be if the only copies of the software were compressed archives: damaged archives could be rendered impossible to decompress correctly.
More likely it's not even on a disc; it'll be on several backup tapes.
If there IS anything on a disc, odds are it's hiding in the desk drawer of a former dev somewhere, and therefore "doesn't exist". :p
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More likely it's not even on a disc; it'll be on several backup tapes.
If there IS anything on a disc, odds are it's hiding in the desk drawer of a former dev somewhere, and therefore "doesn't exist". :p
Its possible. Disk to disk backup is the way to go these days (or even those days) particularly for systems like this, but disks also get reprovisioned. If tape backups were being made, they would be the most likely storage that someone could find still lying around.
However, its also possible that the software necessary and sufficient to create operational servers existed on the workstations physically at Paragon's offices. If those PCs are in a warehouse somewhere, its possible an operational server shard could be reconstructed from the disk content of those systems.
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I could not live without the market, unless the Cash Shop is willing to sell us salvage and recipes.
as long as the game still awards recipe and salvage drops in a fight, we could likely go for awhile without the market until it was brought back online.
Now the Arena and PVP in general we could do without for awhile. Granted there are PVP/Arena badges to obtain, but given how PVP and Arena popularity wasn't that high long before shutdown.....
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This brings up an interesting question: What features of CoH could we go without having to get the game back up and running, and just let these features be rebuilt for the CoH 1.5 instead.
1. The Market - Wouldn't be the same without the market
2. Email - Don't care
3. Global Chat, this one should be a must restore if nothing else. Yes, must have
4. Supergroups - I like them but could live without
5. The Arena - Don't care
6. The AE - Wouldn't bother me much
and some others that I am not able to remember at the moment.
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I agree that the market had its uses but the game could go for awhile without it. After all the game did fine from issue 1 to 8 with just SO's, then came ish 9 with the IO's.
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I think it would be a mistake to not include parts of the game that only some enjoyed. Didn't care much for how pvp was in CoX myself but some actually did like it. I did however have fun dueling friends in the arena from time to time.
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as long as the game still awards recipe and salvage drops in a fight, we could likely go for awhile without the market until it was brought back online.
Theoretically yes, but in a rebooted from zero game its worth noting that at least for a while without markets and farmers and twinking and high-level charity we'd all be back to scrounging for nickles and dimes trying to afford a single SO for our level 30s. It was that and worse in the early days where some players deliberately put themselves into debt just to slow down progress enough to let their enhancement earning power catch up with their slot count. It wouldn't be quite that bad given invention drops, but without a good mechanism for trading and selling them random chance would not operate in everyone's favor there. I wouldn't mind playing City of Heroes The Next Generation not just starting from scratch but starting from nothing, but I suspect even with all the trappings of I23 that kind of game would be unrecognizable to most players that didn't live through those days.
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I think it would be a mistake to not include parts of the game that only some enjoyed. Didn't care much for how pvp was in CoX myself but some actually did like it. I did however have fun dueling friends in the arena from time to time.
My point is this: if some of the features of the game could not come back right away but the main game was back and playable, would you be glad the game is back or lament the hopefully temporary loss of the features?
The ingame email system only became useful to me when items could be attached and sent. Other wise it was useless.
IO's and the Market, the game went for quite some time before those features were added. I suspect many could tolerate SO's for their characters until IO's and the market were restored.
Supergroups and bases, nice to have yes. But I think those are features that we could also do without if it meant getting the game up and running again.
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My point is this: if some of the features of the game could not come back right away but the main game was back and playable, would you be glad the game is back or lament the hopefully temporary loss of the features?
The ingame email system only became useful to me when items could be attached and sent. Other wise it was useless.
IO's and the Market, the game went for quite some time before those features were added. I suspect many could tolerate SO's for their characters until IO's and the market were restored.
Supergroups and bases, nice to have yes. But I think those are features that we could also do without if it meant getting the game up and running again.
AE I could live without temporarily, but I would be unhappy about IOs and the market missing. Again I know it'd be temporary though, and likewise, I know a good number of powerset combinations that work well without IOs. Supergroups and bases? I'd lament the loss for those the most.
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I could live with friends lists over supergroups (most of us would create Facebook pages to coordinate)
We could go without ae, pvp, pvp zones, arenas, email or (gasp) the market to start.
I must have in-game chat! That's as vital as the costume creator to me.
Great discussion btw.
Edit: here's an evil thought - relaunch the game issue by issue (1, 2, 3... All the way to 23) - a week or two at a time.
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Personally, if I'm not even able to create a single IO for my characters, I'd log in long enough to create them (and secure their names), then log out and wait for the market to be restored. If that takes a year or two, well, I've already waited this long.
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Personally, if I'm not even able to create a single IO for my characters, I'd log in long enough to create them (and secure their names), then log out and wait for the market to be restored. If that takes a year or two, well, I've already waited this long.
My bigger fear is burning through my nostalgia in the first month. I will, however, be subbed as long as the game is up.
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My bigger fear is burning through my nostalgia in the first month. I will, however, be subbed as long as the game is up.
Oh, I'll sign up, and stay subbed, I just won't bother logging in - there's no real reason for me to if I can do is run around with empty slots or crappy trainer-bought enhancements. That "quality of life" is just too low for me to bother even trying to play.
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Personally, if I'm not even able to create a single IO for my characters, I'd log in long enough to create them (and secure their names), then log out and wait for the market to be restored. If that takes a year or two, well, I've already waited this long.
Logic error: you cant create IO's without money and salvage and recipies, so by not playing until the market is restored you are delaying the creation of IO's for yourself anyway as you will have no inf, no salvage and no recipes when you return after market restoration.
If the market is not back, at least secure all your names then grind an alt to 50 and build up some funds and salvage.
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My bigger fear is burning through my nostalgia in the first month. I will, however, be subbed as long as the game is up.
I think if you stayed teamed often you will get the swift fun effect and be ok. You'll get your drops and then be able to IO a toon in a month.
Just make sure the first one is something good. Not like an elec blaster or anything. :)
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I hope either City of Legacy and ARP has some kind of life time subs :)
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Logic error: you cant create IO's without money and salvage and recipies, so by not playing until the market is restored you are delaying the creation of IO's for yourself anyway as you will have no inf, no salvage and no recipes when you return after market restoration.
If the market is not back, at least secure all your names then grind an alt to 50 and build up some funds and salvage.
Not for me - I'm not willing to grind and grind and grind on empty slots all the way up to L50, on the off chance that MAYBE by then I'll be lucky enough to have come across all the salvage I need to finally create some decent, basic IOs. No market, no me playing beyond character creation. I've got The Sims, I've got tabletop RPGs - I'll keep myself amused while it gets fixed. But you guys have fun...
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If AE is i23 compatible, people will be cheapo IO'd 50s in 2 days ... Purpling/PVP builds month or two :-\
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Not sure what the last page or so has to do with the actual thread.topic... maybe we should try to contain all the off-topic posts to the threads that are already the unofficial off-topic threads "New Efforts" & "The Mask Comes Off."
Just saying....
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However, its also possible that the software necessary and sufficient to create operational servers existed on the workstations physically at Paragon's offices. If those PCs are in a warehouse somewhere, its possible an operational server shard could be reconstructed from the disk content of those systems.
It's absolutely -certain- such software was in the Paragon offices. Otherwise, how would they have built their internal dev server? :p
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It's absolutely -certain- such software was in the Paragon offices. Otherwise, how would they have built their internal dev server? :p
Actually a lot of our custom built tools and programs are built on remote servers and then downloaded. Basically everything that's not Unreal Engine.
(Not saying this is the case, I'm betting FFM is right. Just saying it's possible.)
EDIT: Last time I heard...Which was awhile ago... the Paragon offices were sitting around like the studio had closed yesterday. Sadly, I live nowhere near there and can't just do a drive-by inspection! xD
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This brings up an interesting question: What features of CoH could we go without having to get the game back up and running, and just let these features be rebuilt for the CoH 1.5 instead.
1. The Market
2. Email
3. Global Chat, this one should be a must restore if nothing else.
4. Supergroups
5. The Arena
6. The AE
and some others that I am not able to remember at the moment.
Personally, I could do without ll of that...except maybe Supergroups.
Arena, AE, and the Market didn't exist when I started playing. Also, I played solo most of the time. so chat wouldn't affect me. I didn't use the Email all that much.
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To me, I'd like to have the city back. I assume that what we've been currently told is that we will get back everything that we had in I23 (not I24, even though Paragon Studios thought it was ready to be released when NCSoft announced the shutdown and killed I24).
This means we should get back every capability we had there: Bases, Market, IOs, and PvP (I just don't like PvP).
What I want restored more than anything is my account data. All my purchases, game codes, etc... Characters can be rebuilt, but I can't see spending thousands of dollars restoring to me what I've already paid for. If this information is NOT restored, I will still play CoX, but I won't be spending a lot of dollars there. I'm sorry, but this is just the way I feel.
As far as NCSoft is concerned, as long as CoX is shut down, I won't buy another program from them. If it is restored, I MAY purchase a program from them, but I'm not sure (too many bad feelings about their company and lack of loyalty to their customers). I never liked the idea of a game that you can only play online. Don't get me wrong, I liked playing CoX and PUGs were fun. I just wish that I could continue to play it even after the shutdown or they had allowed people to start player-run servers. They could have sold you the software and allowed you to start your own server as long as you didn't charge people a subscription.
As far as I'm concerned, when they decide to shut down an online game, they should do something to show their customers that it's more than just the dollars. Something to show that they appreciate all the profits they've made over the years. Instead, NCSoft just said "we're not making enough money anymore, so you're gone". Well, now I'm gone and no matter how good the game they release is, if there's a NCSoft logo on the box, it will not be purchased by me. And I will do everything I can to get my friends not to buy it either.
I have a lot of old programs that I'm re-introducing myself to (like Master of Magic, Warlords 2 Deluxe, Diablo 2, etc.). These are great games, lots of fun to play, the ability to replay a lot without getting the feeling of "been there, done that". Even though in Diablo 2 (yes, I have Diablo 3, but other than the graphics, I think Diablo 2 is a better game) the quests remain the same, the items you find and most of the maps change so each game is unique.
While I'm waiting for CoX to return, I've returned, I'll scan this board, look at the progress of some of the "spiritual successors" to CoX, and play games I've already paid for.
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Actually a lot of our custom built tools and programs are built on remote servers and then downloaded. Basically everything that's not Unreal Engine.
(Not saying this is the case, I'm betting FFM is right. Just saying it's possible.)
EDIT: Last time I heard...Which was awhile ago... the Paragon offices were sitting around like the studio had closed yesterday. Sadly, I live nowhere near there and can't just do a drive-by inspection! xD
It would be nice to slip inside and see if any data useful to reviving CoH was laying around...... not likely of course.
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It's absolutely -certain- such software was in the Paragon offices. Otherwise, how would they have built their internal dev server? :p
I'm not actually certain their "internal" dev server was internal to the office. It might have been internal usage but still in the same physical location as the rest of the server farms. They certainly had to have the tools to build a server shard whenever they wanted to in theory, but a lot of it could have been stored in corporate network resources and not physically in the office. However, since all programmers keep local copies of the code they work on, its extremely likely that somewhere there exists a bunch of computers that contain the entire CoH system, either individually or collectively.
I wonder how NCSoft disposes of old computers. If they destroy them, ebay them, or just store them indefinitely with the Lost Ark.
Also, a lot of testing did not require a fully functioning server shard. That's something I stumbled upon a long time ago (like, around I11) and mostly pretended not to know so the devs could pretend not to know I figured it out.
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However, since all programmers keep local copies of the code they work on...
Ha, ha, so true. I've worked for companies that actually said (with a straight face!) that they expected me to keep the primary copy of my source code library on a network drive somewhere. Trying hard not to laugh, I say "Sure, will do." and then proceed to work from local copies as I always do and backup everything I've changed to the network drive at the end of the day before going home (just delete the project folders on the network and replace them with my local PC project folders - takes less than a minute typically). I've no idea why anyone expects developers to actually not do this.
