Get Sentinel+ Exporter working again ?

[MREBoy]

So with the return of Everyone's Favorite MMO™ in a somewhat unorthodox manner, the somewhat expectable collapse of a group's server has occurred, in that a?/the? Reddit affiliated one went under due to internal drama of some kind. Read about it here:

https://massivelyop.com/2019/06/08/city-of-heroes-pleiades/

Total lifespan for this server was approximately 18 days or so. So now another group of players have lost access to their characters and home server. There is apparently talk of somehow moving the character data to another server currently in use, but the odds of that happening are fairly low I would say.

This brings me to the question that I posted in the Sentinel+ Import thread:  GuyPerfect, how feasible would it be to get the original exporter app working again ? If you yourself are not interested or able to do so, would open sourcing the program be possible ?

With the distinct possibility of whatever servers people are playing on going away with most likely zero or little notice, the ability to make backups of your own characters would appear to be a good thing to have again. And if this proves popular, XML  files could become the de facto standard for moving characters from server to server.



Note: I made this separate thread so as to keep the Sentinel+ Import Tool thread less cluttered/distracted.

[GuyPerfect]

Unfortunately, extending Sentinel+ to support unofficial servers won't be an option. Because of the fact that anyone is able to set up a hosting environment and make their own modifications to the game, there's no catch-all solution to support character extractions arbitrarily among the innumerable hosts that crop up as time goes on.

Titan Network staff discussed the matter internally back when this all started, and the position we reached was that Sentinel, Sentinel+ and City Info Tracker (as well as other things like Mids and City of Data) will remain deactivated until such a time that an official game host becomes a thing again. The reasoning is that we don't want to pick and choose who gets our support and who doesn't, so the only fair, practical and neutral solution is to cease support across the board.

I want to extend best-wishes to the members of Pleiades, and I hope a solution can be reached for archiving the character data produced there. For the rest going forward, I would like to urge that new and existing hosts implement some form of export feature in case of such a future shutdown.