So, we want to keep things around to look at. Even if Paragon Studios or some other entity purchase and reinstate the game, there could be a significant delay. And there's a good chance that won't happen at all, and our only access to things will be through other efforts. So what other efforts can you and I contribute to?
First, the City of Heroes forums -- lots of good stuff and it's definitely going to go bye-bye. Someone with enough disc space might be able to use a ripper like
HTTrack to store everything locally for a complete reference source. But also, since cityofheroes.com doesn't use a robots.txt it can be saved on Archive.org (just hope that nobody ever puts a robots.txt on the domain, since Archive.org respects those things retroactively (there aughtta be a law
)). Archive.org can be a lazy spider, though. So you may want to help out by surfing all the more important pages of the forum (guides, media, interesting information, whatever) through the Archive.org
liveweb. It's not perfect, but the pages you are able to navigate to through there will be captured.
Second, the game itself. If we go dead, or just down for an extended time,
there is still the hope of tooling around in the game using demos and the I24 beta client's demo freelook function. Which is great! But you'll need a demo recording of whatever zone you want to revisit. So it could be a good idea for anyone playing game content now to grab a demo of all unique mission maps as well as major city zones for this purpose. Perhaps we can all pool contributions toward a public collection of demos for the entire game this way (they don't have to be more than a few seconds to grab the entire map, I believe).
As well, it might even be helpful having records of spawn placements in all the major missions, trials, task forces, and whatnot if our only hope turns out to be emulation (
without the help of any broken-haloed angels on the inside hint hint). There's a chance that those are all determined server-side, and would be irretrievable without access to the original server.
