rebuild COH

[Felderburg]

- We want the IP rights so we can include thematic tie-ins (zones, characters, story lines) within the successor efforts

I was under the impression that the successors (other than Atlas Park Revival) had turned down that option, as they have already invested a lot of time into creating their own IP. I thought the IP was so that CoH 2 could be made, or so that other media (other types of games, books, etc.) could be used.

[Solitaire]

Except a group is working to buy the game and there were no legal reasons it was shut down.

It was shutdown because NCSoft was moving to the Asian market and CoH did not make enough money to keep open. It was business and nothing personal on the shutdown - things got personal on the effort to rebuy.

IF only things hadn't got personal  :(

[Ice Trix]

It may not be fool  hardy if the PR is abandoned  ;):
                                        ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Proprietary software which is no longer marketed, supported or sold by its owner is called "abandon ware" and the digital form of orphaned works.

Abandonware isn't a legal term, and no rights exist to access it. (Sadly). You just are less likey to get DMCA take down requests if you host it compared to hosting a latest release game.
A lot of Abandonware sites have games that are still being sold at places like gog.com

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/what-is-abandonware-and-is-it-legal/

[Soul Resonance]

I'm with Iron on this one :>. I can wait, CO's doing decent(In-game only) at tiding me over :). TA is decent, but the nerfs..well, I know that BS wouldnt be pulled in CoH(post revival or Pre-shutdown) so it's even more incentive to wait :P

[Noyjitat]

I think the op was basically saying to code an entirely new game with the same systems coh had and reuse all the art and models. In this manner you wouldn't be reverse engineering server code since you'd code your own server software and code a client to work with it.

Something that's more plausible than waiting 3 to 4 more years only to never legally get the game back. Which I'm beginning to think is the reality at this point...

[TimtheEnchanter]

Write to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're our best hope to making emulators legal. They've already had progress with giving an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for abandoned video games that required an authentication server to run. "Abandoned" games can now legally be hacked so we can still play them after online servers have been shut down.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exemption-video-games-closer-look

The current wording of the exemption does not extend to online multiplayer capability. MMO's are a particularly important piece of human history now because they represent the formation of communities, and in some cases, literal virtual towns and cities, all built by players. MMO's demonstrate a groundbreaking shift in how human communities and societies grow and sustain themselves, and because of this extra 'living element,' MMO's are something that many of us have a far deeper personal connection to than other games. These games aren't just bits and bytes. These are worlds that were designed by artists who own a copyright, yes, but upon arrival, we molded and shaped those worlds to suit our needs and brought another layer of life to them. We made them our own, and they became a second home. The EFF needs to hear how important it is that the DMCA exception be expanded to online play. Unless I'm overlooking something, that's all that stands in the way of legally emulating an online CoH.

"As one of the proponents, I can definitively say that we were able to provide far more evidence of communities that wished to restore multiplayer access to games where servers had been deactivated than of single-player shutdowns."

They're aware of how critical it is that online communities have their homes back. But it never hurts to keep sending the message. And a couple of good stories about how the death of CoH or other MMO's has affected you personally, could be utilized in future negotiations. Keep the pressure on.

[Doc Artz]

Abandonware isn't a legal term, and no rights exist to access it. (Sadly). You just are less likey to get DMCA take down requests if you host it compared to hosting a latest release game.
A lot of Abandonware sites have games that are still being sold at places like gog.com
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/what-is-abandonware-and-is-it-legal/

Actually publications in gaming and or tech magazines say what their readers want to hear. The Federal Statutes clearly describe Abandonware. Well  not so clearly to those who don't read legalese. The Federal Statutes clearly describes the  law as it applies to Proprietary Rights.  I have no doubt that  NCsoft would be first asked by ANY Judge in a court proceeding, Why did you wait so long to file after allowing  others to use your allegedly abandoned software? Below is but a few of the of the many Federal Statutes clearly outlining legal definitions of abandon ware.
http://www.liebertpub.com/dcontent/files/samplechapters/Sample_InternetGamingLawSecondEditionRe.pdf
http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=penn_law_review
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/what-is-abandonware-and-is-it-legal/ <-- Is a gaming website NOT a Federal or international Statute

8)   8)  ;)

[ukaserex]

While this is all very nice and interesting, the real problem was stated by our resident problem solver, Codewalker.

Code may be written to create a compiler to compile code. And code might be written to produce new code. But - who's going to produce the code that will produce a chat server that co-exists along with all the other servers that made up CoH/V/GR?

Further - once you found someone that actually could do that - even if they had just done it yesterday - that effort would take a ton of time. People gotta eat. Food doesn't come free - you have to work for that, at least, most of us do.

