This week I've seen the City of Heroes community react strongly to the NCSoft closure of Paragon Studios in many ways. Some are just angered and call for boycotts or blacklisting of NCSoft. Others are rallying behind any core developers who we hope are interested in acquiring the City of Heroes properties to manage independently, much as Turbine Games (later developers and publishers of Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord Of The Rings Online) did with their seminal MMO Asheron's Call.
And then there are a host of individuals with, I believe, less magnanimous motives. From people trying to make money off the situation by posting Amazon links on Twitter to pipe-dreamers trying to hijack the City of Heroes community as a funding source for that pet MMO project they've been wanting to do for years. Even some of the players who only want to rescue City of Heroes itself seem to think of it as a personal investment opportunity, rather than the charitable support of developers who have been robbed of the product of a decade's work, or merely the player's honest desire to have the game continue to be available.
So, as the pessimist, curmudgeon, and contrarian that I am, I am NOT entirely heartened by all this player activity. In contrast to the rhetoric of several articles I do not believe "we are heroes." Hell, even though my ideal, for which I'm willing to donate whatever scant funds I can muster, is the transfer of ownership from NCSoft to the core development staff of Paragon Studios (or Cryptic, for that matter), I am no superhero. If legal options for the preservation of City of Heroes are flatly rejected, I will support any means whatever of accomplishing that, including the most blatantly illegal.
Better leaked code and tools (which I do hope some guy or gal currently at PS has the balls to secretly liberate -- most especially the tools) and/or reverse engineering leading to private servers than any legal alternative that leaves the game mothballed.
With all the logging of identities involved in forums like this, I am uncomfortable just saying that openly. I do fear corporate-owned legal authorities hunting me down for even speaking like this. But I don't think this "community" is serious if it is not willing to consider such things.
Think of it this way: with the game service discontinued and NCSoft stonewalling all legal channels for it's restoration, the ethical issues are different than in the case of emulation competing with an active service. Sometimes the letter of the law is not just.