The Shot Heard Around Paragon City - SCORE Public Release

[eabrace]

[Taceus Jiwede]

At the speed they were working I have no doubt they could have had a mostly functional server by the 27th.  I don't blame the guy for getting spooked he was putting a lot of responsibility on his shoulders.

I do think this has created a problem though.  While it seems the possibility of a server isn't gone I don't think they have any of the binaries they used to set it up.  Also, Leo and the Admins of the Test server (AFAIK) aren't good terms right now.  I don't say this spread false rumors, and I hope its all good but if it's not I doubt there will be as much collaboration this time around.

Shame that one troll did all this and created a divide between the people trying to make this a possibility.

At this point though I am just waiting the 24h to see what they have to say.  All any of us can do is really speculate or like Saipman said "Ask a magic 8 ball" which will just say

 "

[therain93]

The discord is making me sick.  Leo was right to keep it a secret.  So many rude and undeserving people.  They have CoH back for a week and are already calling the people "spinless and cowards" for not keeping the servor up.  It's disgusting.  No thank you, no we appreciate you trying.  I hate to say it but after reading over this Discord.  The community doesn't deserve CoH.

Some folks are only capable of acquiring wisdom by sticking their hands in the fire.


*smh* 


Vindication for SCoRE's plan doesn't undo the damage some of the community has done,  unfortunately.

[saipaman]

On the plus side, it now appears that all the code and data is out.

At least that's some protection from NCSoft.

[Vella]

I do think this has created a problem though.  While it seems the possibility of a server isn't gone I don't think they have any of the binaries they used to set it up.  Also, Leo and the Admins of the Test server (AFAIK) aren't good terms right now.  I don't say this spread false rumors, and I hope its all good but if it's not I doubt there will be as much collaboration this time around.

Shame that one troll did all this and created a divide between the people trying to make this a possibility.

At this point though I am just waiting the 24h to see what they have to say.  All any of us can do is really speculate or like Saipman said "Ask a magic 8 ball" which will just say

 "

   I think worst case it sets it back 4 or 5 days.  It may not take even that long now that the coders have the hardware and knowledge to correct any issues that might pop up again.  From the screenshots it looked like the issue was between Leandro and the Discord channel admin.  Not the test server admin.  This was a separate issue from the test server.

[Blue Pulsar]

[Vella]

Logging in was the worst, and it was only for the first 24 hours. By Saturday evening, I had no problem logging in, and suffered maybe 1 mapserve for the remainder of the time it was up. And lag wasn't too bad at all. I've certainly experienced worse back when the game was up.

   If I had to compare it to anything I'd say it was like launch day of any other MMO and I mean that as complement.  These guys are doing great work.

[saipaman]

Sunday was excellent.   I'm glad I tried something I'd never tried before -- beam rifle and time manipulation. 

[Vella]

Sunday was excellent.   I'm glad I tried something I'd never tried before -- beam rifle and time manipulation.

Dual Pistols / Super Reflexes Sentinel.. something I've never tried before.

Whatever the outcome of this mess I'm thankful I got to play again.

[weenus]

The stuff happening between the discords, the subreddit, the mods, it's all terribly embarrassing. We were on the door step of something great, but you can always trust pettiness to derail it all.

[VileTerror]

I realize I'm not seeing everything that's going on, but from my little narrow view . . . it almost looked like everyone was getting along for a little while when the public private server was running.  At least getting along well enough compared to before and after.  Goodness gracious!  The lines that get drawn in the sand with this.

I mean, at least it demonstrates how passionate people are about City of Heroes, right?   I'd like to believe that people don't get this emotional about something which they don't actually care about.

And NCSoft always felt out of touch to me, so I can only imagine them watching all this unfold from a distance, scratching their heads in bewildered confusion.

[summers]

I had an absolute blast, it was just like coming home. 99% of the people just want to play the game, 1% who are loud and vocal are causing mischief. We'll get over this and in due course we'll be back

Thank you to everyone so far who has put in huge hours to make the dream a reality!

[Nightraptor]

Something I want to ask the people that did get on :

Did the graphics still feel satisfying to see?

I bring this up because over the years detractors have said "oh the graphics are old and wont be fun to see anymore" (a view I disagree with vehemently).