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Ha, ha, so true. I've worked for companies that actually said (with a straight face!) that they expected me to keep the primary copy of my source code library on a network drive somewhere. Trying hard not to laugh, I say "Sure, will do." and then proceed to work from local copies as I always do and backup everything I've changed to the network drive at the end of the day before going home (just delete the project folders on the network and replace them with my local PC project folders - takes less than a minute typically). I've no idea why anyone expects developers to actually not do this.
I even have a batch file that does it for me... :p
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If a City of Heroes server was a program then this objection would be valid. But its not: its actually a constellation of programs, and any credible software developer would presume such. As a result, even if you had the entire source tree including the make tree (in this case, Visual C++ project files) what that would buy you is the actual executables. You would still have to determine how they worked with each other, and that would be yet another time consuming step. Again, not impossible, but not trivial.
I know that. City of Heroes consisted of many executables running various pieces of the back-end. There was an authentication server executable, for example, and a database interface server, a map server (many instances of which were running at any given time for each zone instance), chat servers, base servers, market servers, etc. City of Heroes wasn't a program, it would more accurately be described as a "system" of programs all working together, communicating with each other, to provide the game as a whole.
And in case anyone is wondering, no, I wasn't a developer and never worked on the back end. Yes, that was proprietary knowledge that wasn't put out there in the public. Yes, that's a fairly common setup for any kind of large software system (ever worked with SAP before? ugh...). And yes, I may have subtly pumped developers for inside information like that while I was at Player Summits and whatnot, stuff that I would ask them out of genuine technical curiosity, stuff that I probably wouldn't say publicly if it weren't for the fact that the game were shut down because I wouldn't want anyone to get in trouble.
But there's not much difference between a single large program with a bunch of source files and a bunch of smaller programs with a bunch of source files other than whoever inherited the source code would have to determine how they interoperated with each other. Again, it might be a bit tedious, but not what I would call "hard" if you have the source files.
And all of this is under the context of how difficult it would be for NCSoft to do, not the acquisition team, because the stated premise of my original statement was that NCSoft might not want to disclose or sell the source code itself.
I'm not sure why you would think we would interpret what you said that way. What I was directly taking issue with was this assertion:
If NCSoft wanted us to go away, the absolute best, most obvious way to do that would have been for NCSoft to tell the negotiating team they had destroyed all copies of the server software and source code as part of the shutdown.
If NCsoft said they had destroyed all running server instances, I might find that plausible, even if a bit unbelievable. But if NCsoft told the negotiating team they had destroyed all copies of the source code? No way in hell would I ever believe that. If they said that they had destroyed all copies of the executables, not just the instances that were running on the game servers, I'd be extremely skeptical of that as well. I'm certain to the point of being willing to wager a large sum of money on the fact that they still have copies of all of the source code and various build targets, including the latest live and beta build targets, as well as probably dozens to hundreds of pages of documentation (at least soft copies) on how to set up, configure, and run those builds.
It may not be pretty, but if nothing else, Paragon Studios would have required that to account for developer turnover internally, and companies hoard that kind of stuff religiously. I know that at my job, I sometimes still run across really arcane stuff like shift logs from a couple of decades ago documenting stuff like AS/400 batch jobs that were initiated back in the 1990s. It's crazy. Anyway, I'm sure that they had internal documentation on how to run the servers, and NCsoft has it stashed in a file directory somewhere of Paragon Studios archived documents.
How many developers does NCSoft corporate have that can do this and isn't doing something more important now?
If NCsoft's excuse for not wanting to deal with someone is that they don't want to take the time and effort to engage in this effort, then my simple response is to let someone else do it. You can still give someone else the source code with the explicit legal agreement that they will not let anyone else have access to it or make changes to it that aren't strictly necessary to run the software in the state that it was running when the game shut down.
Although, with all due respect to Nate and the people who have been talking to NCsoft, this is an extremely bad deal. In my humble opinion, there's no reason in the world that they shouldn't make having the ability to improve the game part of the deal to obtain the game--that is, at a minimum, they need to get access to the source code and at a bare minimum a license to use the IP (ideally, an outright transfer of the IP) to run the game. If nothing else, they'll need to be able to fix bugs and exploits that crop up.
It would take longer just to make a list of all the things you'd need to stand up servers without a server instance image than its likely NCSoft would want to dedicate development staff to actually do. So if they wanted us to go away they could have simply lied about having backups of the server images, said they didn't want to invest the time to recreate them, and that would be that.
I'm not sure how you figure this. Like I said, the simple response would be, "Okay, then give us the source code so that we can do it instead." I for one know that I wouldn't have just said, "Okay..." and gone away.
Its so high, that, as I said, even if the entire source tree was handed to the acquisition team and they *were* willing to invest the time, the time consumption would be, without outside assistance, extremely high.
I'll make you a deal: You find me a copy of the source code, and I'll find you someone who will can get it up and running within, say, a month at the most.
Here's a technical point: if I didn't actually state for the record that *one* of the backend databases for a City of Heroes server shard was a SQLserver, would you even know to search the source code for SQL in the first place?.
I know for a fact (unless multiple developers needlessly lied to me) that the database back-end was MS SQL Server. The server instances running at shutdown were running on 2010 if I recall correctly, but it might have been compatible with earlier versions as well since it was initially developed, of course, before 2010. I know that they used it in a bit of a funky way, that they didn't just store individual pieces of information in individual fields like most app developers do; that they did stuff like store things as lists or serialized binary data in columns, which is why they always complained that people didn't understand how hard it was to simply query the database for stuff and make changes to the running system. As I recall, they didn't have much in the way of database programming talent on hand, so they used the database more like just a dumb data store instead of an honest-to-god RDBMS. Plus, and I didn't get this directly from a dev so I could be wrong about it, but I think the databases weren't actually maintained by Paragon Studios, but by NCsoft out of Austin and/or Seattle, so it's not like Matt Miller could just pull up SQL Management Studio and run a query against the live databases--not even he had that kind of access and had to go through corporate to get something like that done.
Am I in the ballpark of what you're talking about?
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All of getting the pieces together was why I said that a Beta was necessary and that I would make it an open one.
It might be a 6 month long Beta, but I for one would even pay to be in the Beta or Alpha.
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I know that. City of Heroes consisted of many executables running various pieces of the back-end. There was an authentication server executable, for example, and a database interface server, a map server (many instances of which were running at any given time for each zone instance), chat servers, base servers, market servers, etc. City of Heroes wasn't a program, it would more accurately be described as a "system" of programs all working together, communicating with each other, to provide the game as a whole.
And in case anyone is wondering, no, I wasn't a developer and never worked on the back end. Yes, that was proprietary knowledge that wasn't put out there in the public. Yes, that's a fairly common setup for any kind of large software system (ever worked with SAP before? ugh...). And yes, I may have subtly pumped developers for inside information like that while I was at Player Summits and whatnot, stuff that I would ask them out of genuine technical curiosity, stuff that I probably wouldn't say publicly if it weren't for the fact that the game were shut down because I wouldn't want anyone to get in trouble.
But there's not much difference between a single large program with a bunch of source files and a bunch of smaller programs with a bunch of source files other than whoever inherited the source code would have to determine how they interoperated with each other. Again, it might be a bit tedious, but not what I would call "hard" if you have the source files.
I'm not sure why you would think we would interpret what you said that way. What I was directly taking issue with was this assertion:
If NCsoft said they had destroyed all running server instances, I might find that plausible, even if a bit unbelievable. But if NCsoft told the negotiating team they had destroyed all copies of the source code? No way in hell would I ever believe that. If they said that they had destroyed all copies of the executables, not just the instances that were running on the game servers, I'd be extremely skeptical of that as well. I'm certain to the point of being willing to wager a large sum of money on the fact that they still have copies of all of the source code and various build targets, including the latest live and beta build targets, as well as probably dozens to hundreds of pages of documentation (at least soft copies) on how to set up, configure, and run those builds.
It may not be pretty, but if nothing else, Paragon Studios would have required that to account for developer turnover internally, and companies hoard that kind of stuff religiously. I know that at my job, I sometimes still run across really arcane stuff like shift logs from a couple of decades ago documenting stuff like AS/400 batch jobs that were initiated back in the 1990s. It's crazy. Anyway, I'm sure that they had internal documentation on how to run the servers, and NCsoft has it stashed in a file directory somewhere of Paragon Studios archived documents.
If NCsoft's excuse for not wanting to deal with someone is that they don't want to take the time and effort to engage in this effort, then my simple response is to let someone else do it. You can still give someone else the source code with the explicit legal agreement that they will not let anyone else have access to it or make changes to it that aren't strictly necessary to run the software in the state that it was running when the game shut down.
Although, with all due respect to Nate and the people who have been talking to NCsoft, this is an extremely bad deal. In my humble opinion, there's no reason in the world that they shouldn't make having the ability to improve the game part of the deal to obtain the game--that is, at a minimum, they need to get access to the source code and at a bare minimum a license to use the IP (ideally, an outright transfer of the IP) to run the game. If nothing else, they'll need to be able to fix bugs and exploits that crop up.
I'm not sure how you figure this. Like I said, the simple response would be, "Okay, then give us the source code so that we can do it instead." I for one know that I wouldn't have just said, "Okay..." and gone away.
I'll make you a deal: You find me a copy of the source code, and I'll find you someone who will can get it up and running within, say, a month at the most.
I know for a fact (unless multiple developers needlessly lied to me) that the database back-end was MS SQL Server. The server instances running at shutdown were running on 2010 if I recall correctly, but it might have been compatible with earlier versions as well since it was initially developed, of course, before 2010. I know that they used it in a bit of a funky way, that they didn't just store individual pieces of information in individual fields like most app developers do; that they did stuff like store things as lists or serialized binary data in columns, which is why they always complained that people didn't understand how hard it was to simply query the database for stuff and make changes to the running system. As I recall, they didn't have much in the way of database programming talent on hand, so they used the database more like just a dumb data store instead of an honest-to-god RDBMS. Plus, and I didn't get this directly from a dev so I could be wrong about it, but I think the databases weren't actually maintained by Paragon Studios, but by NCsoft out of Austin and/or Seattle, so it's not like Matt Miller could just pull up SQL Management Studio and run a query against the live databases--not even he had that kind of access and had to go through corporate to get something like that done.
Am I in the ballpark of what you're talking about?
I think when Nate and the group started in all honesty - NCSoft at that point didn't know what it had. The people who knew that were in the US and were gone. I truly believe the people they have are basically middle management and file clerks. It would have taken them a while into the deal to try and gather all the parts together. In fact I would be curious if it didn't violate the NDA to simply know is it stored in the US or in South Korea? If in the US - I think you have a better chance of getting most of it back.
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I specialize in ridiculous questions, so I'm going to ask this (or, rather, these):
How big a waste of time would it be for the entire CoH-loving community to BOYCOTT NCSoft? Are the other games they offer really that good that no one would put them aside to demand NCSoft stop dictating to us what's playable and what's not? Would anyone be willing to make the effort to demand either a re-release, a sequel inside of a year, or a standalone game (standalone or able to link up with people without servers)?
How much do we want our City back?
Sorry to get off topic, but I'm going to answer the original question:
I have yet to purchase anything form NCSoft since the closure. I was the kind of player who just left the subscription active for months without playing because I wanted to support the game. Very coincidentally I stopped my subscription a month before the closure announcement because my life was so busy I hadn't really played in over a year other than to log on an get anniversary badges.
The closure jaded me for any MMO: I've played Star Wars (TOR), Star Trek, And Final Fantasy XIV (awakened) since then and I couldn't get attached to any of those games knowing full well my game could be taken away at anytime. I'm also the kind of person that holds onto every video game I've ever owned in the off chance that I'll have a chance to play one of them. Tonight I could go home and play Zelda OoT on the N64 or the Game Cube (or technically the Wii), Mario Kart on the SNES, or Smash Bros. (pick one). I miss playing as my Hero Avatars and saving the world of Paragon City from Evil, or giant robots, or even boredom.
