Okay, so for about two days now, in addition to responding to a zillion PMs (
Titan,
official), Skype invites (tonyv.paragonwiki),
Facebook friend requests, e-mails (
tonyv@cohtitan.com), and other means of communication, I've also been working on a cohesive plan for what exactly we're going to do.
As I've said all along, my #1 goal is to make sure that City of Heroes stays up and running. I think our immediate list of options towards that goal is limited to the following possibilities:
Convince NCsoft to change their mindI'll be totally upfront here: This possibility is
highly unlikely. For a company to lay 80+ people off at one time, there has to be a lot of preparation. A lot of legal and accounting hurdles have been jumped through, a lot of things like contracts terminated with Playspan (who provided the back-end of the Paragon Store) have happened, etc. Plus, you can't just tell 80+ people, "Um... never mind..." and not expect a huge negative hit to morale, and even a measure of bitterness and anger. At this point, I just can't imagine things simply going back to the way they were.
Having said that, however, I do think that there is a possibility that NCsoft might agree to keep the game running in some kind of maintenance mode on a skeleton crew in which there will be no development or updates at least long enough for us to come up with a plan B, most likely involving one of the options below.
Convince NCsoft to transfer the IP rights and code to usI'm jumping from what I feel is the most unlikely scenario to what I feel is the most tantalizing scenario. If we can convince NCsoft that leaving City of Heroes shuttered is an incredible waste of something that has both monetary and emotional value, they might be willing to sell it to us. I've seen a lot of theories around regarding NCsoft being short on cash. I think the situation is more complicated than that, but if they really are looking for a cash infusion, it is possible that they would be willing to part with the IP, code base, and distribution rights for a high enough dollar figure.
So what happens then? I don't know...
yet. Options include using crowd funding and/or an interested investment partner to raise the money to start a non-profit cooperative of players to basically take over where Paragon Studios left off. We might very well reach out to the Paragon Studios developers, artists, testers, etc. to come work with us on the game, with the offer of a financial ownership stake in it. In short, though, we the players could own the game, ensuring that something like this never happens again, that the only reason it could ever shut down is if interest really declines to the point where we simply can't keep the servers running any longer. Worst case scenario, even if we screw it up, we can always use the next option below as a fallback plan; once we own the assets, they'd be ours to do with as we felt best to keep the game running.
The goal would be to have the assets out of the hands of people that don't want the game running and into the hands of people that do. We'd have to tread carefully, though, because I don't want to 1) convince NCsoft that we'd end up taking marketshare away from their other games as a competitor, or 2) do our job so well that we convince NCsoft that the assets are worth a lot more than we can pay.
Convince NCsoft to transfer the IP rights and code to another companyI've seen several suggestions, such as
Riot Games,
Valve, even someone like
Blizzard. These are good ideas, and if we can't get the assets ourselves, then this would definitely be worth pursuing. City of Heroes is a profitable game, one that I think a lot of publishers would be interested in acquiring. I think there are several good options of people to take over the game, good publishers and good studios who would salivate at the prospect of having the world's largest superhero-themed MMORPG as part of their portfolio.
Convince NCsoft to license the IP and codeThe sad fact is that in today's litigious society, there's a chance that NCsoft either can't or won't want to part with the IP for certain legal reasons. If that's the case, then perhaps the would be willing to sell us a license to use the game's IP, source code, and sell us distribution rights to the client so that they retain ownership of the assets, but we basically pay them "rent" to use them.
This isn't an ideal situation because it would still put us in the precarious position of continuing to depend on NCsoft's good will, but it has the appeal to NCsoft that it would be pure profit to them--unlike owning Paragon Studios, there would be no expenditures on their part to eat into their bottom line each month.
Through crowd funding or subscriptions, we could hire developers on a contractual basis to perform maintenance and perhaps even make steady improvements and changes to the server and client.
Reverse engineer the codeI know this might come as a surprise to some of you

but at the Titan Network, we have been working for years on reverse engineering the client and the communication protocols to the servers that run the game. Before you get creeped out about using our tools such as Mids, Sentinel, etc., I assure you that we have never built any malicious code. We all have agreed from day one that we would never use anything we discover to cheat, compromise your privacy, exploit the game, or anything like that.
Anyway, our resident hackers have made a lot of headway in working out how the servers work, and as you can imagine now, they're still at it as I type this. I reached out to nemerle a little earlier, and our reverse engineering lead is going to contact him regarding any opportunities to combine efforts.
Having said all of that, this really is a last resort. I don't want to understate the fact that reverse engineering something like this game is very,
very hard. Even if we're successful and had all of the protocols and information we need, actually implementing replacements is also hard. Also, there's the little matter of legal issues. If we don't have rights to the IP and art and design assets, we obviously can't just start running City of Heroes again on our own servers, lest we get sued out of existence. I've seen some messages and posts essentially saying, "You could run it out of another country where the laws don't cover such-and-such..." but we really desperately want to avoid playing legal games like that. Long story short, if we go this route, the City of Heroes you're used to will probably not be close to the same City of Heroes we're able to produce. It would be like looking at a road map of a city you've never been to. You'd recognize the elements--highways, interstates, railroads, bridges, rivers, etc., but that hometown El Super Mexicano would be gone.
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So those, in a nutshell, are the options we're currently working on pursuing. Some of them I obviously like more than others. Some of them would entail a lot more work than just the two days I've put into it so far, and believe me, I'm working on it. I've also gotten a lot of really good ideas, suggestions, and feedback from the community. I haven't responded to all of it yet because I really am getting slammed with messages while I'm trying to work on stuff (but don't stop!), so if you don't hear from me right away, that doesn't mean that I haven't read what you've written, it just means that I want to get out another post or respond to someone who sent me a message earlier than you did, or there's some other pressing matter I'm dropping everything for. But do keep sending me stuff, because it is making my radar and influencing the directions we're going in!