Certainly, and speaking of the drama though, I find a lot of things start to make a large amount of sense in the community as I've observed. As I've been looking in on it maybe every year for the last 4 years and every 6 months since SEGS started to be a realized thing with 0.3? I think... There was always a slight sort of lethargy about the community, and an almost lack of eagerness in it's movers and shakers, at least that I saw on places like this and the subreddit, whenever the possibility of emulation and server recovery were mentioned. A kind of short period of "Oh well that's nice, carry on."
For me, I never got enthusiastic about SEGS for 2 reasons: 1. I was of the understanding it was an issue 1 (ish) code, and even when I started playing in issue 4-5, going back to what I heard issue 1 was like is not something I wanted. Better than nothing, sure, but I didn't care much about an effort to get issue 1 working. I would have been happy when it was finished, and played it, but it didn't capture my interest; 2. SEGS has been around for *years* and nothing came of it, and until its recent activity in the last half year or so, my impression of it was always "it's that emulator that one person tried to do solo while the game was running."
Obviously I've been more positive about it in the last half year, even joining their discord last November. But that's only a recent development.
I also think that because there were efforts to literally buy the game from NCsoft, people put their hopes on that, instead of an emulator... especially given that the only emulator CoH had was, as noted above, not much of anything. And then SCoRE happened, and it was assumed they'd work for years and years and years and give us something - the idea that a effectively functioning private server existed was even *possible* before maybe at least a decade of work was deemed extremely unlikely.
I like to believe this was all for the good of the community, but how many more years was this going to be a secret for? 5? 10? What's even the point after 17 years of the game being shut down. I get why they kept it a secret. Because they wanted to keep playing and not have it taken away from them. But I don't believe at all that keeping it a secret was for the good of the community, I think it was for the good of themselves. I'll happily be proven wrong if this somehow leads to me being able to play the game again. But currently, it feels like NCSoft and SCORE are both not allowing me to play a game I love.
I honestly don't know any of the people involved with SCORE. And I am sure they are nice people and this wasn't intended to be malicious. But it doesn't make me feel any better knowing this game we all love has been around for years in secret.
Indeed, at least up until yesterday if you had heard of SCORE like myself you could sit around thinking a team is still putting in work behind the scenes to make an emulator but instead we find out a fully playable server exists and is super secret.
I'm not entirely sure I believe Leandro when he says he had intentions of going live with it, or converting it to a more 'public' status server sometime in the future. I also think he was kiiiiiinda using the "Well everyone knew about SCORE!" as his scapegoat, and I don't think most people are buying that (or, rather, allowing him to get away with this on those grounds). I don't know who he is, and I'm not sure what I believe.
This is kind of how I feel. And the statements that "oh it was going to be released for the 15th anniversary, but now we're not so we can make the code "better"" seems disingenuous to me. The cat's out of the bag, there's no harm in going through with the initial release schedule. But I honestly (and I would be happy to be proven wrong) don't believe that there was any set timeframe, in SCoRE's internal conversations, for a release.
Yeah, everyone on Titan Network had heard of SCoRE, but I was under the impression that they were working in secret to build something *to release* - and right now, I tend to lean towards believing that what they had was releasable, which is where the betrayal comes in. Again, if I see some sort of internal documentation from SCoRE that they actually had some release plan or schedule, I will be happy to know that I was not betrayed, but I'm currently skeptical.
Lots of mixed feelings, been part of this "Titan Network" (hell I'm user #38) community before it was even Titan, if I recall correctly CIT had its own boards that I use to frequent at the time, or maybe it was MIDs? either way there was something before this... I don't know where I was going with that...
Check my sig - CIT *did* have its own forums! (I was super disappointed the post counts didn't migrate, because somehow I was one of the top posters there when it did :p )
I think the one fairly laaaaarge silver lining that I have with all of this is just simply knowing that the server, disc image, and data is ALIVE.
I don't think we know that - the only thing that appears to be actually true is that SCoRE was anonymously given character data. The 2013 post from Leandro indicates that they may have actually been reverse engineering or trying to build something that didn't rely on original code.
(That post is also really sad to see, because shows all the initial hope and promise for the project, which somehow got turned into something where secrecy and trying to make the code "perfect" was more important than releasing it.)
