I've been avoiding responding to the thread mainly because of the title. Every time I read it, a little bile rises in the back of my throat and I have to take a deep breath to ward off the temptation to warm up the channelgun capacitors in my Crab Spider limbs. I think now I've cooled off enough that I can remain civil about this.
That said... I'm kinda offended at the mere suggestion that CoH is 'finally dead.'
What really made CoH what it is? NCsoft? No, they merely hosted it. Cryptic, and later Paragon Studios? Closer, but they just developed and made the software. The game universe, and all its rich lore and character development? Still closer, but not quite - that's just the environment it existed within.
No, none of these are what CoH really is.
It's us. You, me, all of us who played and enjoyed the game, poured our creativity, and maybe even our hearts and souls into creating characters to explore that world. Who appreciated it enough to support, monetarily, Cryptic, Paragon, and yes even NCsoft before they revealed themselves to be the insipid cretins that they are. So long as we preserve the memory of CoH and work towards its restoration, either physically (such as the reverse-engineering crew trying to create a compatible server) or in spirit (such as the folks working on Plan Z successor projects, like The Phoenix Project or Heroes and Villains) or in memory (such as the good folks at Paragon Wiki who have exhaustively catalogued much of the game, and still work to piece together what information they're still missing via screenshots, logs and memory),
City of Heroes is not dead.
True, it's not playable right now. We can't gather beneath the namesake of Atlas Park, or in Pocket D, or beneath the statue of Recluse in Grandville. We can't go pursue heroic missions or dastardly plots in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles. We can't alternately praise or damn Emperor Cole the Tyrant in Praetoria right now.
But
dead? Not even hardly.
I'm a villain. Boo and hiss if you must, I've got six limbs with middle fingers to gesture with in return. Believe me, I've been using them in NCsoft's general direction for
quite some time now. But I digress. Being a villain teaches you
one thing - determination and a lack of scruples can get you a lot in this world. When you don't really give two arachnoid turds what the rest of the world thinks, and pursue your goals with bloody-minded abandon, you tend to get stuff done. It tends to shock people when it happens too. Hehehehe...
We've got a lot of people with this kind of determination in this community. Yeah, sure, maybe the Disney & Google efforts fell through, with the characteristic silence of a business that wants to tell you 'no' but doesn't have the gonads to do so. They were worth a shot. But they weren't the only irons we had in the fire, and still aren't. There's at least two successor projects, at least one server engineering project, and I really doubt Team Wildcard has fully given up yet. The sales pitch is still there, waiting for a new possible company to take interest.
It might be a bit of a 'shotgun approach to world conquest' but hey, sometimes
that works. No good villain relies solely on one evil scheme. Backup plans upon backup plans - every good Mastermind practically
breathes this phrase like a mantra. We're not done yet, not by a long shot.
Me? I can't do much at the moment. My talents lie towards blasting things that offend me, not business maneuvering or computer code manipulation. I'll definitely help out here I can when the opportunity presents itself, that time just hasn't come yet. I'm fine with that. Patience is probably the
one virtue that good villains are a bit reticent to give up.
But so long as these plans still exist, so long as some option exists for CoH to return, so long as its community stays together and keeps its memory alive, CoH is not dead.
Merely sleeping.
EDIT: A quick addendum for those who think I'm just spouting prose here. Earth & Beyond has a fan-made server reverse-engineered from scratch. It took them over
three years to get it to a playable state. Yet,
here it is and it's fully playable now.
CoH is a much, much larger and more complex game than Earth and Beyond. It may take longer. But we've
already seen the beginnings. We've
already got a way to fool the client into letting us create costumes and enter the game world, in demorecord mode. It's only a matter of time. It's not even been a year since the shutdown notice yet.
Have some faith in our local computer wizards and supergeniuses, hmm?
