And the mask comes off.

[pinballdave]

Rereading Nate's post gave me that impression too. I think the big thing is that CoH 1.5 devs will have the right to recreate the game that we love, but on a new engine. And that the other spiritual successors no longer have to be scared of getting the pants sued off of them for resembling CoX. And that the i23 game will live on, but for how long?

Yes, this is what I read, too

[Kistulot]

One thing I have to say Irish_Girl is that you've been awesome answering everyone's questions, and imagining your polite tone coming from your avatar with each post has been a delight :)

[Dalghryn]

This really looks like a very short-term existence for CoH.  It can't be fixed or updated and will likely die again fairly soon if Windows 9 and beyond makes its coding incompatible.  If that's accurate, I may not set myself for another fall and just wait until COT etc.

That said, the big plus I see is the "spiritual successors'" being able to use COH from a story-telling perspective.  That would be tremendous.  I haven't seen anything about how that would affect their efforts to date, however.  They've put a tremendous amount of time into world-building and character creation in hopes of creating that spiritual successor, so now do they throw all that out and start from scratch to recreate CoH (2)?  Do they try to add elements of CoH to CoT/Valiance/H&V to make the worlds one (and potentially dilute both), or what?

I also balk at the word "licensing" as it was used a couple of time.  Licenses can always expire; contracts can be broken.  Will NCSoft now have some kind of hold or say in the successors if they choose to incorporate aspects of CoH into their games?

For now, I'm going to stick with Plan "A" and just wait patiently for the successors.  If NCSoft has any involvement in the post-revival CoH, I'm just not sure I'll be able to trust it.

[Dal]

This may be a stupid question, but when CoX 1.5 comes in, will the data be x-fered (toons, global, items, in, Sg, Sg Base, Etc) be also ported over from the new CoX under your control or will we need to restart everything again when CoX 1.5 come out? Either way in fine with both

I don't think they can guarantee anything as of now. There is a good chance some data wouldn't be compatible, I think.

[Remaugen]

http://apr.pc-logix.com/  really suffers from a lack of recent updates, but perhaps soon they will have something wonderful to post!


We're nearly there!    ;D

[downix]

What group would be actually running the CoH 1 to 1.5 servers?

Depends on negotiations. My hope is to self-host by the holding company.

[Shifter]

Depends on negotiations. My hope is to self-host by the holding company.

Thanks again for the info : )

[gypsyav]

Thanks for the efforts everyone is putting in for this. I'm really happy to hear about the APR project continuing. While I give kudos to the successor projects my heart is with the original game and none of the successor projects really appealed to me.

If this deal goes through it will be nice to fly through the air of Paragon again.

Edited: Spelling

[MattTreck]

First of all I would like to thank your entire team and everyone involved. I would also like to thank everyone at NCSoft for being so understanding and willing to cooperate with the team attempting to purchase the game.

Now I have a comment and I seriously do not want anyone to get upset, because I am incredibly excited at the prospect of us getting our game back. But there is something that seriously bothers me.

Based upon what I have read, (if) we get our game back, it stays at Issue 23. Period. No updates at all. No fixes for client bugs, nadda, zit. When Windows 9 is released, and it (maybe) doesn't work. We're done, we can not play anymore (if we upgrade to Win 9 of course.). This is incredibly disturbing to me as it essentially means that the game is being revived to (in my eyes) die (probably) within a year, as we expect Windows 9 to come Spring of next year.

Now there is obviously another way to look at this, the game is revived temporarily while we move over to whatever you would like to call CoT+Atlas Park Revival, CoH 1.5 as it is being referred to. That's great and I seriously look forward to that, and will most likely play it. I've been an avid supporter of CoT since the beginning. Here is my concern.

We now have three games. We have CoH, then we have CoT, then we have CoT plus Atlas Revival. We have City of Heroes which isn't getting any new players because of guaranteed no content updates, added on to the lack of support on newer operating systems.

I personally am just not convinced that this is going to work out well. I can't fully express why but I am uneasy about playing the game for a year then going through the same stuff we went through exactly 2 years ago. I am not convinced that any port to UE4 will still feel like City of Heroes. It might, and perhaps the different games that spawn will be even better than City of Heroes. But I do not think it will be City of Heroes.

I am sorry if what I have typed is somewhat vague, and please understand I am not attempting to spark an arguement or insult anyone working on any of these projects. I am extremely happy and grateful at what our community has accomplished in the past two years and will never give up on it. I will play City of Titans, whatever City of Titans + Atlas Revival comes to, if it does, and I will of course play City of Heroes shall it be re-opened. I will give all of them my support.

[Shard]

It seems to me like the whole idea with CoH 1.5 is to basically have CoH live on in a more future-proofed way. Exactly CoH, just updatable, more features to AE, etc.

You'll have to bear in mind that the system would still be an approximation of the existing CoH.  It can't/won't be exact. This isn't a good or a bad thing, but it *will* be a thing.