So, um, yeah, I gotta say I agree with Codewalker - if you can find someone that can do it - knock yourselves out. I'll even contribute a bit financially. But, I'm fresh out of time, and it's been years since I called someone a Null Pointer Exception in an argument. I lack the code chops to to do such a thing.


All that said - I appreciate your desire to have the game back.

[Noyjitat]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: SWG

It has several emulators of pre nge, pre cu and now an nge server made from leaked source code; which is now spread all over the internet. The ip is owned by Disney of all people, the company that is famous for lawsuits and they haven't lifted a finger to shut down any of those servers. And those servers were built and coded by volunteers with donations and funding through paypal (which some will argue is profit)

I'm sorry, I've tried to remain positive all this time but the carrot on a stick isn't looking that appealing anymore and its hard to believe that it takes years for ncsoft to sale the game and complete this deal we've been waiting on.

It's going to take the same risks the swg community took to get our game back; now if only we can find someone that will take that risk.

[TimtheEnchanter]

It has several emulators of pre nge, pre cu and now an nge server made from leaked source code; which is now spread all over the internet. The ip is owned by Disney of all people, the company that is famous for lawsuits and they haven't lifted a finger to shut down any of those servers. And those servers were built and coded by volunteers with donations and funding through paypal (which some will argue is profit)

Even with the Mouse involved, NCsoft is STILL, sadly, worse in this regard.

Disney has always been very aggressive, but not in the same way. If nothing else, Disney understands what makes a fanbase tick. They go after uses of their properties that earn money. They don't crack down on fan pages. Also, Star Wars is an odd ball in the grand scheme. Say what you want about George Lucas's shortcomings, but one very positive thing about him is he encouraged creativity as much as he could without ripping himself off. As far as he's concerned, do whatever the heck you want with the Star Wars IP, just don't sell what you create. He even went as far as hosting a contest every year for creators of Star Wars fanfilms. At least for now, Disney seems to be respecting the spirit of the fandom that Lucas promoted.

We have the misfortune of CoH being owned by what is probably the most paranoid and aggressive copyright enforcer in the world of gaming. World of Warcraft is still running and there are private servers that Blizzard isn't taking down. Independent servers of EA games exist. EA, which is hailed as the grand daddy of all evil gaming corporations, doesn't go after independent servers. SWG emulators for CU and pre-CU began springing up before the game shutdown and SOE did nothing. NCsoft has shutdown any emulation servers for any of their games, whether they're abandoned or not, and they are quite zealous about it.

[Noyjitat]

It's either risk a server getting taken down or continue to hope ncsoft cares to make a deal and I'm sure I'm not the only one that sees a carrot on a stick that has begun to wither away.

[Surelle]

I think that those who want a CoH emu should go right on ahead and make one, end of story.  You won't be so pushy about it once YOU are the one who has to kiss your whole life goodbye for however-many years to make it happen.  It's all too easy to give the shirt off someone else's back.

SWG (pre-NGE) emu has been running for what, 12-15 years now, and it's still a major disaster area.  Emus are a lifelong pursuit for a half-baked, crumbling, messed up ball of flame that has C & Ds hanging over its head besides.  I very seriously doubt any of you crying for a CoH emu would be even remotely happy with one if it was ever really made.  It would also likely not be ready for a server launch for another ten years, even if it had a dedicated team who had major rent and food money magically dropping from the skies onto them whenever they worked on it.

Look how many real-live Kickstarter MMOs go belly up!  And they have relatively major funding compared to what you are demanding.

Please get real here.

[hurple]

I think that those who want a CoH emu should go right on ahead and make one, end of story.  You won't be so pushy about it once YOU are the one who has to kiss your whole life goodbye for however-many years to make it happen.  It's all too easy to give the shirt off someone else's back.

SWG (pre-NGE) emu has been running for what, 12-15 years now, and it's still a major disaster area.  Emus are a lifelong pursuit for a half-baked, crumbling, messed up ball of flame that has C & Ds hanging over its head besides.  I very seriously doubt any of you crying for a CoH emu would be even remotely happy with one if it was ever really made.  It would also likely not be ready for a server launch for another ten years, even if it had a dedicated team who had major rent and food money magically dropping from the skies onto them whenever they worked on it.

Look how many real-live Kickstarter MMOs go belly up!  And they have relatively major funding compared to what you are demanding.

Please get real here.

Easy to say for someone who just got their ass kicked by Batman (snicker). 

[Noyjitat]

I think that those who want a CoH emu should go right on ahead and make one, end of story.  You won't be so pushy about it once YOU are the one who has to kiss your whole life goodbye for however-many years to make it happen.  It's all too easy to give the shirt off someone else's back.