If NCSoft republished the game right where it left off I'm not sure I'd purchase a subscription. The trust is gone, and I also lost respect for the company as a whole.
I think of NCSoft like this: they went out of their way to purchase the game from Cryptic: as in they wanted the property, and at one time they wanted to do something with it. Paragon Studios did a wonderful job developing the title: I enjoyed the game more under their direction than under what Cryptic was turning the game into. The game itself was profitable. And the studio wasn't, but it was making headway on several other projects. NCsoft took profitable system and closed it much to the disappointment of many people. NCSoft fired a successful team of talented people who loved their work: NCSoft took away their livelihood. So NCSoft and are aren't really cool anymore.
I like games, I play them when I get a chance. And I'm selective. NCSoft has yet to sell another product I want to try, and they got rid of the one I did like. They have nothing I want.
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Sorry to get off topic, but I'm going to answer the original question:
I have yet to purchase anything form NCSoft since the closure. I was the kind of player who just left the subscription active for months without playing because I wanted to support the game. Very coincidentally I stopped my subscription a month before the closure announcement because my life was so busy I hadn't really played in over a year other than to log on an get anniversary badges.
The closure jaded me for any MMO: I've played Star Wars (TOR), Star Trek, And Final Fantasy XIV (awakened) since then and I couldn't get attached to any of those games knowing full well my game could be taken away at anytime. I'm also the kind of person that holds onto every video game I've ever owned in the off chance that I'll have a chance to play one of them. Tonight I could go home and play Zelda OoT on the N64 or the Game Cube (or technically the Wii), Mario Kart on the SNES, or Smash Bros. (pick one). I miss playing as my Hero Avatars and saving the world of Paragon City from Evil, or giant robots, or even boredom.
If NCSoft republished the game right where it left off I'm not sure I'd purchase a subscription. The trust is gone, and I also lost respect for the company as a whole.
I think of NCSoft like this: they went out of their way to purchase the game from Cryptic: as in they wanted the property, and at one time they wanted to do something with it. Paragon Studios did a wonderful job developing the title: I enjoyed the game under their direction than under Cryptic was turning the game into. The game itself was profitable. And the studio wasn't, but it was making headway on several other projects. NCsoft took profitable system and closed it much to the disappointment of many people. NCSoft fired a successful team of talented people who loved their work: NCSoft took away their livelihood. So NCSoft and are aren't really cool anymore.
I like games, I play them when I get a chance. And I'm selective. NCSoft has yet to sell another product I want to try, and they got rid of the one I did like. They have nothing I want.
Wow. Good response.
I'm not boycotting but like primeknight, NCSoft has no properties I'm interested in. Other than CoX.
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I think I am on-board with the whole "NCSoft has nothing I want" sentiment. The exception, of course, would be the IP for CoH to be sold to Nate and company. At that point, they become a vendor who provided a product to the people to whom I would be paying a subscription. I know NCSoft would likely benefit from that, and while that aspect does not please me at all, it is a demonstration of how much I am willing to compromise to get my game back.
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If the negotiations fall through it will be posted.
Even if that is prohibited by an NDA?
NDAs disappear when deals fall through?
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This brings up an interesting question: What features of CoH could we go without having to get the game back up and running, and just let these features be rebuilt for the CoH 1.5 instead.
1. The Market
2. Email
3. Global Chat, this one should be a must restore if nothing else.
4. Supergroups
5. The Arena
6. The AE
and some others that I am not able to remember at the moment.
That might not be the point. If they are trying to stand up a server set and the systems are looking for the Email and it's not obvious (as apparently may be the case) what the systems are looking for, they might not be ABLE to stand up the server without email or to easily stub out that function.
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Don't forget that most people working at Paragon were not programmers and would have no reason to have source code lying around, or even have access to it to begin with. The vast majority of staff were designers, along with some artists, writers, and QA testers. From what I've been able to gather, the number of actual programmers working there varied from 5 or 6, possibly down to as few as 1 at some points. That's one of the reasons so many things were deferred because they would require programmer time to fix, and why they tended to go for hacks and workarounds in the data instead.
Designers wouldn't need to (or want to) have source code. They would have the spreadsheets and the text version of the data files that the spreadsheets were used to create, probably using some scripts. Those data files were compiled into binary format and packaged into piggs. There's no reason to believe the process was any different for the client and the server, as on multiple occasions they demonstrated just how easy it was to relocate data from one to the other, such as when badge hint descriptions were removed from the client, or when the full power effects magically appeared in the client data around I11 to make real numbers possible.
Designers most likely had a debug version of the game to compile those data files. The release version that we have does contain some vestiges of it and is capable of compiling text to bin, but the only way to access that is by hacking the exe to rewrite the code to call normally unused portions. But they wouldn't need the source code to do that, just the debug exe provided by the programming team. I doubt most designers knew how to compile the thing or even had Visual Studio installed; there would be no reason to license it for people who would never use it.
Anyway, point to my story is that with so few people having access to the code, I highly doubt anyone would risk leaking it, even if they had kept a copy locally. It would cast suspicion on a very small group of people.
You'd be somewhat more likely to encounter a developer setup, which consists of debug builds of the client and server executables (loaded with performance killing sanity checks / monitoring hooks and asserting at the first sign of trouble), and an data tree with text files versions of the game data. While you could use that to set up a server, it would be less than optimal and people would have to use the debug client to connect -- I highly doubt the I23 or I24 release clients would work with it.
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I think if you stayed teamed often you will get the swift fun effect and be ok. You'll get your drops and then be able to IO a toon in a month.
Just make sure the first one is something good. Not like an elec blaster or anything. :)
I... ah.. um...
MEAN!
(runs to Icon to make sure elec/shield brute is good to go)
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Even if that is prohibited by an NDA?
NDAs disappear when deals fall through?
That would depend on what the NDA was for, I would guess.
I have signed a few NDAs that are still on going, despite the fact that I am no longer working at the company for which I had signed the NDA, and I don't know whether the projects that were going on while I was there are still going on. However, the NDAs I signed are persistant NDAs that will never go away until the government decides that they will...which will be about the week after the end of the Universe.
Most companies, and most certainly, MMO production companies don't normally need infinitely perpetual NDAs for negotiations. So, I would guess that once the negotiations are finished, for better or worse, the NDA forbidding the discussion of the negotiations will, most likely, lapse.
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That would depend on what the NDA was for, I would guess.
I have signed a few NDAs that are still on going, despite the fact that I am no longer working at the company for which I had signed the NDA, and I don't know whether the projects that were going on while I was there are still going on. However, the NDAs I signed are persistant NDAs that will never go away until the government decides that they will...which will be about the week after the end of the Universe.
Most companies, and most certainly, MMO production companies don't normally need infinitely perpetual NDAs for negotiations. So, I would guess that once the negotiations are finished, for better or worse, the NDA forbidding the discussion of the negotiations will, most likely, lapse.
Even if it were in affect and negotiation fell through there would be ways of saying it without breaking any contract. If Nate were to jump on and say that he was now able to focus solely on CoT that would spell it out clearly and still not recognize any negotiations ever took place.
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I... ah.. um...
MEAN!
(runs to Icon to make sure elec/shield brute is good to go)
My first victory against Jolty... and it's a forum post.
Does this help my pvp cred?
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I have no direct knowledge of what is happening with the buyout team. But I suspect that two different things are happening. The first is that the technical details of how to even get everything up and running - and whether they have enough to do that at all - is being worked out. The second is that I suspect there were conditions to the buyout that the buyout team may have needed time to satisfy. For example, if I was NCSoft I would not negotiate with a bunch of individuals. I would only negotiate with an actual corporation, and that corporate entity would need to satisfy a set of basic requirements. Official incorporation, officers, audited financials or statement of financial viability, etc. Those things could have taken significant time to materialize.
Plus, if this is something that their contacts at NCSoft are doing unofficially in their spare time, and not as some actual official NCSoft project, its possible *everything* is taking longer just because its no one's top priority. You might send someone an email and you might get a reply days later. Something that could be hashed out in a two hour conversation could take three weeks to ping pong back and forth.
Agreed.
I think the majority of us are at a stage now where we're divided into two camps: there's one camp that believes that we've reached a point of no return and if NCSoft had wanted to 'fork it over', they would have done it by now - and there's the camp that fights to maintain the notion that it's SUPPOSED to take this long, and insists on reminding people that there could/can be countless, COUNTLESS factors at play here that could very well be incredibly valid reasons for why no outcome has been concluded. I personally find myself more in the latter camp as opposed to the former, but the patience thing only gets more and more difficult as time goes on.
But yeah - I do too believe that if I were NCSoft, I would be incredibly reluctant to negotiate with just Nate and Nate alone regarding something as serious and grand as this. Admittedly, I was even a little disheartened when I first heard it was Nate who was running this whole shindig - of course, I maintain gratitude and confidence in all that he's doing...but when IronWolf initially came forward and gave everyone here on the Titan Forums the skinny regarding what was going down, I thought for SURE that it was a financially prosperous and reputable/well-known gaming COMPANY that had been driving the ship. Now, I'm not sure who else Nate has on his team besides IrishGirl - for all we know, there could be other 'heroes' who have since then come to his aid in providing assistance (whether it be as financial backers or just in the way of tips/advice as to how to go about this in the best way possible).
Also - the notion that this has only been operating in an 'unofficial' capacity on NCSoft's end has crossed my mind multiple times. There's no way to tell just how serious or not serious they're taking Nate, and I don't think - as many people want to believe - that the NDA's are a sign that the deal is 'going somewhere'. I would LIKE to believe that, as a generally optimistic person *laughs* - but I don't believe this to be the case. I think there are most likely NDA's in place because NDA's are common practice with negotiations such as this, regardless of the level at which such negotiations currently stand.
However...I do remember IronWolf stating that they were talking to the 'right person', or something? And there was a figure thrown out there, and that figure was 'doable' from Nate's end? Granted, I'm pretty sure I had read that back in the fall, so who knows what's changed since then.
I just hope that if/when a 'point of no return' is reached with this and it is 100% obvious and evident to Nate that the deal isn't going to happen and we need to go back to the drawing board...that he would communicate that somehow. Of course, he doesn't HAVE to communicate anything he doesn't want to. That's just my personal hope with it all.
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My first victory against Jolty... and it's a forum post.
Does this help my pvp cred?
Probably but more for the rarity. I hardly pvp'd and those that did fight me brought 20 blues... Jerks! Also, I plan on remaking Rejolt as a dominator so you just did that annoying trick of telling me what to do when I was already doing it.
Original point: I'm in the camp of nothing else NCSoft makes that makes them big bucks has interested me. I gravitate toward modern-era rpg (city of heroes), Sci-fi (tabula rasa, exsteel, auto assault) and NCSoft shut them down.
The one thing that they have is Wildstar. If COH comes back I may give their "wow in space" a shot.
Edit: I've harped on making shuttered Mmos into iPhone games before and exsteel is a perfect candidate. It was already freemium, arena/counter-strike based and best played in short bursts.
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The new group that would run the game is not Nate.
They had the backing to buy the game at the price offered or nothing further would happen and NCSoft would certainly make sure the money is in Escrow at this point.
Nate wants the IP. I believe he is still in the conversations - but possibly not as much as you might think. Unless there has been a change he was not planning to be the one running the old game. Irish Girl as far as I know works for no one but herself with CoH APR. CoT has offered to help with the costume creator - but the development is Irish Girl's.
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It's not just Nate working on the sale, there are more people involved and have been from early on. He's just the person in charge, so he's the one that's talked about most. Nobody's named names yet, and it's not really my place to. and while I'm privy to details that most people aren't, I'm not directly involved with the sale.
