Regarding the blame for CoH's shutdown

[UnitFour]

It would seem our hatred for NCSoft may not have been as... entirely accurate as we originally hoped, although hate rarely is.

I recently spoke to someone on the CoH Subreddit, who says he used to work at Paragon on QA, regarding the new efforts to purchase the game.  (It's easy to find, but I'd rather not link it so his message box isn't flooded), and the topic of the licensing issues with Cryptic came up, and the hopes the new team has accounted for them in their deal.  I inquired further, (initially saying that I had thought this was a false rumor as Cryptic had denied it), and he replied thusly:

It's been a long time since it happened and I got muddled when I said third party tech, though it did involve a third party owning the tech! The rumor I heard internally went along these lines: Cryptic wanted to split off from NC and do their own thing. NC purchased the CoH IP from them, including a licensing agreement to Cryptic's tech for a period of years (I guess 5?). By the time that agreement elapsed Cryptic had a new owner (Perfect World) along with Champion's Online. Perfect World set a huge price on the leased tech because they had absolutely no reason to allow a competing super game to exist without big bags of cash changing hands. Instead of giving them the money NC decided to shut it down and focus on GW2 and an early version of Wildstar.

I wasn't in those meetings so I can't say if any of this is true, but the staff didn't really have a reason to invent that rumor either. Watercooler talk!

Has this been discussed in the past?  If this is old news, please, feel free to ignore the thread, but I'm curious, as it's news to me.  Had I known originally, my SG never would've tried to hop to CO in order to try and continue our stories and characters.

[The Fifth Horseman]

I believe that this particular rumor has been debunked by one of TFHM attempts.

[Thirty-Seven]

It has been discussed... but I thought it was debunked pretty thoroughly?  No idea where all the links and posts were, but I would think they'd have been on the official forums.

[UnitFour]

It may have been watercooler talk, then.  Thanks guys.

[Aggelakis]

This was discussed on the official forums, but I can't find it in the archive. IIRC Cryptic's engine was licensed indefinitely, with the option to build a couple more games with it if they wanted to.

[Captain Electric]

Those archives are hell to dig through for stuff, because (A) I can't use search terms to find stuff and (B) when I click on successive pages in a thread, it will often jump to some different date because the page-date my browser asks for isn't cached in the archive.

(B) can't really be helped but regarding (A), I wonder: if we could get a copy of the archive, could y'all put it on a Titan server and give it search options? Those forums are a wealth of information; but this isn't the only thing I've already previously tried to dig out of there and came back bleary eyed hours later. The information in that archive needs to be made searchable.

In some cases, there are wonderful discussions that I remember were brought up in various threads, but the discussions were themselves a derailment from the topic and subject line. You know how things go sometimes (well, often ), but no one complained if, say, Arcanaville came in wagging her humongous helpful brains around. Meanwhile, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of helpful guides written throughout the years, not to mention fiction, comics, huge gobs of data that a community server could use, and just plain good memories. One day it won't hurt as much to go digging, I guarantee you. But when that day comes, if we go there and find that Archive.org made some mistake and lost part or all of our old forums, we'll really have ourselves to blame.

[JaguarX]

Those archives are hell to dig through for stuff, because (A) I can't use search terms to find stuff and (B) when I click on successive pages in a thread, it will often jump to some different date because the page-date my browser asks for isn't cached in the archive.

(B) can't really be helped but regarding (A), I wonder: if we could get a copy of the archive, could y'all put it on a Titan server and give it search options? Those forums are a wealth of information; but this isn't the only thing I've already previously tried to dig out of there and came back bleary eyed hours later. The information in that archive needs to be made searchable.

In some cases, there are wonderful discussions that I remember were brought up in various threads, but the discussions were themselves a derailment from the topic and subject line. You know how things go sometimes (well, often ), but no one complained if, say, Arcanaville came in wagging her humongous helpful brains around. Meanwhile, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of helpful guides written throughout the years, not to mention fiction, comics, huge gobs of data that a community server could use, and just plain good memories. One day it won't hurt as much to go digging, I guarantee you. But when that day comes, if we go there and find that Archive.org made some mistake and lost part or all of our old forums, we'll really have ourselves to blame.

Yeah been reading through those things for hours now since I cant sleep anyways. (6 hours going on actually)

[Von Krieger]

I think there was a data dump of the entire CoH forum SOMEWHERE. I remember it clocking in around 60 gigs or something of the like?

[jacknomind]

It would seem our hatred for NCSoft may not have been as... entirely accurate as we originally hoped, although hate rarely is.

Not sure.

I do know a plausible explanation for the shutdown.  It does not cast NCSoft as wholly the villain, or Paragon as entirely in the right.  In essence, it comes down to people at Paragon making a bid for greater autonomy and in doing so calling NCSoft's bluff.  It turned out NCSoft wasn't bluffing, and believed their only practical option to retain investor confidence at all was to shut down the studio.  The reason that all this appeared to come out of the blue was due to secrecy maintained within Paragon even to its own employees about parts of these actions.

I either cannot or will not corroborate any of this, although I believe all of the same sources I have used are present on or linked to from these forums.  Nor I do not consider myself unbiased.  The fact that this action hurt NCSoft's stock anyway makes me happy, and I am inclined to forgive the Paragon management more than I am NCSoft.  City of Heroes was a place I and my friends gathered.  I do not feel the need to further justify my anger at whomever shut it down, regardless of how much money they thought they stood to lose.

In any case, the past is gone.  If NCSoft is now willing to do business with elements of the community for its home, focusing on past anger is unproductive.

[MWRuger]

^^^Agreed! At this point I want nothing to cause NCSoft to have a reason to not sell. We can't change what happened, we can't even know for sure at this point what did happen. Too many NDAs in place.

[The Fifth Horseman]

I think there was a data dump of the entire CoH forum SOMEWHERE. I remember it clocking in around 60 gigs or something of the like?

Archive.org. And it's far, far larger: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-city-of-heroes-main