Author Topic: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release  (Read 262342 times)

Golden Aurora

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #140 on: April 17, 2019, 03:16:44 AM »
« Last Edit: April 17, 2019, 03:49:25 AM by Golden Aurora »

Twi

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #141 on: April 17, 2019, 03:20:40 AM »
That's also totally erroneous. The kind of community discussion concerning the private server he wanted to see was 0, as has been well documented.
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Eiko-chan

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #142 on: April 17, 2019, 03:24:22 AM »
Everything that can be said about NCsoft has been said. It's a moot point and not worth the time. We have new problems, new people, and new pain.
Maybe for those that have dwelt here continuously for the past seven years. Not so much for those this news may bring back.

Ohioknight

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #143 on: April 17, 2019, 03:25:21 AM »
People I've talked to said it was fully functional, they just got bored of not having their friends on the server.

Awesome!!!
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weenus

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #144 on: April 17, 2019, 03:26:47 AM »

Super Atom

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #145 on: April 17, 2019, 03:29:44 AM »
Quote
Is the disconnect between the SCoRE insiders and the CoX refugees really that wide?


Walling off and being a few years seperated from being sad about coh being gone is a gigantic gap. So yeah, its pretty wide.

MM3squints

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #146 on: April 17, 2019, 03:34:24 AM »
Honestly I'm impressed that it was kept secret for so long. Looking at the reddit and seeing all of the action steps and the amount of compartmentalization that was setup to keep this running is on another Machiavellian level. Reminds me of the steps an inteligence service will use to establish a presences before toppling over a sovereign nation.


Zombie Man

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #147 on: April 17, 2019, 03:35:37 AM »
Going by the laborious video of the guy who just outed SCoRE, it seems there wasn't much actual playing. He presented the secret server as a bit of a ghost town, like those CoH servers of old where people complained they couldn't get a team or task force going. That's partly why he quit.

So... it sounds like the secret server was more like a Beta Server.

Remember how some players would rush to the Beta Server and then bitterly complain that the new content was unplayable because of bugs? They missed the point of the Beta Server... it wasn't to play new content but to *test* it.

I wonder if the secret server was more like that. And that if it had been released, whoever was hosting it would be inundated with complaints about the bits that weren't fully operational.

Ironwolf

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #148 on: April 17, 2019, 03:39:43 AM »
You see it now appears that some of our players actually managed to kill the game.

NCSoft closed the game and then when a chance was presented for a few players to work on a way to preserve the game for others - they kept it secret for 6 years. I am not surprised some people refused to play the game if others couldn't - I would have been in that camp.

I would indeed try to run an "open" server where players just pay for the cost of operation. It might be fun to see if the group who were redoing the artwork could be given the code and make a COH/V 1.5 version. I guess I think of what could have been done in 6 years by a shared community and it seems quite wasted now.

You lost the rest of the team SCORE. We once were all in it together - now we sound like people I am not sure I want to share a server with.

RGladden

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #149 on: April 17, 2019, 04:08:44 AM »
The anger will pass.  But trust may never be restored.  That will depend on the actions taken by Leandro and SCoRE.

Super Atom

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #150 on: April 17, 2019, 04:09:51 AM »
Truth. To qoute a friend of mine on this situation. They gave us a photograph of steak while they had the actual meal


WolfSoul

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #151 on: April 17, 2019, 04:23:13 AM »
The anger will pass.  But trust may never be restored.  That will depend on the actions taken by Leandro and SCoRE.

Yes. This.

TonyV

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #152 on: April 17, 2019, 04:39:29 AM »
Very easy. Do you not know about private servers? Also, in what world would 50k people play on a private server. WoW private servers don't even reach that. People can run private servers from their home PC's, but thats not whats being done here. He's renting server space and running it on that, which most would probably do. Please my man, don't post such misleading stuff.

He's not misleading, and this is a pet peeve of mine; the rampant assumption that anyone could just snag a copy of the code and be off and running. I know several of the Paragon Studio devs, and because I'm geeky like this and at the time worked in a datacenter, I took every opportunity I could to grill them on the game's infrastructure while it was up and running. The computing muscle required to run City of Heroes was significant.