I think for better or worse is the truth is that most gaming companies aren't very interested in a deal like this. Unless they had a vested personal interest in CoH. Most gaming studios tend to want to either work on their own I.P., or a big name I.P. that they're fans of. Add on top of that the incredible financial burden that something like this would place on the company. Buying the I.P., Overhauling the game, Q/A and testing, Promotional costs...and having to still maintain overhead (Paying for office space, paying the people working on it). It's big, it's expensive, and risky...there's no guarantee that anyone beyond our little community would come play.
Money's not the issue, and you're remembering correctly. NCSoft gave a rough estimate cost near the beginning and it was, to quote Nate, "Very doable."
Based on all the information I have, I do not think NCSoft is stringing us along when it's much easier to just say no.
But we're dealing with something they've never done before...and they keep getting hit with other, larger issues... like WildStar failing, and Nexon trying to steal their Pie, and then of course finding out that people were embezzling from them.
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I gotta admit, I am seeing unexpected posts from some people here.
Morale feels kinda shot so hopefully we'll get some sort of actual news soon.
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It may seem like morale is down; especially considering the statements from some people...but... I will say it again and again.
Nothing CAN be reported officially at this time due to the NDA, but the negotiations are ongoing and as soon as something can be disclosed...it will be. I know it's frustrating, but there is nothing that can be done about the lack of new information. You just have to have trust in Nate et al that they are fighting for everyone to return to Paragon... and that no matter what happens...as soon as something can be said...it will be said.
I gotta admit, I am seeing unexpected posts from some people here.
Morale feels kinda shot so hopefully we'll get some sort of actual news soon.
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Probably but more for the rarity. I hardly pvp'd and those that did fight me brought 20 blues... Jerks! Also, I plan on remaking Rejolt as a dominator so you just did that annoying trick of telling me what to do when I was already doing it.
Original point: I'm in the camp of nothing else NCSoft makes that makes them big bucks has interested me. I gravitate toward modern-era rpg (city of heroes), Sci-fi (tabula rasa, exsteel, auto assault) and NCSoft shut them down.
The one thing that they have is Wildstar. If COH comes back I may give their "wow in space" a shot.
I haven't touched any NCSoft since the shutdown was first announced. Like many I was understandably irate over the shutdown itself and how it was handled. While some facts have been brought to light since the shutdown, my opinion of NCSoft is still rather sour.
Also in case the market and IO's don't return right away with the game, I was able to cobble together something in MIDS that will have some def cap with SO's in case I need to use such a thing until IO's were restored.
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NDA regardless, the team's not just going to leave the community hanging.
-mom voice-
Now, don't make me start posting pretty, pretty APR screenshots to try and cheer people up!
-wags finger-
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NDA regardless, the team's not just going to leave the community hanging.
Respectfully, some of us are feeling hung out to dry.
Yes, I know they can't say anything, no I don't want them to risk the deal by doing so, but even so... Eventually, hope gives out to despondency.
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Respectfully, some of us are feeling hung out to dry.
Yes, I know they can't say anything, no I don't want them to risk the deal by doing so, but even so... Eventually, hope gives out to despondency.
I meant more...if the deal's dead-dead...it won't left a mystery.
and I've noticed the feeling. I wish there was more I could do, honest.
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I meant more...if the deal's dead-dead...it won't left a mystery.
and I've noticed the feeling. I wish there was more I could do, honest.
It wouldn't be so bad if there were any MMO's out there worth playing; but I've tried them all since CoH was brutally axed in the back, and NONE of them match up to CoH. They're prettier, have superior engines and all that stuff, but they're all soulless pieces of garbage. They don't have the "X-Factor" that CoH had in spades.
To be blunt, they're ALL a pile of pancake.
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I meant more...if the deal's dead-dead...it won't left a mystery.
and I've noticed the feeling. I wish there was more I could do, honest.
If the deal's dead, the only one who will know is NCsoft, because they are the only one who may decide it to be dead. And we will only know if they find that us knowing it is in their best interrest.
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It wouldn't be so bad if there were any MMO's out there worth playing; but I've tried them all since CoH was brutally axed in the back, and NONE of them match up to CoH. They're prettier, have superior engines and all that stuff, but they're all soulless pieces of garbage. They don't have the "X-Factor" that CoH had in spades.
To be blunt, they're ALL a pile of pancake.
Agreed. When I've got free time I sometimes bounce from MMO to MMO. Haven't found one that really holds my attention for more than a few hours. ToR sometimes manages to get a day or two, because it's Star Wars. Oh, and waaaay too much Warframe...but that's not really an MMO.
Also, Mmmmm......Now I'm thinking about a nice stack of banana pancakes. xD
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It wouldn't be so bad if there were any MMO's out there worth playing; but I've tried them all since CoH was brutally axed in the back, and NONE of them match up to CoH. They're prettier, have superior engines and all that stuff, but they're all soulless pieces of garbage. They don't have the "X-Factor" that CoH had in spades.
To be blunt, they're ALL a pile of pancake.
Totally agree!
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If the deal's dead, the only one who will know is NCsoft, because they are the only one who may decide it to be dead. And we will only know if they find that us knowing it is in their best interrest.
They will have little choice but to break the news to Nate & Crew at least, because Nate & Crew will keep gently prodding about CoX's imminent return every now and again otherwise. And then once Nate & Crew find out, they will pass along the info to us however they must without breaking the NDAs. As someone else pointed out earlier, Nate could easily come onto Facebook and the Titan forums and say that he is now able to focus fully on CoT from here on out with no other distractions, and without there being a separate victory thread on the terms of CoX's/the IP's revival to go with it, we will get the picture that the deal failed from there.
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The new group that would run the game is not Nate.
They had the backing to buy the game at the price offered or nothing further would happen and NCSoft would certainly make sure the money is in Escrow at this point.
Nate wants the IP. I believe he is still in the conversations - but possibly not as much as you might think. Unless there has been a change he was not planning to be the one running the old game. Irish Girl as far as I know works for no one but herself with CoH APR. CoT has offered to help with the costume creator - but the development is Irish Girl's.
If CoX's financial backers are forced to hold their millions in escrow, you'd think they would start becoming irritated at how drawn out this process has become, with all that money being tied up for so long that could be invested into other things instead.... I wonder how long they will put up with that before they just withdraw their offer (although maybe this is what NCSoft might be angling for by this point anyway, for all we know, what with all their other more critical recent happenings like the threat of the Nexon takeover and the internal embezzling).
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They will have little choice but to break the news to Nate & Crew at least, because Nate & Crew will keep gently prodding about CoX's imminent return every now and again otherwise.
And ? What in this cause them any kind of trouble ? In fact, we are asked to stay kind with NCsoft or else the trade may failed. That's a small but net gain for them. If they let us know that the deal will never come to success, there may be another shitstorm on their head. Let us hope that the game will be back online until we get tired of waiting.
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They will have little choice but to break the news to Nate & Crew at least, because Nate & Crew will keep gently prodding about CoX's imminent return every now and again otherwise.
Clearly you've never been told "Don't call us, we'll call you".
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Clearly you've never been told "Don't call us, we'll call you".
Hah! I was going to respond to this with a somewhat similar phrase.
Yeeeeeeeeeah...if NCSoft wanted to be really, REALLY difficult about it? Theoretically? I don't think I could see them just 'cutting off' communication entirely and/or indefinitely with little to no reason or explanation as to why...but I absolutely think they could pull the whole 'if/when we're interested, we will contact you' card. Ergo, they leave it vague and open ended on their end while keeping the hope alive on our end, but with no definite agreement one way or the other regarding whether or not some type of deal can be met. Until they sign that disc over (or get the IP, or whatever it is that we're trying to settle on with them) they have the power. They're listening, and I think they find the deal to be at least SOMEWHAT interesting...however, they won't forget for a second that they can shoot it down at any time should they choose to.
But, I agree with Surelle in that if that were to happen, Nate would probably find a very discrete yet diplomatic way to communicate that to everyone - i.e. coming on to these forums, the official COT forums, and various social media platforms with a sentiment of "I can officially state that I am now able to solely focus all of my efforts on the City of Titans title..." etc.
There's just so much left in the unknown at this point. How do we know that some of Nate's backers haven't since already backed out? How do we know that NCSoft isn't far enough removed from the negotiations so that they could care less about constant/consistent emails or phone calls from Nate and his team? Or how do we know that a deal isn't already close to closing, but NCSoft is just waiting out all of this Nexon/embezzlement stuff to sign their names on the dotted line? All we can do is speculate.
Speculate, and eat Cadbury Creme Eggs. Happy Easter everybody.
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There's just so much left in the unknown at this point. How do we know that some of Nate's backers haven't since already backed out? How do we know that NCSoft isn't far enough removed from the negotiations so that they could care less about constant/consistent emails or phone calls from Nate and his team? Or how do we know that a deal isn't already close to closing, but NCSoft is just waiting out all of this Nexon/embezzlement stuff to sign their names on the dotted line? All we can do is speculate.
Speculate, and eat Cadbury Creme Eggs. Happy Easter everybody.
Or, for that matter, that the deal is signed, the payments are made, but by terms of the agreement they cannot announce until they have the servers running properly together and all the components (market, account manager, etc.) developed and ready for open testing. Of course, this seems somewhat unlikely given the general attitude of "well delay is annoying but we're hopeful" that we're hearing from the Illuminati.
But I could easily envision a signed commitment with milestones waiting on development goals with an NDA on progress as they work towards building a functional system that would be the basis of the deal ... with only IP at a lower price if the system(s) can't be made to work based on what NCSoft has provided.
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Ohioknight, that is where I am at as well. You don't spend good money on something that doesn't work.
I personally believe that the development of the server image has to be worked out before the deal is done.
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Or, for that matter, that the deal is signed, the payments are made, but by terms of the agreement they cannot announce until they have the servers running properly together and all the components (market, account manager, etc.) developed and ready for open testing. Of course, this seems somewhat unlikely given the general attitude of "well delay is annoying but we're hopeful" that we're hearing from the Illuminati.
But I could easily envision a signed commitment with milestones waiting on development goals with an NDA on progress as they work towards building a functional system that would be the basis of the deal ... with only IP at a lower price if the system(s) can't be made to work based on what NCSoft has provided.
...See, that's what I WANT to believe is going on with everything lol. In an ideal world, this would be the reality of the situation. But the half-glass-empty 'realist' in me won't even allow that to be considered as a viable option? I think I might be taking on the 'expect the worst, hope for the best' mentality as a means of preparation should things not pan out for us.
Here's my question though: why do you feel that might be the case? Is it just a hunch, or...? I'm genuinely curious.
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Ohioknight, that is where I am at as well. You don't spend good money on something that doesn't work.
I personally believe that the development of the server image has to be worked out before the deal is done.
I think you two have cracked the secret code.
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To me, and yes the September news brought back old feelings, the game is done. It was a service that ran for over 9 years (including beta) in a genre that wasn't all that popular (comic book RPG) and I had a blast.
I appreciate all the successor projects and the current attempt to bring back COH legacy. I have no expectations and they should take as long as they need to get the job done. Any other mindset is unfair to the procedings.
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...See, that's what I WANT to believe is going on with everything lol. In an ideal world, this would be the reality of the situation. But the half-glass-empty 'realist' in me won't even allow that to be considered as a viable option? I think I might be taking on the 'expect the worst, hope for the best' mentality as a means of preparation should things not pan out for us.
Here's my question though: why do you feel that might be the case? Is it just a hunch, or...? I'm genuinely curious.
I try to make sense of the situation. The Mysterions are obviously frustrated by not being able to tell us something and nearly uncomprehending (to actively hostile in Burnt Toast's case) when people are falling into despair over the apparent stagnation/failure/indefinite termination of the deal -- "WHY CAN'T YOU FOLKS SEE HOW CLOSE THIS IS!!!" seems to me to be their attitude... but they are also apparently frustrated over the pace of developments. If they were getting fully stonewalled it would be more like "WE HAVE TO KEEP TRYING ... KEEEP TRYYYING :gonk: " But this is more like "WHAT, WE STILL HAVEN'T GOTTEN THAT DOCUMENT BACK! MAN, WHAT A WAY TO RUN A RAILROAD" or "OH C'MON! THIS GODDAMN THING!" It seems to me that our silent friends THINK that there are things GOING ON (beyond negotiations) that they can't mention.