Whatever Leandro has/had, if he had "just released it", most people would not have been in a position to do anything useful with it.
The same is true of the original code from the real servers. But releasing the code allows two things to happen: 1. It prevents NCsoft from actually managing to finally destroy the game, because it should be patently obvious that having multiple copies of digital information you want to preserve is the only way to ensure it doesn't get deleted, either maliciously or through something happening to the single physical databse; 2. It allows the people who don't fall under your "most people" umbrella, the ones who have the sort of knowledge to make things work, to try their own hand at working on CoH code. And that's a good thing. Regardless of anything else, I do believe that SCoRE has some really great programmers, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily see the best way to do x y or z. Outside eyes might be able to help get the code into a better state faster than a few people working in secret. Crowdsourcing is a tried-and-true way to solve problems.
Money that was donated to Titan Network for PC Chat development? What?
Did you give money to Titan Network thinking they were involved in PC Chat development? I thought it was made clear many multiple times that there was no direct connection between Titan Network and PC Chat. Who did you give money to?
Bold of you to assume I've had enough money to donate to anything in the timeframe since Paragon Chat was released
. I was just trying to note that, while claims of the successors being money fronts *is* ridiculous, Titan Network does have a donation button (I don't know about Paragon Chat), and it is *understandable* that people will now be suspicious about where that money goes, given the close nature of Titan Network and Paragon Chat.
I get your cynicism, I really, really do. But this isn't a place to take that cynicism and project it as far and wide as possible, hoping it takes hold and infects everyone else. If that were the case, we never would have survived the shutdown because believe you me, there was a LOT of cynicism back then, too. This a place where we come together to get over our cynicism, where we pull together--and yes, that means even the people who have been on the private server--as a community. Hell, we're talking about THREE THOUSAND people, undoubtedly many of whom have been on here frequently continuing to prop up the community as SCoRE has been working on a working server, carrying everyone through some bad times until hopefully we can all enjoy the fruits of their labors.
.....
They could have simply gone away to live in their "gated community" and chose not to. Why? Because as I said in my "On 'private servers'" thread above, there IS NO gated community here. There is no caste system. There are no "haves" and "have-nots," there's just us. ALL of us.
If anyone can't abide by that, then they're choosing to isolate themselves from the community, not us. And I think that's a shame, but again, we're not going to allow anyone to use these forums to try to make this whole "caste system" foolishness a self-fulfilling prophesy.
That's fine. We disagree on how upset people should be about it, and we probably disagree on the level of egregiousness of various people's sins. And I've always said, in this context and in others, that no one gets to tell you his you must feel about any given situation. You have the absolute right to feel however you feel.
But there is a huge difference between feeling angry and taking actions to make everyone else feel angry. There's a huge difference between feeling betrayed and trying to incite others to act on your feeling of betrayal.
One, we allow leeway in discussing here on the Titan forums. The latter, the part where people get destructive to the community, we don't.
TonyV, you've been a staunch pillar of the CoH community for a long time, and you built the Titan Network into the best CoH community there is. I do believe that you didn't know about the server, and that the reasons for censoring private server talk were to prevent these forums from devolving into what other places have become the last few days.
But I honestly think that many of your comments, especially on the MassivelyOP article, come across as tone deaf.
I get that you're upset. I get that you're mad. But other people are getting hurt, people who have nothing to do with any private server, people who have busted their butts trying to provide a community where EVERYONE feels welcome.
I don't think you truly grok why people are feeling hurt, and betrayed. You say yourself that you're relatively sanguine about the revelation:
This holds true today just as much as it did then. The only difference is that now we know there's a private server. Well, bully for them. I'm not jealous of the people who have been playing on it, because I personally am no worse off than I was this time last week.
On these very forums, you can search for SCoRE or Secret Cabal of Reverse Engineers, and see posts of people who put their faith in SCoRE to provide a working game to the community. As of right now, the evidence points to SCoRE *having the game that they promised to deliver* .... and not doing so. Yes, maybe the code wasn't "good enough" for SCoRE's standards... but surely you can understand why people who see video of a working game, that was built by people they trusted to release said game, are upset that it was kept secret?
Edit: Due to the migration of posts from "New Efforts" to this thread, the quotes above no longer link properly. But they are unmodified, and the originals can be found in this thread (I don't want to put the effort in right now).