That said, it will be a thing that will last longer and will be able to grow.

For this reason, best effort on the migration most likely will be limited to Characters and Costumes.  It's going to be a long while before anyone can give you anything other than a solid "We're gonna try".

[ivanhedgehog]

any idea if COX maint will be able to run holiday events? possibly?

[Blackstar5]

O.k. I'll hold off my nerdgasm for now, everything looks good( not as good as I had hoped but it's still not pancaked so)
I thank you for your efforts and am hopeful that NCsoft does sell the game.

[Optimus Dex]

Greetings,

For those unaware, my name is Nate Downes. While I am the President of Missing Worlds Media, Inc, I am also a member of the City of Heroes community, and an advocate. A series of circumstances put me in to a unique position, to reach out to NCSoft, not as the company president, but as a member of a small group with the goal to acquire the older property in some form or another.

Early on, this group, which included a few people from MWM as well as other members of the community, made the intentional choice to not directly involve CoT in the negotiations. There are a few reasons for this. It prevented the discussions from negatively impacting the project should they go wrong. It also prevented them from distracting any development. And, most importantly, if this should work out, it would be incredibly unfair for only one segment of the community to benefit.

How it began.

In September of last year, I had lucked into a chance meeting with a few people who worked for NC Soft, including a manager. They advised me then to come back later on to talk with them. While I'd kept the dialog channel open, the general consensus was that no, the company would never sell City of Heroes complete and intact.

Then IronWolf posted the idea of buying up part of the game, but not the entire thing. This prompted me to ask my contact people, who through several discussions eventually advised me to talk to a single person, NC Soft's Business Manager Jae Soo Yoon. In addition, we had some other people who were ex-employees and ex-partners suggest the very same person.

For those who do not know Korean business methods, it is considered highly rude to directly email someone, but to instead get an introduction from a third party business associate. This meant we had to find someone who was not part of NC Soft to formally introduce us to Mr. Yoon. Fortunately, we had two people who could do just that, a former NC West employee and a former co-worker of mine who had started a media company which works with NC Soft on developing properties for the Asian market.

Introductions in place, we made the leap from US-bound people to members of the Korean firm. This was very carefully done, very slowly orchestrated. By July, we had gotten to the point that Mr. Yoon had passed us to Sangwon Chung from NC Soft's Strategic Partnership Development Team.

For those who are unfamiliar, this is the group which handles things such as partnering with an existing studio or the development of new partnerships. This is the group we have been working with since early July. It is a very slow process, and still will take a long time to conclude.

The proposal as it stands right now (this is not a final form, just the current proposal on the table) is this:

The CoH IP would be spun to its own company, to handle licensing. This company would itself license the existing engine from NCSoft for the creation of a maintenance mode, using a binary copy of the i23 server.

The existing user database and characters are not part of this arrangement at this time, nor is the source code.

An arrangement is to be made to license the trademarks to the various Plan Z projects, CoT, Valiance and H&V, to create a family connection, and to allow each to drop the "Spiritual" portion of successor. This means they can make references to the original game if desired, and to enable the expansion of partnerships. This could be expanded for any of them, should the desire be there.

An arrangement is also to be made for the Atlas Park Revival project. As part of the informal agreement we have with them, they would be given an official stamp of approval, and the CoT game build would be licensed to them, to create a kind of "CoH 1.5" and migrate people off of the classic game engine before it finally becomes unsuitable (we expect this to happen around when Windows 9 is released, due to binary compatibility). This can be done because both APR and CoT run on Unreal Engine 4.

By being its own firm, the licensing company can also pursue other avenues which were unavailable before.

Why this group?

Because we approached them like another Korean company. We respected their company culture. And most importantly, we were patient. We had periods where we heard nothing for weeks.
The group itself began as three people. It has grown, some people more connected to the inner workings than others. Some former Cryptic and Paragon employees have given us advise on things ranging from what is needed to run the old server binaries to how the Paragon Market worked.

So, why come forward now?

Back in March, we were advised to wait until after August as a show of good faith. It is now September, so here we are.

Since we could not give full details to anyone without jeopardizing the whole thing before now, a lot of misinformation, rumors, and flat out wrong ideas got out there. To correct them could have broken the request, and therefore the trust, built up. So we had to let them stir, and do minor nudges to fix when we could get away with it.

So where are we now?

Right now, still discussing terms, ideas, limits. The challenges we have been given we stepped up for and handled. Likely there will be discussions and adjustments right up until the moment the deal is signed. The whole thing may fall apart. For all we know, everything done so far has been nothing but a delaying tactic so they can say once again that they tried to work with the community to no avail. But until such time that becomes clear, we will continue forward in good faith.

They could have ignored us from day 1, but they did not. They may not operate at the pace we would like, but they are at the pace they are comfortable with. At this point, the ball is in their court.

Ultimately, it is not the dozen folk here who have been in talks with are important here, but all of you. Those who said what you wanted, what you'd hoped for, who did not give up. We're still not there, may never make it there, but we are not even close to giving up. And whatever happens, we can do it together.