When I think about that and I think on NCSoft's (and probably the SECRET MASTERS OF THE MYSTERIONS) NDAs on the deal... this tells me that active work is happening but SLOWLY (or at least with slow progress) ... then I think about possible conditions and I take everything we've heard about the technical nature of the game and the missing pieces that will need developing -- and getting things working before a final signature seems most likely.
But I've wildly over-interpreted people's responses before and been wrong (notably the meaning of a certain "GAME CHANGING" piece of information that I always thought was fairly obvious -- the involvement of people who are also involved in COT)
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What if the main deal is complete but the team building the server is taking a while to get it done? Would you buy a game that you couldn't prove was able to run? I keep saying to people that there are a LOT of moving parts in this deal. You have the IP, the game image, the future leasing and all of them done by different teams.
I kind of doubt that since they haven't tapped any of the people that are most likely to be able to get that done. None of the reverse engineers in the community most experienced with how the game works have even been approached about helping, and none of them are under NDA.
Sure, they could do it without those people, but it would take significantly longer. So I don't believe they are at that stage yet.
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The Mysterions are obviously frustrated by not being able to tell us something and nearly uncomprehending (to actively hostile in Burnt Toast's case) when people are falling into despair over the apparent stagnation/failure/indefinite termination of the deal -- "WHY CAN'T YOU FOLKS SEE HOW CLOSE THIS IS!!!" seems to me to be their attitude... but they are also apparently frustrated over the pace of developments.
Where are you getting this impression? Nate hasn't posted in over five months on the matter, and even back in October of last year, that's not even close to the impression I got. It just seems to me an awful lot to read into stone cold silence.
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If I were approached to help a project under a NDA... I think I'd have to sign a NDA to do it.
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Where are you getting this impression? Nate hasn't posted in over five months on the matter, and even back in October of last year, that's not even close to the impression I got. It just seems to me an awful lot to read into stone cold silence.
I am trying not to read anything into it if possible - no news means the effort is still being attempted. Some people know who the Server team are and also know more about where the talks lie - but they can't say anything. I speculate but also say - that I think this might be happening.
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I know for a fact (unless multiple developers needlessly lied to me) that the database back-end was MS SQL Server. The server instances running at shutdown were running on 2010 if I recall correctly, but it might have been compatible with earlier versions as well since it was initially developed, of course, before 2010. I know that they used it in a bit of a funky way, that they didn't just store individual pieces of information in individual fields like most app developers do; that they did stuff like store things as lists or serialized binary data in columns, which is why they always complained that people didn't understand how hard it was to simply query the database for stuff and make changes to the running system. As I recall, they didn't have much in the way of database programming talent on hand, so they used the database more like just a dumb data store instead of an honest-to-god RDBMS. Plus, and I didn't get this directly from a dev so I could be wrong about it, but I think the databases weren't actually maintained by Paragon Studios, but by NCsoft out of Austin and/or Seattle, so it's not like Matt Miller could just pull up SQL Management Studio and run a query against the live databases--not even he had that kind of access and had to go through corporate to get something like that done.
Am I in the ballpark of what you're talking about?
I think it was 2k8r2, not 2k10. Otherwise basically correct. And the devs didn't have direct access to any of the production anything. They couldn't just bring up SQL tools and look at the servers directly, nor could they just RDP into the production platforms or anything. They were gated by operations people. True for most MMOs.
As the the rest, I still think you're conflating difficult with complex in a way I'm disavowing. You say its not "hard" just "time consuming" but that's exactly what I'm saying constitutes "hard enough to claim its not worth doing" by a disinterested party. Anything is possible given enough time and the original source code in its entirety. But that's like saying we don't even need the source code: anything is possible with the binaries themselves, given only sufficient time to reverse engineer patches. Icon was created without source code. A sufficiently interested, knowledgeable, and dedicated person could patch the server images to do anything *without* the source code. The source code only makes it take less time.
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If I were approached to help a project under a NDA... I think I'd have to sign a NDA to do it.
Almost certainly. But the reverse engineering community is not a large one, and if people were being approached, it would probably become known even if they couldn't say anything directly.
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no news means the effort is still being attempted.
I do wish you'd stop saying that. No news means nothing other than no news, and it's bloody annoying!
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I do wish you'd stop saying that. No news means nothing other than no news, and it's bloody annoying!
If the effort stops - we will hear. So by direct inference - the effort is still ongoing. You may wish to hold onto anger and disappointment but I don't.
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If the effort stops - we will hear. So by direct inference - the effort is still ongoing. You may wish to hold onto anger and disappointment but I don't.
Possible, likely even, but not absolutely certain. No company places too much value in an NDA to an individual normally, because we all know most people think the law is that thing they invented to use for the Law and Order franchise. But its likely NCSoft would not negotiate with someone they felt could not be held to NDAs on more than a pinky promise. If the negotiating team was required to, say, put up a bond against the NDA, or do something else that attached significant liability consequences to breaking it, its both legally possible and historically accountable that the negotiating team is under a lockup period where no matter what the state of the negotiations are, even if they are no longer viable, they cannot discuss them. Often, such lockup periods extend for a year or two or more.
No news is no news. The range of possibilities is sufficiently wide that its not possible to deduce anything from the lack of information.
I would imagine that if things broke down completely, then even with a harsh NDA in place that news would leak out over time, slowly, the way these things do. I would imagine that at some point a little birdy would arrive on my window sill, but although that hasn't happened yet I cannot (i.e. will not) serve as a deadman's switch for that.
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I'm in the things are still on going camp here.
We was given to much good news at the start for this to be a ploy by NCSoft. Leasing the IP out to a third party, the green light on CoH 1.5 if everything goes threw, ect...
I believe that right now there's a few things holding up progress. The whole Nexus/NCSoft power struggle, getting a working server (as IronWolf and other's have pointed out. I doubt anyone would pay for a product they don't know works), ect.
I believe IrishGirl when she says. That if the deal was dead, we'd know it.
I know many people here consider themselves realist but in the grand scheme of things what negative news have we received so far? The long silence? From a "realist" perspective couldn't that go either way when combined with all the other news we've gotten?
Until things start to look bleak, I'll be over here cheering the team on. GO TEAM GO! GO TEAM GO! :P
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Possible, likely even, but not absolutely certain. No company places too much value in an NDA to an individual normally, because we all know most people think the law is that thing they invented to use for the Law and Order franchise. But its likely NCSoft would not negotiate with someone they felt could not be held to NDAs on more than a pinky promise. If the negotiating team was required to, say, put up a bond against the NDA, or do something else that attached significant liability consequences to breaking it, its both legally possible and historically accountable that the negotiating team is under a lockup period where no matter what the state of the negotiations are, even if they are no longer viable, they cannot discuss them. Often, such lockup periods extend for a year or two or more.
No news is no news. The range of possibilities is sufficiently wide that its not possible to deduce anything from the lack of information.
I would imagine that if things broke down completely, then even with a harsh NDA in place that news would leak out over time, slowly, the way these things do. I would imagine that at some point a little birdy would arrive on my window sill, but although that hasn't happened yet I cannot (i.e. will not) serve as a deadman's switch for that.
This. As Arcana so eloquently put it, I think that if/when this deal should fall through, we would eventually hear about it. But that could be over the course of a certain period of time - there is no definitive way to know that if we're not hearing anything, that means the deal is steadily proceeding (unless we hear it directly from Nate that he has heard from his contact at NCSoft something to this effect). So, unfortunately, I think I'm in the 'no news is no news' camp :( I don't think no news is good news, necessarily - I think we'll know good news when we HEAR good news.
Also, I referred to myself as a realist not in the sense that I think we've received 'negative news', but in that I'm TOO cautious (with all that's unknown as the negotiations currently stand) to convince myself that something he said or she said could have a positive spin when it may not. Of course, everyone is entitled to view this however they want - and I hope to be pleasantly surprised should the deal actually land.
*sends good vibes to Nate*
*...also, lottery tickets - homegirl's gonna need some MONEY for all this hahaha*
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This. As Arcana so eloquently put it, I think that if/when this deal should fall through, we would eventually hear about it. But that could be over the course of a certain period of time - there is no definitive way to know that if we're not hearing anything, that means the deal is steadily proceeding (unless we hear it directly from Nate that he has heard from his contact at NCSoft something to this effect). So, unfortunately, I think I'm in the 'no news is no news' camp :( I don't think no news is good news, necessarily - I think we'll know good news when we HEAR good news.
Also, I referred to myself as a realist not in the sense that I think we've received 'negative news', but in that I'm TOO cautious (with all that's unknown as the negotiations currently stand) to convince myself that something he said or she said could have a positive spin when it may not. Of course, everyone is entitled to view this however they want - and I hope to be pleasantly surprised should the deal actually land.
*sends good vibes to Nate*
*...also, lottery tickets - homegirl's gonna need some MONEY for all this hahaha*
There are many ways for the team to let us know that the deal fell threw. Without directly telling us as I think Ohioknight put it. Nate could simply say "I'm focusing all my energy in City of Titans". If he was to say something like that. Then I'd assume it'd mean, that the energy he was focusing in making the deal happen. Was no longer needed because the deal isn't going to happen, ect..
I wasn't saying that being a realist meant you was being negative. What I was trying to say is. If you claim to be a realist yet read negatively into the silence. Then are you truly a realist? What is there to decern from silence after good news, with no negative news to follow?
I don't know maybe there's something I'm missing?
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Some people know who the Server team are
ah... so there is a server team working on something with this disk image? Or am I reading too much into what you posted or simply misunderstanding?
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Where are you getting this impression? Nate hasn't posted in over five months on the matter, and even back in October of last year, that's not even close to the impression I got. It just seems to me an awful lot to read into stone cold silence.
Nate hasn't posted here, or on subject, but he has posted. IG has posted quite a bit. OK maybe Burnt Toast is just a snotty 12-year-old playing with his smartphone, or a middle-aged internet blowhard, I don't know...
I was just answering the question of what made me think what I suspect about the status of the project -- I think there are Mysterion posters on this board (beyond Irish Girl) expressing attitudes ... as I said, I've been wrong and I'm fully aware I may be seeing letters in the clouds -- I was fairly certain that the mole in Young Justice was a clone of Aqualad (which really would have made more sense than the actual story... but anyway)
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There are many ways for the team to let us know that the deal fell threw. Without directly telling us as I think Ohioknight put it. Nate could simply say "I'm focusing all my energy in City of Titans". If he was to say something like that. Then I'd assume it'd mean, that the energy he was focusing in making the deal happen. Was no longer needed because the deal isn't going to happen, ect..
I wasn't saying that being a realist meant you was being negative. What I was trying to say is. If you claim to be a realist yet read negatively into the silence. Then are you truly a realist? What is there to decern from silence after good news, with no negative news to follow?
I don't know maybe there's something I'm missing?
If I'm not mistaken, it was Surelle (not Ohioknight - although I've agreed with many of the things he's said as well) who originally suggested that should Nate make the ultimate decision to find some discrete/diplomatic way to inform the rest of the community that he would be moving on from the negotiations, he would do so in such a manner - and I was the first to re-quote and agree with her. But what I'm saying is that there is no way to know where the deal currently stands right NOW in our 'no news/updates' stage (i.e. they may be under a lockup period and there is a definite yes/no, but no one can say anything YET - as Arcana suggested). Ergo, to state that 'no news is good news' might actually be quite false, or be quite true - we don't know, unless Nate were to come forward and specifically say "Hey guys - if you don't hear any updates from me, that's a good thing/bad thing" (which he has not done). So, to air on the side of caution, that is why I prefer the term 'no news is no news'.
