New efforts!

[GenericHero05]

Trick-or-Treat

[triedac]

Just wanted to say Happy Halloween to all my fellow heroes and heroines out there ^_^ I hope this time next year we can be celebrating the revival of our game in one form or another  ;D

[Mistress Urd]

Ah yes, I liked how it was always night during the Halloween event.

*Prods Nate

j/k Still waiting.  :P

[Ryo Kinsaru]

Scene 1: Take 1
Setting: NCSoft Executive Headquarters Waiting Room

A lovely young secretary opens the waiting room door and addresses the room, "Mr. Downes, they will see you now.". In a distant corner of the room a desiccated skeleton clutching tightly to a stack of documents and a smart phone shifts slightly in the breeze caused by the opening door and the skull rolls into the adjacent chair. The secretary appears annoyed momentarily and closes the door.

(Fade to NCSoft logo)

[nyhm]

never mind.

[Remaugen]

I miss ToTing. . .

And those crazy costumes we used to get!
I loved the Carnie ones. . .


*~Sigh~*

[Felderburg]

http://ninja.lhost.de/wiki/index.php/2008-08-09_Death_Puppet_5 Didn't want to fight my phone trying to find this image in the comic's actual archive, but... Also, I seem to recall Something Positive having lyrics of Oingo Boingo songs in the the title space of a few of the later comic's, but it's been since I've read either of them.

http://sinfest.net/view.php?date=2008-08-09

[ivanhedgehog]

http://sinfest.net/view.php?date=2008-08-09

we could really use some good news. vo has kind of fallen into a hole with vague "soon" promises(that has really been abused lately by other dev teams) cot is still in places they cant show anything. coh return would be a great xmas present.

[worldweary]

I understand that the issue 23 server is what they are trying to get but can anyone say if they will be able
to add on the costume sets that were completed but not released?Some of the new sets really fill in holes
that we had at the end of the game.We can see them in Paragon Chat so would it be possible to add it if
the game returns?I have made many new characters with the pieces and hope they can be added.

[duane]

I understand that the issue 23 server is what they are trying to get but can anyone say if they will be able
to add on the costume sets that were completed but not released?Some of the new sets really fill in holes
that we had at the end of the game.We can see them in Paragon Chat so would it be possible to add it if
the game returns?I have made many new characters with the pieces and hope they can be added.

Only the negotiations team can say but I interpret the snapshot as being frozen.  No code changes. If so much as a typo exists in some npc dialogue -- no changes.  I would love to see i23 come back and some effort to finish i24 and release it, but I just don't think that's realistic either as the production tools and expertise may be gone - hence the static i23 snapshot.

[Zerohour]

I'll tell you what's happening.  They've got some poor intern in the basement keeping tabs on this forum, and any other internet locations where there is still interest in CoH.  This person is waiting until the interest fades to almost nothing, at which point they pick up the phone and tell Mr. NCSoft that no one is paying attention anymore, and have moved on.  At that point, the deal will "suddenly" fall through and all will be for nothing, and they've minimized the uproar because no one is watching.  Thereby protecting themselves as much as possible because of little to no backlash from pissed off consumers.

[darkgob]

I'll tell you what's happening.  They've got some poor intern in the basement keeping tabs on this forum, and any other internet locations where there is still interest in CoH.  This person is waiting until the interest fades to almost nothing, at which point they pick up the phone and tell Mr. NCSoft that no one is paying attention anymore, and have moved on.  At that point, the deal will "suddenly" fall through and all will be for nothing, and they've minimized the uproar because no one is watching.  Thereby protecting themselves as much as possible because of little to no backlash from pissed off consumers.

Thanks for that completely nonsensical expert analysis.

Come on guys, we're not exactly dealing with Lex Luthor here.

[pinballdave]

Thanks for that completely nonsensical expert analysis.

Come on guys, we're not exactly dealing with Lex Luthor here.

Simon BarSinister? Care to smell my flower?