SWG (pre-NGE) emu has been running for what, 12-15 years now, and it's still a major disaster area.  Emus are a lifelong pursuit for a half-baked, crumbling, messed up ball of flame that has C & Ds hanging over its head besides.  I very seriously doubt any of you crying for a CoH emu would be even remotely happy with one if it was ever really made.  It would also likely not be ready for a server launch for another ten years, even if it had a dedicated team who had major rent and food money magically dropping from the skies onto them whenever they worked on it.

Look how many real-live Kickstarter MMOs go belly up!  And they have relatively major funding compared to what you are demanding.

Please get real here.

Emulators don't get sued unless they become big and charge for features like some of wow's emulators did. It isn't worth company time and resources to tie it up in court so often a c&d is sent and then the project will go into hiding only to resurface under a different name and then they continue where they left off.

Also yes most of us would be happy with combat, missions and npcs to kill even with stability issues. I'm playing swglegends right now which is everything up to the last few game publishes of the live server and I'm having lots of fun there. no lag, and everything works minus parts of the chat system (which is being coded and fixed at this moment) The big battle we face is fixing some stability issues and they've done a good job with that thus far. All volunteers and donations via paypal. There's also projectswg which is being coded from the ground up also by volunteers and paypal donations and that looks like it will be complete in about two years at it's current pace.

Perhaps if we're still at this same point at this same time next year, without a game or under some "nda" or whatever carrot on a stick ncsoft is giving us. Someone out there will put a team together and start the project.

[chuckv3]

I think that those who want a CoH emu should go right on ahead and make one, end of story.  You won't be so pushy about it once YOU are the one who has to kiss your whole life goodbye for however-many years to make it happen.  It's all too easy to give the shirt off someone else's back.

SWG (pre-NGE) emu has been running for what, 12-15 years now, and it's still a major disaster area.  Emus are a lifelong pursuit for a half-baked, crumbling, messed up ball of flame that has C & Ds hanging over its head besides.  I very seriously doubt any of you crying for a CoH emu would be even remotely happy with one if it was ever really made.  It would also likely not be ready for a server launch for another ten years, even if it had a dedicated team who had major rent and food money magically dropping from the skies onto them whenever they worked on it.

Look how many real-live Kickstarter MMOs go belly up!  And they have relatively major funding compared to what you are demanding.

Please get real here.

100% agreed.

[Inc42]

Recently Apple sued Samsung for PR violations and lost on the ruling of "common knowledge". I think it's time to go on the offensive.

I really don't see the connections between that case and what you are proposing. What you are proposing is someone copy a LOT of copyrighted material to make an exact replica, not make something similar to or even based on something else.

Look at Deadpool (Marvel) and Deathstroke (DC). Deadpool was clearly based on Deathstroke, from his fighting style, healing powers, elements of his costume, even down to real name (Wade Wilson vs Slade Wilson). This is pretty damn close to copyright infringement, but there are enough differences to keep it from being so, therefore it is legal. If people wanted to make games LIKE CoH, but NOT CoH, they could. This is the same kind of thing you are talking about with Samsung vs Apple.

What you are wanting is more like if DC Comics came out with Spiderman comics, character's real name is Peter Parker, all the same abilities, storylines, everything. Reprinting all the old comics, but with DC's logo covering Marvel's on the original covers.



You are far from alone in wanting the game back, but it isn't as easy as you seem to think. Even assuming there were enough savvy programmers who could whip up an exact copy of a game that was developed for almost a decade exactly as it was when it was shut down, even if you didnt have to take into consideration the amount of time or resources it would take them to do it where they would be unpaid for their efforts, the best you could really hope for in the long run is a single player or personally hosted experience, it would never be able to survive as an MMO. It would be shut down. Look into Pokemon MMOs for instance, there are many out there built from scratch, surviving on donations, and Nintendo is going after every one of them they can find with everything they have. Some got to go for a couple years, but that's the best you can really hope for.

[Noyjitat]

Yeah... we know it's going to be hard. But it has a higher chance of success than any deal with ncsoft ever will have. And if you really want the game back you shouldn't fear monger those that may have the skills to actually code the game and get it back in our hands; nor should you put all your eggs into one basket. Try everything possible to get the game back and more. But I digress, let's see if we get a real update by this same time next year that amounts to more than the results of a chess match with ncsoft i.e. a stalemated checkmate and another nda.

[Inc42]

We are in a time right now where we are watching people's lives be ruined by copyright claims. This is a major topic right now, these past few months, not just in the world of game emulators, but all over the internet. The recent major abuse of the copyright claim system on YouTube, especially by gaming companies, has brought this issue into the light. Talking about this is NOT fear mongering. This is pointing out to the people demanding emulators what the people capable of even beginning such a project already know, and explaining some of the problems with the "Just rebuild it" attitude.

