At this point, the most reasonable course of action is to assume that nothing is going to happen this calendar year. NCSoft has next to zero incentive to prioritize this over any other initiative.
Personally, I'm going to be pleasantly surprised if the I23 environment ever sees the light of day.
I really have no idea where people get such lack of hope.
Let's look at what has happened in 2 years:
1. Game is announced to be shutting down.
2. Players and Paragon Studios get together to try and buy the game, due to some personality issues the deal falls through - but it was literally one signature away.
3. Several groups contact NCSoft but either do so improperly or decide not to close the deal (on buying the IP seperately).
4. Information is passed down and yet another group of players - find the contact person, find the way NCSoft wishes to be approached, comes up with a novel idea to lease the IP, free the game up to be played and meets with NCSoft's approval to do so.
5. News is relayed that a give and take deal is ongoing that they can't talk about until it is complete.
The trouble is you personally are setting your own time period on the deal. A while back Nate said they were shooting for August - then NCSoft set then a task to complete prior to any talks on a deal. They completed the task and NCSoft is happy to proceed. We get other news from podcasts and so on that NCSoft is going to assign one of their people to help oversee the lease transactions. People as far away from Korea as Texas who had no interest in CoH - have heard about the deal going on.
Somehow out of all of this people still feel NCSoft is going to play Lucy and pull the football away. I will continue to try and dispell your feelings of doubt where I can. I can only tell you - I personally will not quit until NCSoft says - we will never sell and destroys the software. I also got to know Nate Downes reasonably well during all of this and he knows how you feel - he really does.