I think where you might be confused is in your assumption that people who are of this 'no news is no news' mindset are choosing to automatically have a negative opinion of where the deal currently stands - and while I can't speak for everyone else, I can certainly state that this notion does not accurately reflect my personal views at all. If I were thinking negatively of the situation, I would be in the 'no news is BAD news' camp :) I'm not being an optimist, and I'm not being a pessimist. I'm just taking the 'no news' for what it is, with no spin this way or that way. I want to see the deal go through just as badly as everyone else does - I was a 7 year veteran of the game, and I think about it all the time.
I'm just opting not to get my hopes up, nor lose hope all together. Does that make more sense?
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I'm just opting not to get my hopes up, nor lose hope all together. Does that make more sense?
Believe in the best, anticipate the worst? Sounds like a realist :P
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Believe in the best, anticipate the worst? Sounds like a realist :P
Yaaaaaay! You got it! :)
*cheers*
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Think about it this way guys... if the deal was stone-cold-dead-in-the-groud...Would I still be trying to convince people to still have hope, and that things are moving (albeit slowly)?
(The answer is probably not Yes.)
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Think about it this way guys... if the deal was stone-cold-dead-in-the-groud...Would I still be trying to convince people to still have hope, and that things are moving (albeit slowly)?
(The answer is probably not Yes.)
...Maybe. Perhaps. Somewhat.
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We don't have confirmation as to how far the negotiations have progressed, or what is their outcome so far.
Currently the deal is kind of like Schrodinger's Cat - in an indeterminate state barring arrival of new data. Instead of splitting ourselves into "it's dead, cause no news" and "it must be alive, we'd have heard if it died" camps, why not get a cup of tea and sit down in the "wait and see" camp? It's not like a longer wait would kill us.
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I suppose I am still in the "hopeful" group, just because it has not been called dead officially.
I have, however, wondered intensely about why such NSA level precautions are taken around negotiations for the resurrection of a defunct game? I know business is all about competition, but let's face it....the competition in this arena are well known products, which while they may be similar, they are not the overall king of the Superhero genre (like WoW is to fantasy). There might be some things in development, but they are years in the distance. I don't claim to know everything about business practices, especially international business, but this all seems WAY too cloak and dagger for the property at stake.
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We don't have confirmation as to how far the negotiations have progressed, or what is their outcome so far.
Currently the deal is kind of like Schrodinger's Cat - in an indeterminate state barring arrival of new data. Instead of splitting ourselves into "it's dead, cause no news" and "it must be alive, we'd have heard if it died" camps, why not get a cup of tea and sit down in the "wait and see" camp? It's not like a longer wait would kill us.
Two deaths every second. I'd say, morbidly, that waiting could potentially kill some of us.
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Think about it this way guys... if the deal was stone-cold-dead-in-the-groud...Would I still be trying to convince people to still have hope, and that things are moving (albeit slowly)?
(The answer is probably not Yes.)
I love how you put things. 8) Thanks!
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Think about it this way guys... if the deal was stone-cold-dead-in-the-groud...Would I still be trying to convince people to still have hope, and that things are moving (albeit slowly)?
(The answer is probably not Yes.)
It's just sad that you have to.... Sometimes I feel like some of these people are pulling on heart strings trying to get information. It's like unless it's written in stone RIGHT in front of them. Then there's wiggle room and they'll find something there to pick at until they get all the information they can out of it.
Alright, I'm going back to my command center cheering the team on from it. Until we get the final yes or no.
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I suppose I am still in the "hopeful" group, just because it has not been called dead officially.
I have, however, wondered intensely about why such NSA level precautions are taken around negotiations for the resurrection of a defunct game? I know business is all about competition, but let's face it....the competition in this arena are well known products, which while they may be similar, they are not the overall king of the Superhero genre (like WoW is to fantasy). There might be some things in development, but they are years in the distance. I don't claim to know everything about business practices, especially international business, but this all seems WAY too cloak and dagger for the property at stake.
One could presume that if there was no NDA, that MMORPG news sites would run rampant with wild rumors and speculations that could derail things, same with all the message boards.
Also if there were no NDA, then it may be possible for a competitor, or perhaps I should say owner of another super hero MMO to come in and try to usurp things with a better offer in order to buy up the game and keep it offline while their own game continues to thrive. Disney/Marvel springs to mind given the history of lawsuit problems that existed between Marvel and CoH for awhile.
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Hmmm....two scenarios:
One where you have no information, and one where you have too much and have to sort the wheat from the chaff.
All things considered, I think I would prefer option 2. Just sayin'.
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Hmmm....two scenarios:
One where you have no information, and one where you have too much and have to sort the wheat from the chaff.
All things considered, I think I would prefer option 2. Just sayin'.
Option 2 would kill Nate's chances of landing a deal with NCSoft. Rumors and speculations = non-discrete, and non-discrete = NCSoft maaaaaaaad. NCSOFT RAAAAAAGE.
I think we're safer off with Nate keeping to himself for the time being and not running the risk of spilling anything he probably shouldn't.
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Option 2 would kill Nate's chances of landing a deal with NCSoft. Rumors and speculations = non-discrete, and non-discrete = NCSoft maaaaaaaad. NCSOFT RAAAAAAGE.
This is what I'm talking about. I feel like I have to point some of this stuff out because people are having unrealistic expectations and fundamental misunderstandings of the current status of affairs:
- NCsoft isn't anything. They have never said one single solitary word regarding the negotiations to anyone outside the negotiating team. Nothing. Nada. Zip, zilch, zero. So please stop reading anything into how NCsoft feels or what NCsoft is thinking in regards to these negotiations.
- What we do know is that Nate posted on September 1 last year--over seven months ago--that negotiations were taking place. We don't know anyone who is or was on that team other than Nate. We know people who were marginally involved (e.g. IG), but as far as we publicly know, Nate is the only person who can definitively state anything with any weight of credibility behind it. Now I want to be clear about this: I'm not accusing anyone of lying or deliberately misrepresenting the truth. But I have seen WAY too often people reading things into posts that simply aren't there. I've said this before, and why people won't take this advice to heart completely stymies me, but do not take worth a grain of salt anything that you hear or read from non-firsthand sources! And yes, that includes me. I try my best to make it clear when I know something versus when I'm speculating about something, yet I still see people saying, "Tony said such-and-such..." when I never said any such thing.
- What we also know is that these negotiations supposedly started in September 2013, which is over a year and a half ago. Yes, I know that things sometimes move slowly in the business world. But c'mon, people. Not this slowly. I mean, we're not talking about merging two multibillion-dollar corporations here, having to get approval from the FTC and Congress, and yet even those kinds of deals have taken less time than this one. We're talking about a pretty simple, straight-forward purchase of IP and (ideally) a source code base. We're talking a few months, max--if NCsoft were willing to play ball. That doesn't mean that I've completely ruled out something happening as impossible, just highly unlikely. If you want to believe that they're right on the cusp, then by gummy, have at it, but for the love of whatever god you pray to, PLEASE stop characterizing people as "holding on to anger and disappointment."
- I don't know why people are dancing around what I consider kind of obvious, but to answer the question of, "Why hasn't Nate come out and said the deal is dead?", it's entirely possible that he is holding out hope that it's still alive even after NCsoft has made it clear, likely through simple non-communication, that it's not. Or it could be a simple matter of someone he knows telling him, "We need to wait for the right time to approach the executives..." and then there just never seems to be a right time. I don't know--and it's important to me that you understand that--but in my humble opinion, if it hasn't happened after over a year and a half, it's almost certainly not going to happen this time around.
And you know what? That's okay. Like I said, in spite of this, I'm still optimistic. I know of other things that are in the works that are kind of exciting, things that are longer-term efforts that, while I don't want to rile everyone up over, I know will eventually sufficiently awe people to be worth the wait. And I also don't think that this will be the last time a play is made for the City of Heroes IP. The thing that strikes me about this attempt at it is that so far, nothing has changed. The executives who shut down City of Heroes and nixed negotiations with Brian Clayton and his team are still in charge. But there's a steady stream of news coming out about Nexon making moves against top-level management at NCsoft, NCsoft being forced to divest some of its stock to NetMarble to avoid a hostile takeover, and some of NCsoft's properties not doing as well as planned, that lead me to believe that things won't always be the same.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again to leave everyone on a happy note: NCsoft can say no a thousand times, but all it takes is one yes. And we will eventually get that yes.
(Or, you know, make the answer irrelevant...)
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I know of other things that are in the works that are kind of exciting, things that are longer-term efforts that... will eventually ... be worth the wait.
(...)
THERE we go! Good to hear from you again Tony!
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I blame tony..he didnt get us all a nice cheese plate
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Thread was created a week ago and already has 10 pages and 4000 views haha. People are like *Gasp* another thread to look through for news.
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I am actively hostile? Uhm ok? I prefer to think of my replies as blunt, logical and honest. I guess we have different opinions on hostile.
I try to make sense of the situation. The Mysterions are obviously frustrated by not being able to tell us something and nearly uncomprehending (to actively hostile in Burnt Toast's case) when people are falling into despair over the apparent stagnation/failure/indefinite termination of the deal -- "WHY CAN'T YOU FOLKS SEE HOW CLOSE THIS IS!!!" seems to me to be their attitude... but they are also apparently frustrated over the pace of developments. If they were getting fully stonewalled it would be more like "WE HAVE TO KEEP TRYING ... KEEEP TRYYYING :gonk: " But this is more like "WHAT, WE STILL HAVEN'T GOTTEN THAT DOCUMENT BACK! MAN, WHAT A WAY TO RUN A RAILROAD" or "OH C'MON! THIS GODDAMN THING!" It seems to me that our silent friends THINK that there are things GOING ON (beyond negotiations) that they can't mention.
When I think about that and I think on NCSoft's (and probably the SECRET MASTERS OF THE MYSTERIONS) NDAs on the deal... this tells me that active work is happening but SLOWLY (or at least with slow progress) ... then I think about possible conditions and I take everything we've heard about the technical nature of the game and the missing pieces that will need developing -- and getting things working before a final signature seems most likely.
But I've wildly over-interpreted people's responses before and been wrong (notably the meaning of a certain "GAME CHANGING" piece of information that I always thought was fairly obvious -- the involvement of people who are also involved in COT)
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I am not a snotty 12 year old.
Internet blowhard? Not sure what I have said for you to associate that term with me. Maybe again...different opinion on the definition of blow hard (someone who talks too much and who people dislike).
I had no clue I was seen in such a negative light on these boards. I never thought I was hostile...and while I wasn't trying to win a popularity contest...I never knew I was disliked so much.
Nate hasn't posted here, or on subject, but he has posted. IG has posted quite a bit. OK maybe Burnt Toast is just a snotty 12-year-old playing with his smartphone, or a middle-aged internet blowhard, I don't know...
I was just answering the question of what made me think what I suspect about the status of the project -- I think there are Mysterion posters on this board (beyond Irish Girl) expressing attitudes ... as I said, I've been wrong and I'm fully aware I may be seeing letters in the clouds -- I was fairly certain that the mole in Young Justice was a clone of Aqualad (which really would have made more sense than the actual story... but anyway)
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I am actively hostile? Uhm ok? I prefer to think of my replies as blunt, logical and honest. I guess we have different opinions on hostile.
You're forgetting the golden rule of the internet, Toasty. If someone disagrees with you, then no matter how politely or reasonably they promote their point of view, they're actively hostile and aggressive, trolling, and probably lots of other derogatory things.
Which is why, whenever someone calls me something like that, they get tossed into the moron box.
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This is what I'm talking about. I feel like I have to point some of this stuff out because people are having unrealistic expectations and fundamental misunderstandings of the current status of affairs:
- NCsoft isn't anything. They have never said one single solitary word regarding the negotiations to anyone outside the negotiating team. Nothing. Nada. Zip, zilch, zero. So please stop reading anything into how NCsoft feels or what NCsoft is thinking in regards to these negotiations.