Thanks to all of you.

Excellent , Fantastic I have high hopes for this.

[Surelle]

OK, but how does this affect us Mac users? Will I23 run on OSX Mavericks (10.9.x) or Yosemite (10.10.x)?

As they have stated there is no source code for CoH nor the ability to patch, add anything or make any changes, let's hope I23 runs on your Macs as-is.  Otherwise, do you have an older Mac that used to run CoH?

Thanks so much, Irish Girl, for even attempting to salvage CoH.  Who exactly will be reverse-engineering it and  running it, and do they have any sort of time frame of how long that will take?

The person who brought up the point about any potential bugs or clashes with machines that have gotten new updates (even Windows 7 updates quite regularly) potentially causing CoH to crash brought up some interesting thoughts.  I guess I would rather know up front that CoH may not be running reliably for that long if at all, and that no modifications would ever be able to be made to it.  This sounds more a case of licensing the IP for new games based on CoH than anything.  And Nate did mention in his initial post in this thread that the deal could all fall apart.  For me, my biggest hope was to play CoH again, and it does bother me that all the source code is now gone and the tools used are gone now as well.  I don't think NCSoft had any plans to sell CoH to anyone.  I hope they are changing their minds now, and not just hoping we eventually give up and fade away.  I'm cautiously optimistic and I'm realistic too.  I don't think CoH running as we knew it is going to be very long-term, if it can even be reverse-engineered in time to be of any use even for a short-term thing (not criticizing!  I can't do it!  Glad it's not reliant upon me!   :P  so anything's better than nothing!).

I hope multiple backups of this CoH I23 server image are made and stored so that if the one players are using becomes borked somehow through database corruption or what have you, they can put another backup up and not be up the creek permanently.  Also, I hope reliable character progress can be backed up on a regular basis, not to mention reused in the event of said corruption bringing down the server.

[Kistulot]

As they have stated there is no source code for CoH nor the ability to patch, add anything or make any changes, let's hope I23 runs on your Macs as-is.  Otherwise, do you have an older Mac that used to run CoH?

My first thought for this is that it may be worth it to use bootcamp to run Windows XP/7 if your mac can't just play CoX out of the box.

You'll have to bear in mind that the system would still be an approximation of the existing CoH.  It can't/won't be exact. This isn't a good or a bad thing, but it *will* be a thing.

That said, it will be a thing that will last longer and will be able to grow.

For this reason, best effort on the migration most likely will be limited to Characters and Costumes.  It's going to be a long while before anyone can give you anything other than a solid "We're gonna try".

I think of it a lot like the various mega man fangames people have created from scratch with SDL.

They'll have the original to play around with, actively, in order to test it and make it as percievably close as possible.

There might be a hole here or there - and Mega Man vs CoH is like a toaster versus a clockwork in terms of complexity... but I believe it's possible :)

[Cailyn Alaynn]

One thing I have to say Irish_Girl is that you've been awesome answering everyone's questions, and imagining your polite tone coming from your avatar with each post has been a delight :)

Lmao! Thanks. Yeah, I'm going to be picturing myself very politely screaming in everyones faces all day now! :P

[artbunker]

I know the details arent final yet, but  I have to be the downer here.

1.How much will it cost for subscribers to get on  the revived COH ?

2. Will it be monthly plans agian or some one time fee?

3.If the game is free to play again, will subscribers at least get something special for paying month after month again until the shift over to REVIVAL? I know incarnate content is the reward and all, but $15 a month for a relaunched 2003 game is gonna be kinda hard to sell to folks without incentives .

I'll be there of course and your plan for the game sounds great overall. I just am curious as to the three questions I asked thats all

[Shard]

There might be a hole here or there - and Mega Man vs CoH is like a toaster versus a clockwork in terms of complexity... but I believe it's possible :)

It's really hard to be certain. most of  reports I've had on the game part of the engine has not been what I would call kindly spoken of.  That said, the community has a lot of collected data that can be examined.  Even with that and careful study, the number of variables are such that I have to expect that it will be "mostly" alike and hopefully that will be adequate for everyone.  The question becomes one of what is a better use of time?  Rebuilding Paragon and Co in another mechanics engine ( H&V, CoT, etc ) or doing the best to emulate CoH in a new codebase.

I don't envy the decision makers there.

[Wyrm]

Sincere thanks to everyone involved in working to make this happen.  You've truly gone above and beyond.  My thanks also to NCSoft for willing to come to the table and discuss the possibility of re-opening CoH and providing options for future growth of the IP.

[lapucelle]

It's been a long, long road from the forming of TFHM till now.

I'd like to thank everyone involved, from IronWolf to Rae to Nate. I like to think I helped here and there, as well.

Irish, there's a lot of work to do, but I can't wait to see you guys do it.

It's just such a relief to finally be able to talk about it.

- Warcabbit