Here's the deal. Ever since the announcement of the shut down there have been threads here, on the CoH boards before they were closed, Reddit, and probably plenty of other places where every few months (or days in the beginning) someone has the brilliant idea of "just make an emulator", just like this thread. People inevitably chime in that "yeah, just do it, it should be easy", and others try to explain the many reasons why it is not that simple. Mostly because no one has the game code besides NCSoft, and it would be designing a full game from scratch (which IS happening, go check out the Atlas Revival Project).

No one who has ever suggested that someone should just "do it" has any of the necessary skills to do it themselves. The people who DID have that kind of skill either did not have the time/interest to do it (or you would probably be hearing something by now) or joined one of the successor projects. I'm sure individuals or small teams tried back when the shutdown was announced, only to realize the obvious, that a game that was in development for 3 years before launch by a large team of skilled developers, and then received regular updates the entire time it was running, cannot be duplicated by one or two people. The amount of work in just rebuilding the various zones would take one or two people months/years of full time, unpaid work. Then there's powers. Then there's animations. Player models, enemy models, player stats, enemy stats, AI behavior, costumes, server hosting, file distribution, and a million and a half backend things that we who don't program video games would probably never know about.

The "fear mongering" is not what is preventing anything, it is just a new and currently very relevant problem, so that is why people decided to bring it up rather than spelling out the same old things for the millionth time. The fact is that we KNOW NCSoft would do everything they could to shut the servers down, to sue anyone who even tried to break even on the cost of development into bankruptcy, and from a player perspective the best we could hope for is the code is given to someone else to host for a while before they are shut down and sued, and so on, so we can start from scratch every few months.

But since historical reference to similar cases means nothing and the rest of us are clearly worried about nothing, why dont some of you who think it's so easy just go ahead and do it? I'll play healer when you get the game back online  8)

[Surelle]

We are in a time right now where we are watching people's lives be ruined by copyright claims. This is a major topic right now, these past few months, not just in the world of game emulators, but all over the internet. The recent major abuse of the copyright claim system on YouTube, especially by gaming companies, has brought this issue into the light. Talking about this is NOT fear mongering. This is pointing out to the people demanding emulators what the people capable of even beginning such a project already know, and explaining some of the problems with the "Just rebuild it" attitude.

Here's the deal. Ever since the announcement of the shut down there have been threads here, on the CoH boards before they were closed, Reddit, and probably plenty of other places where every few months (or days in the beginning) someone has the brilliant idea of "just make an emulator", just like this thread. People inevitably chime in that "yeah, just do it, it should be easy", and others try to explain the many reasons why it is not that simple. Mostly because no one has the game code besides NCSoft, and it would be designing a full game from scratch (which IS happening, go check out the Atlas Revival Project).

No one who has ever suggested that someone should just "do it" has any of the necessary skills to do it themselves. The people who DID have that kind of skill either did not have the time/interest to do it (or you would probably be hearing something by now) or joined one of the successor projects. I'm sure individuals or small teams tried back when the shutdown was announced, only to realize the obvious, that a game that was in development for 3 years before launch by a large team of skilled developers, and then received regular updates the entire time it was running, cannot be duplicated by one or two people. The amount of work in just rebuilding the various zones would take one or two people months/years of full time, unpaid work. Then there's powers. Then there's animations. Player models, enemy models, player stats, enemy stats, AI behavior, costumes, server hosting, file distribution, and a million and a half backend things that we who don't program video games would probably never know about.

The "fear mongering" is not what is preventing anything, it is just a new and currently very relevant problem, so that is why people decided to bring it up rather than spelling out the same old things for the millionth time. The fact is that we KNOW NCSoft would do everything they could to shut the servers down, to sue anyone who even tried to break even on the cost of development into bankruptcy, and from a player perspective the best we could hope for is the code is given to someone else to host for a while before they are shut down and sued, and so on, so we can start from scratch every few months.

But since historical reference to similar cases means nothing and the rest of us are clearly worried about nothing, why dont some of you who think it's so easy just go ahead and do it? I'll play healer when you get the game back online  8)

Exactly this.  Especially the "why dont some of you who think it's so easy just go ahead and do it? I'll play healer when you get the game back online" part, except I'll tank.   ;)

[Soul Resonance]

I agree with the above. I mean, you'll basically be doing the same thing as THeM, getting the ok from NC so your server and game won't be completely shutdown, it'll take the same amount(or not at all since you started illegally and they may not be willing to deal with you :P) of time to get the IP to be in the clear, then engine stuff etc etc. And be prepared to have people chompin' at the bits to get every snippet of info on the current progress of well...everything :P. Hope you got those NDAs ready  8)