First off - the notion that people are "holding on to anger and disappointment" because they're not trying to put optimistic spins on things they're either seeing or hearing is ridiculous. I agree with you on that - much of what you've said I've agreed with, and there is evidence of this just from the past few posts I've made on this thread.
...However, my comment was very much in relation to back in the late summer/early fall when everyone was first catching wind via IronWolf that something serious was in the works, and the social media platforms blew UP. Fortunately, since then things have simmered considerably and it's not so much a problem...but it was stated by many a fairly reputable sources in our community that NCSoft didn't care for that type of business behavior, and that type of player-wide rumor and speculation churning (on a fairly large scale, might I add) would only sour the efforts - ergo, it was best to simmer some and collect ourselves. And granted - I don't think it would have soured things to the point of completely ruining everything...but still. I believe that to be true regarding how NCSoft prefers to do business - kind of like how Nate said in his original post that he had to have someone make an introduction for him to meet Mr. Yoon, as that's how things get done with their type of corporate culture.
Just my opinion.
Also, Tony...the usage of the term 'opinion' more so in your posts is something you might be able to benefit from :) Especially if you're having issues with people confusing when you're saying something in speculation vs. fact - *laughs* And this is totally not me picking at a wound here at all, but you literally stated in one sentence that: "do not take worth a grain of salt anything that you hear or read from non-firsthand sources! And yes, that includes me..." and then followed that up with: "We're talking about a pretty simple, straight-forward purchase of IP and (ideally) a source code base. We're talking a few months, max--if NCsoft were willing to play ball."
AND I'VE DONE THE SAME THING. I'm not trying to call you out on anything I'm not guilty of, too.
Cheers.
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...However, my comment was very much in relation to back in the late summer/early fall when everyone was first catching wind via IronWolf that something serious was in the works, and the social media platforms blew UP. Fortunately, since then things have simmered considerably and it's not so much a problem...but it was stated by many a fairly reputable sources in our community that NCSoft didn't care for that type of business behavior, and that type of player-wide rumor and speculation churning (on a fairly large scale, might I add) would only sour the efforts - ergo, it was best to simmer some and collect ourselves. And granted - I don't think it would have soured things to the point of completely ruining everything...but still. I believe that to be true regarding how NCSoft prefers to do business - kind of like how Nate said in his original post that he had to have someone make an introduction for him to meet Mr. Yoon, as that's how things get done with their type of corporate culture.
Yeah, I distinctly remember this, too. We were specifically requested to stop posting on NCSoft's Facebook page, not attempt to contact them in any way, and tone down the anti-NCSoft rantings in public, or it would ruin everything. I'll have to do some digging for the actual request (it might even be in the New Efforts thread - Edit: Nope, can't find it there), but I know it happened.
On a more general note, some of us have just had enough work-related experiences where not hearing anything for a long while from a company is not a good thing (it just means they forgot about you and/or are hoping you'll go away), so I'm still hopeful, but not optimistic.
I'd rather be pessimistic and pleasantly surprised than optimistic and disappointed :D
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I am not a snotty 12 year old.
Internet blowhard? Not sure what I have said for you to associate that term with me. Maybe again...different opinion on the definition of blow hard (someone who talks too much and who people dislike).
I had no clue I was seen in such a negative light on these boards. I never thought I was hostile...and while I wasn't trying to win a popularity contest...I never knew I was disliked so much.
I deeply LOVE you Toast. My point was that I don't THINK you are either a snotty 12 year old or an Internet Blowhard, but rather one with deep wisdom and knowledge -- My post was noting that I could be wrong (sorry if that was unclear). And I apologize for the "hostile" appellation -- sputtering in fury perhaps... :-)
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Yeah, I distinctly remember this, too. We were specifically requested to stop posting on NCSoft's Facebook page, not attempt to contact them in any way, and tone down the anti-NCSoft rantings in public, or it would ruin everything. I'll have to do some digging for the actual request (it might even be in the New Efforts thread - Edit: Nope, can't find it there), but I know it happened.
You are correct there was a request to tone down the rhetoric on the fb page and not engage in the active lobbying (letter writing, masks etc) that did not sit well before with ncsoft.
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Ahh ok... sorry for the confusion. I read those and I was like "uhh what'd I say to bring that on?" :)
I deeply LOVE you Toast. My point was that I don't THINK you are either a snotty 12 year old or an Internet Blowhard, but rather one with deep wisdom and knowledge -- My post was noting that I could be wrong (sorry if that was unclear). And I apologize for the "hostile" appellation -- sputtering in fury perhaps... :-)
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NCSoft told the team (Nate and Co.) they didn't like the sort of publicity that the last effort had.
Nate contacted me once the guy on Facebook broke things loose and it was published if I had spoke to the website - he was in a panic and so was I, NCSoft was mollified that time and so things were not completely derailed, but it was not a good thing.
There is a team that is with Nate to run the servers and the returning game - Nate said as much and so have others. It's not news, however as others have said here - there is a lot of experience in reverse engineering/server restoration here on the site - that would do it for cheap/free so why look elsewhere?
I also understand why the new group won't say anything because without a deal they have nothing to say yet.
I am so bored with other games now. I hope we hear soon.
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I haven't played any MMO since 11/30/2012... none of them even remotely interest me. I have done a LITTLE alpha testing for VO and that's it :( I was never an MMO player... just CoH. I probably spend an hour or so every day in MIDs to fill my CoH gap.
NCSoft told the team (Nate and Co.) they didn't like the sort of publicity that the last effort had.
Nate contacted me once the guy on Facebook broke things loose and it was published if I had spoke to the website - he was in a panic and so was I, NCSoft was mollified that time and so things were not completely derailed, but it was not a good thing.
There is a team that is with Nate to run the servers and the returning game - Nate said as much and so have others. It's not news, however as others have said here - there is a lot of experience in reverse engineering/server restoration here on the site - that would do it for cheap/free so why look elsewhere?
I also understand why the new group won't say anything because without a deal they have nothing to say yet.
I am so bored with other games now. I hope we hear soon.
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I am so bored with other games now. I hope we hear soon.
Me too brother, me too. . .
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You're forgetting the golden rule of the internet, Toasty. If someone disagrees with you, then no matter how politely or reasonably they promote their point of view, they're actively hostile and aggressive, trolling, and probably lots of other derogatory things.
Which is why, whenever someone calls me something like that, they get tossed into the moron box.
The problem is that box is full, and they keep bouncing back out.
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I am so bored with other games now. I hope we hear soon.
This. Our core group of 4, who played together probably 7-8 years in CoH, has yet to find a suitable home. And our fifth hasn't done an MMO since City closed, I think.
Really want our City back...
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I don't know why people are dancing around what I consider kind of obvious, but to answer the question of, "Why hasn't Nate come out and said the deal is dead?", it's entirely possible that he is holding out hope that it's still alive even after NCsoft has made it clear, likely through simple non-communication, that it's not. Or it could be a simple matter of someone he knows telling him, "We need to wait for the right time to approach the executives..." and then there just never seems to be a right time. I don't know--and it's important to me that you understand that--but in my humble opinion, if it hasn't happened after over a year and a half, it's almost certainly not going to happen this time around.
Couldn't the terms of the NDA extend beyond the negotiating period, as well? I know this isn't reality TV we're talking about here, but I've heard if you're on a show like that you generally can't talk about production for several years after the fact. It makes me wonder if the NDA had a clause that said you can't discuss these negotiations until "X".
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I am so bored with other games now. I hope we hear soon.
Ugh. I know, right? I literally log onto Champions Online to keep in touch with the COH community members whom have migrated over there since shutdown...and that's pretty much the sole reason, lol. Trying to play that game only makes me pine for COH even more.
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Ugh. I know, right? I literally log onto Champions Online to keep in touch with the COH community members whom have migrated over there since shutdown...and that's pretty much the sole reason, lol. Trying to play that game only makes me pine for COH even more.
I pretty much only play CO to keep in touch with the friends I have there to. It gets old spamming arc lightning/concussor beam on everything, or using claw melee, or only two gun.
Likewise while the fun lasts a lot longer I am sure i'll be bored of using explosives in new vegas before long. I could mess with the robco certified character some more, get to a higher level so I could get a tesla upgrade for a certain robot I got.
I know I've been bored of skyrim recently due to just running out of ideas or a character and whatnot, I'd need to throw some new mods into it. I have been messing with diablo 3 periodically, and plan to start a new seasonal character(probably a demon hunter, i tend to enjoy that class far more than the others). But that has a few days to go yet before I can start the next season, and even then I'll probably hit 70 very very quickly. At least that game every playthrough will be different due to the randomness of the bosses and levels in the adventure mode.
So back to CO, tried the mechanon arch, and hated the last mission so much I don't think I want to complete it. It's full of bullcrap zero g but it's the no-control-at-all type. I had to retcon my character build to a "Proper" build, that is, defensive passive, again, cause the end boss was not scaled or anything. It just was not fun though, it was a slow-paced slog leading up to said boss and I just decided "screw this". Like, there was no testing.
All that just makes me want CoX back even more.
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I keep trying to get into CO, it would be to my advantage given I'm a lifer, but for complex reasons CO doesn't hold my attention like CoH did. In fact, I'm currently playing STO (also a lifer) because it has a significantly better hold on my attention span than CO does.
Also, you know, Star Trek, pew pew. And they are dumping so much stuff on Delta recruits its like Christmas.
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I keep trying to get into CO, it would be to my advantage given I'm a lifer, but for complex reasons CO doesn't hold my attention like CoH did. In fact, I'm currently playing STO (also a lifer) because it has a significantly better hold on my attention span than CO does.
Also, you know, Star Trek, pew pew. And they are dumping so much stuff on Delta recruits its like Christmas.
I'm trying to get back into CO (a lifer as well) but it has all the depth of an iOS arena battler with the heavy emphasis on Alerts and Rampages for the good gear. CO does enough right I can't take DCUO seriously and DCUO's lore, team content and active development makes me hate zombie-mode CO that much more.
Arcana, if I gave you 5-10 million and a staff of 20 could you "fix" CO or is it best to burn down and start over?
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Arcana, if I gave you 5-10 million and a staff of 20 could you "fix" CO or is it best to burn down and start over?
Hey! Today is the day I have the magic wand that grants unlimited cash, hours and resources. Make Arcana put that to COH2. :-)
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Arcana, if I gave you 5-10 million and a staff of 20 could you "fix" CO or is it best to burn down and start over?
If you want my honest answer, its both. I would burn down CO and then fix it.
What I mean is, CO the game is fixable. Few MMOs are irreparably broken, and there's nothing critically wrong with the engine and infrastructure that I can see. I would spend that money adding more and better content: more and better content (powersets, powers, power effects, missions, loot, etc, all count as "content") is really what most players want out of their MMOs. Within that content, I would probably steer the game in the design direction I felt was best, and my design sensibilities are on record (something for everyone, not everything for someone is my golden rule).
The problem is that its often difficult to "fix" things in an MMO because whether something is broken or not is not an objective thing, but a subjective thing based on the prejudices of the most vocal players. There are many elements of CO, as in most MMOs, where the players and the developers are locked in an adversarial relationship, making graceful change difficult or impossible.
If I'm being honest, I wouldn't pour your 10 million into CO directly: I'd just be setting a lot of it on fire. I'd take CO, hand it to my developers, and go stealth for about six months to a year building a reboot of CO. Meanwhile I would put CO into maintenance mode (some would say it already is: see "adversarial relationship" above). Then I'd pop out of stealth mode, offer players a chance to convert and import their characters into CO 2.0, and try to start fresh. CO 2.0 would not be a start from scratch game; its relationship to CO would be like CoH Freedom to CoH Issue 8. But I would get the benefit of a clean slate in terms of player expectations, which is something I feel would be necessary to not waste all that cash.
