Here's the tl;dr right at the start: The more I've learned about NCSoft's history of easily shutting down games and fighting hard to keep them dead, the more I've realized that a central, dedicated host server list would become a death knell for the revived game. The solution is the Freelancer model that was talked about by Chris Roberts at the PAX East panel in regards to City of Heroes and the subject of keeping games alive after publisher disinterest. Interestingly, I still play Freelancer online every so often and this is exactly the model that has allowed me to do it. (I'm a big fan of the Battlestar Galactica conversions.
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More wordsIt won't matter to their lawyers if we players change every signature character and line of text in the game; I say "we" because the code monkeys aren't planning on doing that part for us--they're giving us a tabula rasa to help fend off the lawyers who will be sniffing out trademark violations. Of course I don't think this will entirely work. It doesn't matter if the server is written from scratch; because the lawyers aren't likely to be tech savvy enough to think beyond the mere fact that players are playing City of Heroes again in any form--and NCSoft will be paying them to make that situation stop. Now the core EULA-dodging aspect of this paragraph deserves its own thread (it already has a few, actually), so what I'm asking people to focus on instead is the simple consequence of having NCSoft's lawyers come after us:
any centrally located server will be the first target.
Ideally, the server software should be optimized to run on normal to high-end gaming PCs alongside the client (or at worst a separate dedicated server box that can be built for under $500), so that friends all over the world can organize over instant messaging programs or VOIP or Steam or private guild forums, and play the game without fear of being noticed by NCSoft's eye in the sky. And the project's source code should be made freely available upon release of the community server, to aid in wide dispersal around the Internet, as a pre-preemptive measure against the inevitable cease and desist notice before it arrives. (It will be far more trouble for you guys if you release the code
after receiving a cease and desist.)
This is the most likely avenue to getting a healthy AND SAFE game out in the wild, with some diverse and competing code branches pumping out updates.
Maybe sometime in the future, 10 years or so, when NCSoft's reigns have changed hands, or their stance has softened, or they've abandoned MMOs to be the king of mobile app sweatshops or whatever, someone can raise up a central massive server and fling open its doors. If you do this any time soon, you're just painting a target on your chest, and the surrounding fallout is likely to put people off of returning to the game in any form.