My take on the graphics is it is a super hero game spawned from a comic background. I don't NEED to see eyebrows or breathing or even hair animations to be immersed in the game. The trees and grass don't need to rustle (unless of course they are Devouring Earth!).

[summers]

Something I want to ask the people that did get on :

Did the graphics still feel satisfying to see?

I bring this up because over the years detractors have said "oh the graphics are old and wont be fun to see anymore" (a view I disagree with vehemently).

My take on the graphics is it is a super hero game spawned from a comic background. I don't NEED to see eyebrows or breathing or even hair animations to be immersed in the game. The trees and grass don't need to rustle (unless of course they are Devouring Earth!).

It felt great. The art direction never demanded ultra-high detail where every blade of grass is animated

[Nightraptor]

Brilliant! Good to know!

I am SO looking forwards to getting back ....

[Tahquitz]

I know you're assuaged after reading Leandro's twitter, but I'd like to clarify this a bit for others, according to my understanding.

The *I24 source code* is widely public now. That, however, is not enough to run a server or a client (btw both server and client code are packed *together*). As far as I know, several types of asset files are also needed, and those are not yet properly publicly available.

What was running on this Discord server, was a *precompiled* I25 (I24 + Leandro's and his team's modifications) server (aka binaries), joined by the I25 client supplied through Tequila. Again, as far as I know, Leandro was in the process of releasing the I25 source code but it had to be scrubbed of any privately identifying information before being made public.

Why the I24 assets, or the I25 binaries and assets aren't publicly released at this point, I do not know.

From my reading of the last 10 days of news and forum posts (including here): 

-- Issue 25 in binary form is ready to go now.  It's the fastest route to go live immediately, and the COH Discord team is fine with that for now, but they want Issue 24.  Before Leo can release this source code, he needs to scrub it for anything that would tip off investigators to the identities of who modified it, both NCSoft staff as well as SCORE (doesn't take a lot of guesses as to why both of those matter).  That'll take some time. 
-- Issue 25 source code will be possible, but not immediately.  This can be distributed in Source Code form, but it must be scrubbed before release. (See above)
-- Issue 24 will be possible AFTER the Issue 25 source code is scrubbed.  This is manually rolling back the changes Leo made to Issue 25 to put it back to Issue 24, then adjusting the server configuration and databases to work with the rollback.  This will take a few months and may be as late as this Fall, depending on his schedule.

Ultimately, public servers will have their choice of what resources to use, but they'll need one or the other.  The source code by itself without these resources do nothing.  If you want Issue 24, you'll need to wait.  If you want to play ASAP, Issue 25 is what's on the menu.

Hopefully that explains why Leo's Twitter posts are essential to the team: they need his binaries to get a server online as soon as possible.

[Sinistar]

Just some musing:

Unless there's an approval from NCSoft (tacit or explicit), there won't be a single server like we had back when the game was running.  Either costs will grow too much, someone will get bored or spooked and kill their server, or they get a letter from NCSoft telling them to C&D.

I feel like the future of CoH will be multiple private servers operating under the radar.  It might be closer to a single person game or a small group of friends.  It's possible that there will be a facility to extract your character from a server, so you can have a backup, and to allow restoration on another server.  Think of it like transhuman sleeving - download your character into a new body somewhere else.

The coding team working on understanding, simplifying and deploying new binaries based on the i24 code is probably the future of the game.  They still need the back end database data, but that's probably coming still.  Once that's released, it's only a matter of time before you can run your own private server on commodity hardware.  It might take some time.

I had a great time playing on the test server this weekend.  I got to play with my friend that introduced me to the game in the first place; we re-rolled our original toons and had a blast.  We got to show our kids and they loved it too.  My daughter made her first character in Icon and was disappointed that the test server was down, but I have hope now that the code's out.  The test server might not have worked out (it might still - the jury's still out on that) but there will be City of Heroes in the future. 

I'm happy to have some real hope going forward.

I suspect that it will indeed be many private servers and that is fine. More the merrier and thus the genie remains out of the bottle and the bottle is shattered.

The main thing is to make sure no money is required to be on these servers. If donations are asked for and voluntary given and all money properly tracked then Ncsoft shouldn't be able to complain, or at least not very loudly.