First of all, a lot of the code was spaghetti-ish, prone to breaking if you didn't have it tweaked just right. Just getting the thing running on ANY servers was, according to people who were professionally paid to do so, not easy.

Second of all, it's not like you just plopped coh.exe on a server and double-clicked the icon and voila, you can now log in. City of Heroes wasn't a server. Even a City of Heroes "server" (e.g. Infinity) wasn't a server. It was at least, to the best of my recollection:
  • An account/authentication server
  • Multiple chat server executables
  • A market server
  • A Paragon Store (microtransaction) server
  • A crapton of mapservers
  • Multiple DB servers
  • An instance, possibly multiple instances, of MS SQL Server
  • Probably other stuff I'm forgetting since these conversations took place seven years ago

All of this stuff required specific versions of software and libraries to run correctly, so you couldn't just click OK when Windows prompted you to update or upgrade. And all of this was spread across multiple physical high-end enterprise-scale boxes that had to have hardly-ever-looked-at configuration parameters and registry settings tweaked just-so to run.

Now, I get that the traffic on a private server may not be as heavy as on the live game servers, but it's not like just because it's a private server, now you don't need a market server, or you can do without a chat server, or that you don't have to have the exactly correct version of some database library installed. Even a base-level config for a single shard required a LOT of resources.

Having said all of that, I have no idea what progress SCoRE has made in simplifying this setup, or even if they've managed to make any progress towards it. Maybe one of the reasons they've kept it secret so long is so that when it is released, people can actually use it. Keep in mind that everything I described above is just to run the executables. If you actually want to tweak the code base, you get into a whole 'nother level of configuration hell in getting Visual Studio set up just right to be able to actually compile the thing.

At any rate, please don't propagate the misconception that the thing isn't a pain in the ass to run. Barring some next-level miraculous re-coding of how all of these tiny puzzle pieces without pictures or edges to guide them to give clues fit together, this thing was--and probably still is--a very, VERY demanding beast.

P51mus

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #153 on: April 17, 2019, 04:48:38 AM »
There's also been a lot of advances in server technology and how they run in the years since the game shut down. 

I dunno, from my mostly outsider view it looks like you might have had more trust in someone than he actually deserved.  We'll see I guess.

Super Atom

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #154 on: April 17, 2019, 04:48:46 AM »
I'd like to call attention to other posts made on this topic, you qouted the first part of the convo but none of the follow up.

Quote
Of course he's probably put a lot of time and effort into making it operational. The problem people have is they want him to release his code so everyone else can play too.

Another post further down by p51

Quote
See, thing is, if the code were more openly available there'd be a bunch of private servers running.  Some of them would be open, some of them would be more private.  It wouldn't just be one person running a server.  That's how most private servers for MMOs are.

And if it was anything like what I know about the Ragnarok Online private server community (my info on this is way out of date), then they'd be sharing tweaks they've made among the private servers so that any fixes one person made could be used by others.  (At the time there were actually two different types of private servers for RO, one that was an emulated server and another that was based off of leaked/hacked official server code)


a follow up post by  TWI 
Quote
Dunno. Maybe if they spread the code I'll let you know once I see it.

Quick edit; you put a lot of no-brainers like "plopping the coh.exe down" that nobody claimed was the case. Dunno why you did this, but it wasn't a health way to explain anything. It's putting words in peoples mouths.

edit2: realized i sounded slightly hostile, wanted to fix

« Last Edit: April 17, 2019, 05:06:16 AM by Super Atom »

weenus

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #155 on: April 17, 2019, 04:56:38 AM »
Having said all of that, I have no idea what progress SCoRE has made in simplifying this setup, or even if they've managed to make any progress towards it. Maybe one of the reasons they've kept it secret so long is so that when it is released, people can actually use it. Keep in mind that everything I described above is just to run the executables. If you actually want to tweak the code base, you get into a whole 'nother level of configuration hell in getting Visual Studio set up just right to be able to actually compile the thing.