[Brigadine]

Only the negotiations team can say but I interpret the snapshot as being frozen.  No code changes. If so much as a typo exists in some npc dialogue -- no changes.  I would love to see i23 come back and some effort to finish i24 and release it, but I just don't think that's realistic either as the production tools and expertise may be gone - hence the static i23 snapshot.

How do you lose tools and keys to a major asset? That's like Russia losing a nuclear submarine... even NCsoft isn't that incompetent.

[Void Huntress]

http://realnewsrightnow.com/2015/03/nuclear-armed-russian-stealth-sub-goes-missing/

Just sayin'.

[worldweary]

It would be nice to finish issue 24 but I'm doubtful they can do that.Costume parts that were finished and we use in Icon and Paragon Chat I'm hoping can be added.

[ivanhedgehog]

How do you lose tools and keys to a major asset? That's like Russia losing a nuclear submarine... even NCsoft isn't that incompetent.

you lay off the people that wrote them with no notice. you tell them on friday afternoon, have them clean their desks and escort them to the door.I have seen it at a number of places. everything is a big secret till hr does a big "reveal" absolutely no planning is done by anyone that can do technical planning because the tech people arent told until it is too late. From what I have heard, the ncsoft offices are still there in austin. no telling what was done with their hard drives or documentation. That is how companies loose important support resources for their product. I have heard of companies outsourcing their it, laying them off, and only after  a couple of weeks thinking to try to get any server passwords.

[Ankhammon]

you lay off the people that wrote them with no notice. you tell them on friday afternoon, have them clean their desks and escort them to the door.I have seen it at a number of places. everything is a big secret till hr does a big "reveal" absolutely no planning is done by anyone that can do technical planning because the tech people arent told until it is too late. From what I have heard, the ncsoft offices are still there in austin. no telling what was done with their hard drives or documentation. That is how companies loose important support resources for their product. I have heard of companies outsourcing their it, laying them off, and only after  a couple of weeks thinking to try to get any server passwords.

Qft.

I,ve had to hack a few pcs after ppl were laid off back when I did sys admin work for a major from because no one was thinking about the work that was being done.

[pinballdave]

It would be nice to finish issue 24 but I'm doubtful they can do that.Costume parts that were finished and we use in Icon and Paragon Chat I'm hoping can be added.

Please see the Atlas Park Revival information.

[Arcana]

How do you lose tools and keys to a major asset? That's like Russia losing a nuclear submarine... even NCsoft isn't that incompetent.

1.  City of Heroes wasn't a major asset to NCSoft.  It was a relatively minor asset (to them) they shut down and had no intention of ever starting up again.

2.  "Lost" implies misplaced, like its somewhere, but they just can't locate it.  Certain components of Issue 24 may be literally gone.  If it only existed on a developer's workstation at the time of the shutdown, those computers may be long ago wiped and gone.

3.  Even if all of the development assets exist and can be found, the development environment may not exist in any usable form anymore.  The environment is something that often isn't backed up in a usable fashion because its something that is often configured by replicating another working environment.  Precisely which compiler, which version of which modeling tools, which directories contain which information pointed to by which desktop shortcuts is something that its possible don't exist intact and would have to be reconstructed.

4.  Even if *everything* exists, the knowledge of how to use it often isn't documented on paper.  You could have all sorts of files and executable scripts, but no explicit documentation that states you need to run these specific things in this specific order with these specific switches to make a specific thing.  Absent a developer who remembers how to do that, this is knowledge that could take a significant amount of time to recreate, and its rare that sufficient documentation exists to recreate it from scratch in any development environment I've ever seen.

5.  Even if you find everything, its possible to find too much everything.  Which is to say, a working game requires all of the data and the codebase to be relatively in sync.  If you gather up everything you can find but its not explicitly contained in a coherent whole, you'll have to figure out how to assemble a proper snapshot of development environment and development codebase and development assets that go together.  Put the wrong set of assets together and you'd get a confused mess that won't work right.  In actual practice, while the game was in development different developers could have different versions and builds of the game and the data that they were working on.  If you are trying to recover a functioning I24 from that, you might have multiple different versions of I24 in different computers, without a lot of documentation on who was working on what at that instant in time.