[Sinistar]

From my reading of the last 10 days of news and forum posts (including here): 

-- Issue 25 in binary form is ready to go now.  It's the fastest route to go live immediately, and the COH Discord team is fine with that for now, but they want Issue 24.  Before Leo can release this source code, he needs to scrub it for anything that would tip off investigators to the identities of who modified it, both NCSoft staff as well as SCORE (doesn't take a lot of guesses as to why both of those matter).  That'll take some time. 
-- Issue 25 source code will be possible, but not immediately.  This can be distributed in Source Code form, but it must be scrubbed before release. (See above)
-- Issue 24 will be possible AFTER the Issue 25 source code is scrubbed.  This is manually rolling back the changed Leo made to Issue 25 to put it back to Issue 24, then adjusting the server configuration and databases to work with the rollback.  This will take a few months and may be as late as this Fall, depending on his schedule.

Ultimately, public servers will have their choice of what resources to use, but they'll need one or the other.  The source code by itself without these resources do nothing.  If you want Issue 24, you'll need to wait.  If you want to play ASAP, Issue 25 is what's on the menu.

Hopefully that explains why Leo's Twitter posts are essential to the team: they need his binaries to get a server online as soon as possible.

If issue 25 is just a modified 24 and has everything from 24 in it, then why bother rolling back to just i24? Just whip up a friendly server and client setup package with nice easy instructions and the tech specs for a good server to have it on and then package it up, call it the Paragon Seed or some such and release it to the internet for all to enjoy

[Arkasas]

If issue 25 is just a modified 24 and has everything from 24 in it, then why bother rolling back to just i24? Just whip up a friendly server and client setup package with nice easy instructions and the tech specs for a good server to have it on and then package it up, call it the Paragon Seed or some such and release it to the internet for all to enjoy

Some people are purists and don't want anything Cryptic/Paragon didn't make, others just hate Leandro. There's a market for it!

[Zombie Man]

From my reading of the last 10 days of news and forum posts (including here): 

-- Issue 25 in binary form is ready to go now.  It's the fastest route to go live immediately, and the COH Discord team is fine with that for now, but they want Issue 24.  Before Leo can release this source code, he needs to scrub it for anything that would tip off investigators to the identities of who modified it, both NCSoft staff as well as SCORE (doesn't take a lot of guesses as to why both of those matter).  That'll take some time. 
-- Issue 25 source code will be possible, but not immediately.  This can be distributed in Source Code form, but it must be scrubbed before release. (See above)
-- Issue 24 will be possible AFTER the Issue 25 source code is scrubbed.  This is manually rolling back the changed Leo made to Issue 25 to put it back to Issue 24, then adjusting the server configuration and databases to work with the rollback.  This will take a few months and may be as late as this Fall, depending on his schedule.

Ultimately, public servers will have their choice of what resources to use, but they'll need one or the other.  The source code by itself without these resources do nothing.  If you want Issue 24, you'll need to wait.  If you want to play ASAP, Issue 25 is what's on the menu.

Hopefully that explains why Leo's Twitter posts are essential to the team: they need his binaries to get a server online as soon as possible.

Ok... here's my understanding:

Everything for i24 is now out there, both from Leo and some other anonymous source. But, it has to be fixed to work, which the coders now working on it could get done in a few weeks or months.

Leo's SCORE group had a 6 year jump on making i24 work, and they modified it creating an updated issue: i25. It was i25 that Leo gave to a trusted member of the Discord group to test out, which led to last week's playtesting. Why to a trusted member? Because part of the code needed to be scrubbed since it had info embedded in it that would lead to who leaked it and who was working on it. Leo was working in the meantime to scrub it while everyone was playtesting it. So, yes, Leo still has some files not widely released for that reason.

Then the fake news that NCSoft was going to issue a D&C led to the person who had the i25 files on the playtesting server to panic and to delete it all. Which takes us back to only Leo having part of those files. So, no working playtesting is available unless some other trusted individual wants to run i25 while its files are being scrubbed.

Even if Leo never releases his i25 files, what has already been released is enough for coders to create a working game just like Leo did.

But Leo is most definitely committed to getting everything eventually released. He had a fit when the Discord group was holding onto some files that were scrubbed and got them to release them to the wild.