At any rate, please don't propagate the misconception that the thing isn't a pain in the ass to run. Barring some next-level miraculous re-coding of how all of these tiny puzzle pieces without pictures or edges to guide them to give clues fit together, this thing was--and probably still is--a very, VERY demanding beast.

I don't get it though, was it kept a tight lipped secret because they're afraid of NCSoft's legal eagles or was it kept a tight lipped secret because it's this painstaking WIP?

Even if they get it 110% playable, if they run the server population with an iron fist and live in constant fear of NCSoft's lawyers, what would it being playable change anything?

Would it being more playable somehow protect them from getting the business end of NCSoft's legal department?

saipaman

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #156 on: April 17, 2019, 05:08:43 AM »
At any rate, please don't propagate the misconception that the thing isn't a pain in the ass to run. Barring some next-level miraculous re-coding of how all of these tiny puzzle pieces without pictures or edges to guide them to give clues fit together, this thing was--and probably still is--a very, VERY demanding beast.

I'm not protesting the miracle.  I'm protesting what came after the miracle.

Kyriani

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #157 on: April 17, 2019, 05:18:05 AM »
I don't get it though, was it kept a tight lipped secret because they're afraid of NCSoft's legal eagles or was it kept a tight lipped secret because it's this painstaking WIP?

Even if they get it 110% playable, if they run the server population with an iron fist and live in constant fear of NCSoft's lawyers, what would it being playable change anything?

Would it being more playable somehow protect them from getting the business end of NCSoft's legal department?

I think what Tony is trying to say is that running a CoH server is not the same as running a WoW emulator repack that you just click a couple executables, change a file in your client to point to your server and bam it plays. So if Leandro is indeed running the actual CoH source and not an emulator of some sort, and just gave it out for anyone to use, most people aren't going to be able to do anything with it... at least not without a ton of time and effort blindly figuring things out... assuming they have enough technical expertise in the first place.

I know I don't have that level of expertise. Heck I can barely get a wow repack to work just to mess around in a sandbox and take cool screenshots.

This whole situation bothers me. I see all these people upset over this, heck I'm one of them, but I'm also rational enough not to just go for the pitchfork and torches without having all the information. We're only seeing half a story here and I'm not one to make judgements without all the facts. It also pains me to see people not only making death threats, but members of this community actively laughing about it and saying he deserves the threats. That's not the community I remember. That's not a community I want to even be a part of. So I hope that most of us remain rational. We can feel angry, we can feel hurt, we can feel betrayed, but we have to remember that we are all human beings, and also... we're supposed to be heroes here.

Heroes don't make, condone, or worse, celebrate, death threats against anyone no matter how bad they might be.

Twi

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #158 on: April 17, 2019, 05:18:43 AM »
snipping a big post

Yeah, I recall every ounce of what they said about the server infrastructure. I recall the lamenting of Aeon's concerning trying to get everything working just right to enable new scripting, I recall the complaints about spreadsheet hell, I recall them saying that it was all spaghetti code at best.

Seems to be working for someone right now though, don't it? Infact, it seems to have been working for them for quite a while! And who knows what more eyes on could've accomplished, it's not as if the MMO gaming world is exactly short on server infrastructure engineers or intrusion detection specialists.
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P51mus

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Re: The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release
« Reply #159 on: April 17, 2019, 05:32:11 AM »
I think what Tony is trying to say is that running a CoH server is not the same as running a WoW emulator repack that you just click a couple executables, change a file in your client to point to your server and bam it plays. So if Leandro is indeed running the actual CoH source and not an emulator of some sort, and just gave it out for anyone to use, most people aren't going to be able to do anything with it... at least not without a ton of time and effort blindly figuring things out... assuming they have enough technical expertise in the first place.

I know I don't have that level of expertise. Heck I can barely get a wow repack to work just to mess around in a sandbox and take cool screenshots.

There's people who will mess with this kind of thing for fun.  The person I knew who ran the RO private server I spent a small amount of time on was one of them.

You get enough of those kinds of people trying to get it running and sharing what they did with each other and suddenly you have solutions, and ways to get it working so that more people can try it.

Heck, I even corrected the hp/sp tables for the newer classes for him, and he probably shared that with the other people running RO private servers.