Incidentally, I can also tell you where I would spend most of that cash. It wouldn't be on content itself: it would be on content development tools. The problem with most MMOs is that content creation is ludicrously difficult to make. In fact, most MMO developers probably work with tools that are worse than a lot of the modding tools out there to mod other games. And those suck to begin with. I think game developers have never seen anything but, so they just get used to it. But the truth is that if it takes an entire team of developers six months to make something like the content in Going Rogue, if the dev team for CO can only release whatever it is they are releasing now, I don't think that's because those developers are bad or slow, I think its because the tools they have to work with are the game dev equivalent of having JK Rowling try to publish the Harry Potter novels using a chisel and stone tablets.
I believe that a quantum leap in tool capabilities is possible, and it could increase developer productivity by literally large multiples. Not just 20% or 50%; I'd be disappointed if I couldn't get 300% or 500% better output out of better tools, particularly by bringing rapid prototyping to the game. An MMO that can crank out content at that pace can at least do a better of job not going stale, and it has more time to work on infrastructure improvements. If you aren't spending all your time and money just trying to get a package of mission content out the door, you might have more time and resources to spend on improving map servers to reduce lag and allow for more things going on, for example, opening the door to wider possibilities for content.
While playing through Star Trek Online featured mission ("Uneasy Allies") when it first released, players ran into a critical bug: at a crucial point in the mission a critical
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While playing through Star Trek Online featured mission ("Uneasy Allies") when it first released, players ran into a critical bug: at a crucial point in the mission a critical
Did I miss the rest of this post? ???
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"I'm sorry you have used up all available text space for this post. If you would like to increase your text you will need to deposit one million influence. All available agents are busy at the moment. Please stay on the line and an agent will be with you as soon as possible. There are currently 2,042 customers in the que. Your business is important to us." *cue muzak*
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Did I miss the rest of this post? ???
I'm betting she made a *really* witty joke about how the mission critically failed, by having the sentence critically fail.
That or she did math to it, and now the missing portion can only be seen with a Lucky Charms decoder wheel.
Could go either way with Arcana, honestly.
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Did I miss the rest of this post? ???
Actually, while writing that post I got pulled into a tech support thingy, and forgot I had stopped in the middle of a sentence. Then I pushed post and went home, because I was in a rush.
What I was going to say was that while playing through Star Trek Online featured mission ("Uneasy Allies") when it first released, players ran into a critical bug: at a crucial point in the mission a critical NPC didn't spawn at all, and thus the mission was impossible to complete (without using a workaround experienced MMO players might guess at, but 99.99% of your playerbase wouldn't). The reason stupid stuff like that makes it into the game isn't just because QA is retarded. Its mostly because the way content is created in most MMOs and I presume STO is that the creator doesn't actually "see" what they are creating as they are creating it. One typo, one untested regression, and stuff breaks or doesn't even work right in the first place. If content was created with tools that showed the creator what was going to happen as they were writing it, errors like that would happen far less often (its also stupid and careless, but if we eliminate all the stupid careless people from software development we wouldn't get any more software).
Something like the Swift environment Apple released recently would be practically a revolution in MMO content implementation, at least as far as I've seen. If the prevalent dev tool for MMO developers is Excel, the entire industry effectively has brain damage.
There's also so much that can be done to automate content creation and checking that MMO developers clearly don't use, most of it technology and concepts from the 80s and 90s. Its worth noting that the Paragon Studios devs primarily designed critters (the powers side, anyway) with Excel and a number 2 pencil. When players used Mids to play around with player builds, for all the flaws Mids had they were working in an environment so far advanced from what the actual developers of the game were using it was comparable to the difference between someone trying to do all of their business accounting with scraps of paper and a shoebox compared to someone using Quickbooks. True story: when I worked on the custom critter system I was given access to the devs spreadsheets for critters (among other things). Although I did use that information to double check a few things and to get a few bits of data I couldn't get any other way, for the most part I did most of my work with my own version of the data that I extracted from the client piggs.
Let that sink in a bit. The version of the data for powers I yanked out of the client was better than the actual native data the devs actually used to build the game. With that I could do in minutes what the devs often took days or weeks to do (if at all). Just because my cobbled together scripting tools were better than their stone knives and bear skins. That's how much improvement can be achieved with better tools. Better tools would unlock so much productivity and creativity for MMO devs. Think of what Paragon could have done if at least on the non-art side of the house everything happened five times faster. How about ten times faster. How about QA spending more time on complex and subtle problems, and less on stupid regressions. Designers spending more time thinking about what they wanted to create, and less time performing the drudge work of creating it. Content designers getting instant feedback about how their content worked that was true to the actual game engine. That's all achievable with no significant improvements in the current state of the art. Its actually technology other industries already have.
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Snipped due to Epic Size. Nobody can post a Wall O' Text like Arcana.
Although, I typically want to actually read through hers.
-Me, Just now.
Archaic, painful tools is part of why when the deal is signed the focus of development will be on Revival, and not Legacy. (That and not having the source for Legacy. Or the tools Paragon used. But that's besides my point. ...Moving on.)
Better tools make life so, so much simpler. They can make a 10 hour job into a 15 minute job in some cases. Sometimes it's just a tiny little thing, that only saves you 5 minutes of work...but it saves you 5 minutes of work for EVERY asset you add to the game.
This isn't exactly related to what Arcana is talking about, but it's a nice example of how better tools save time and headache.
Every object in Revival actually has several different "Meshes". One of those is a collision mesh, it's a hidden object that tells the game the physical shape of the object for collision.
One of the nice things added to Unreal Engine 4 is a process that will automatically built a collision mesh when an object is imported into the editor. Now, it doesn't work for all things...I've still got to build some collision meshes by hand for more complex, or large things like the Statue of Atlas. But for a lot of things like Walls, trash cans, newspaper boxes, fences, plaques, cones, cars, some small buildings, and a plethora of other things... The auto generated collision mesh works just fine. Saving me 5-10 minutes per object.
That adds up when you realize that Revival's currently got 2-300 objects.
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Archaic, painful tools is part of why when the deal is signed the focus of development will be on Revival, and not Legacy. (That and not having the source for Legacy. Or the tools Paragon used. But that's besides my point. ...Moving on.)
Correction, the focus of your development. Important distinction.
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Correction, the focus of your development. Important distinction.
If we get the legacy game back, I have a suspicion that "certain unnamed persons" will, in fact, be able to bring us some new content...
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If we get the legacy game back, I have a suspicion that "certain unnamed persons" will, in fact, be able to bring us some new content...
If the legacy game comes back legitimately, its not a question of "able" but "willing." If we do get a legal version of the game servers running, there exist people capable of writing content for it. I'm sure many of the former Paragon devs still remember how to do that, for example, and some would be willing to pass that knowledge along.
The question would rest more with whether the game operators were willing to set up the infrastructure necessary to propagate game client updates (necessary for new content) and whether there exists a pool of people both willing and able to create new content for the original game engine, as opposed to any other project that might or might not be competing for that time. And I suspect that if the original game returned intact, there would be people willing to spend the time necessary to come up to speed on how to do that.
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The question would rest more with whether the game operators were willing to set up the infrastructure necessary to propagate game client updates (necessary for new content) and whether there exists a pool of people both willing and able to create new content for the original game engine, as opposed to any other project that might or might not be competing for that time. And I suspect that if the original game returned intact, there would be people willing to spend the time necessary to come up to speed on how to do that.
These days, the cheapest option there would be use one of the many cloud based CDN's available at quite affordable rates. No need to build your own expensive distribution method.
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I'm betting she made a *really* witty joke about how the mission critically failed, by having the sentence critically fail.
That or she did math to it, and now the missing portion can only be seen with a Lucky Charms decoder wheel.
Could go either way with Arcana, honestly.
Well, I have said that I thought she was crazy. So, it wouldn't have surprised me either way.
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These days, the cheapest option there would be use one of the many cloud based CDN's available at quite affordable rates. No need to build your own expensive distribution method.
Or you could torrent the thing and just manage the seeds. Also, we wouldn't need to "patch" the client per-se, we could just send data directory updates. Patching isn't hard, but data directory feeds would be stupidly simple. I would probably prefer client patches myself (at least pigg patches) for technical reasons, but there exist update paths that require very little work to implement overall. Still, its Yet Another Thing for the operators to oversee, and I can't speak for anyone else as to what is reasonable workload.
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Or you could torrent the thing and just manage the seeds. Also, we wouldn't need to "patch" the client per-se, we could just send data directory updates. Patching isn't hard, but data directory feeds would be stupidly simple. I would probably prefer client patches myself (at least pigg patches) for technical reasons, but there exist update paths that require very little work to implement overall. Still, its Yet Another Thing for the operators to oversee, and I can't speak for anyone else as to what is reasonable workload.
I considered the torrent option, but that's very much reliant on your peers agreeing to seed the thing, and there are still people out there with quota limits...
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I considered the torrent option, but that's very much reliant on your peers agreeing to seed the thing, and there are still people out there with quota limits...
Not if you also have a server or two seeding as well.
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Not if you also have a server or two seeding as well.
And that depends entirely on cost. It might well be cheaper to lease CDN space. Admittedly, I've never looked into it.
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Just checking in and saw this thread, and to be honest I'm not sure what compelled me to read it. I can't say there is one NcSoft game I care for besides CoH. CoH was my first mmo, and that wasn't until 2009 sometime...think issue 13 or 14? I was pretty much just an fps gamer prior and thought mmo's were a waste of time. Since the shut down I've played quite a few different mmo's and I fit in the same boat as so many others. I can't seem to find anything that remotely comes close to the enjoyment I had with CoH. I've been playing WoW for the past couple years on and off and various f2p games. I even went so far as to buy GW2 and I don't care what anyone says, but that has to be one of the most boring leveling experiences I've had. I'm really hoping one of these newer titles like Valiance Online, City of Titans, Heroes and Villians (which I'm assuming all three are currently continuing development) can pick up the ball. To be honest I just say to hell with NcSoft...our money and loyal fan base is better invested in one of these upcoming titles anyway.
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And that depends entirely on cost. It might well be cheaper to lease CDN space. Admittedly, I've never looked into it.
Never really deployed one before, but ballpark say ten cents a gig, plus or minus a factor of two. Say a content patch averages 100MB, that's a penny per patch per player. For ten thousand players, that's a hundred bucks per update. That's not bad, actually. A buck per player per year would probably cover all the distribution costs if you did it efficiently.
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Never really deployed one before, but ballpark say ten cents a gig, plus or minus a factor of two. Say a content patch averages 100MB, that's a penny per patch per player. For ten thousand players, that's a hundred bucks per update. That's not bad, actually. A buck per player per year would probably cover all the distribution costs if you did it efficiently.
That's even cheaper than I thought it would be, and doesn't suffer the drawbacks of using torrents (such as some ISP's blocking torrent protocols).
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Yes. I'll pay a dollar to patch my game! Can I do it now?
Now would be good.
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Yes. I'll pay a dollar to patch my game! Can I do it now?
Now would be good.
I threw $1,000 at City of Titans. I'd happily throw double that at CoH Legacy Edition to help them get on their feet (whoever they are).
Especially if that contribution came with an enormous bag of INF and loot. ;)
"Bribing Your Way to Victory" - it's not just a gaming strategy, it's a way of life. ;D
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"Bribing Your Way to Victory" - it's not just a gaming strategy, it's a way of life. ;D
It's been working for K Street so far xD
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I threw $1,000 at City of Titans. I'd happily throw double that at CoH Legacy Edition to help them get on their feet (whoever they are).
Especially if that contribution came with an enormous bag of INF and loot. ;)
"Bribing Your Way to Victory" - it's not just a gaming strategy, it's a way of life. ;D
My gaming budget used to be about $1500-2000 a year. When COH hit, it was all I began playing. Even if you factored in a brand new PC every year (I never did that btw) and COH was still saving me money.
I could easily spend that on legacy and toss a few more at the successor projects.
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Man, if it was only a matter of throwing money at NCSoft, I would venture a guess that we would already have the game back today! I fear there is a lot more to it than that, and whatever those things are remain the reasons that we are left pining away for our beloved Paragon City.