Gentelmen.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with an IP that can be used to take the City of Villains trademark away from NCSoft without infringing on NCSoft's CoV IP. :p
When we all have the game back in some way via server emulation, I actually expect the community's tone is going to shift regarding NCSoft. VERY few of your peers will appreciate you for going near the giant ogre in question and saying, "
HEY! HEY LOOK OVER HERE!!! LOOK WHAT WE'RE DOING NEENER NEENER!!!!"
In the early days of the Earth and Beyond emulator, before anyone was sure what EA might do, even mentioning EA on the emulator's community forums in a negative tone would get you a warning or a temporary ban; worse if you didn't take the hint. It was a tough choice that the majority voted on in order to keep themselves from doing something stupid that might make things worse for everybody in the end.
Here's what will always be true, whether we scream it or whisper it: NCSoft let us down. And we can also say without hyperbole or exaggeration that they stabbed a dedicated, talented development team in the back. That was the worst incident of its kind I've ever heard about for an MMO studio. It was the business equivalent of the villain murdering the hero in public view of the world, and simply walking to the bank unhindered and depositing the cash out of the hero's wallet.
This will always be part of the game's history, part of our history, part of the industry's history. Ever wonder why more studios are going indie from the get-go? Ever wonder why some of the PC gaming industry's most revered veterans, masters of the cult classics within their genres, are turning to kickstarters rather than turning to big publishers? We're not the only ones who see the writing on the wall. Publishers are exceeding their intended reach, becoming increasingly cutthroat, everybody knows it. I remember being surprised by a conversation with a player in the E&B emu one time, who said she wouldn't invest time in any MMO (even a F2P one) until a server emulator popped up for it--
as a matter of principle. Her words were something like, "You know that
fool me once, fool me twice saying? I'm a happily reformed former poster child."
Everything above, we all know it; but we'll build a new era for City of Heroes by focusing on the present and the future, not the past.
One more thing about the E&B emu. There are new players there who don't have any clue who published the game, who never played it back then. The drama of the past isn't any of their business, they don't care, they are just playing a game they like. Beating drums and waving banners of hatred for my personal cause in their faces wouldn't make them see the light, it would just annoy them.
So when a new CoH player shows up in the community server and says, "I'm here from GW2/Wildstar/whatever", and is ridiculed for it, that will be
our community being the bad guys, not NCSoft. And this is coming from a guy who is still boycotting NCSoft. There are aspects of this that I'll never move on from or forget, and there are aspects where it is crucial to move on. This is where "not moving on" will hurt us, and might even make us hurtful toward others. Food for thought.
