So on the bright side...

[JKPhage]

Just wanted to kind of interject a bit of positivity into what we all know is terrible situation for our community. Yes, it sucks that the city is gone (at least for now), and that even if we get it back, the chances of getting all the old dev/community team that also made the game so special is close to non-existant, but there is an upshot to this.

We still have several people who worked on the game among the community and keeping tabs on it, who I'm sure would be glad to pitch in a little help when/if we should get a community server up and running, perhaps even point us in the right direction plot-wise for those who might want to continue making content updates for the game...

And on that note, my biggest hope/reason I can actually look at this as a good thing: on a community server we can fully support community-made content. If someone creates a genuinely good story arc, it can be incorporated into the game. If we all decide that we'd really like a particular power-set and we have people who are willing/able to create animation/textures/effects and someone to balance the numbers *cougharcanavillecough*, we can readily create and include new powersets, or even perhaps new alternate power-effects.

Essentially, I'm excited about the new prospects for what can happen when the game is put into community hands. We've always been a hugely creative community, full of imaginative and talented people of all kinds, from writers to artists, coders to mathematicians, and we've now got an opportunity to really make the city we love something even greater. We can take those incomplete Wind Control and Radiation Armor/Melee powersets and give them appropriate effects, put a little polish on them, and truly put a bit of ourselves into Paragon. We can even create new zones, new NPCs, completely new stories, the sky is the limit. We haven't lost the city, we're just in a hibernation state before we ascend and start doing cosmic stuff with our new powers. ;)

[onyxprincess]

This is one of the most inspiring posts I've seen- and there's more behind the scenes than even we can realize...

Just wanted to kind of interject a bit of positivity into what we all know is terrible situation for our community. Yes, it sucks that the city is gone (at least for now), and that even if we get it back, the chances of getting all the old dev/community team that also made the game so special is close to non-existant, but there is an upshot to this.

We still have several people who worked on the game among the community and keeping tabs on it, who I'm sure would be glad to pitch in a little help when/if we should get a community server up and running, perhaps even point us in the right direction plot-wise for those who might want to continue making content updates for the game...

And on that note, my biggest hope/reason I can actually look at this as a good thing: on a community server we can fully support community-made content. If someone creates a genuinely good story arc, it can be incorporated into the game. If we all decide that we'd really like a particular power-set and we have people who are willing/able to create animation/textures/effects and someone to balance the numbers *cougharcanavillecough*, we can readily create and include new powersets, or even perhaps new alternate power-effects.

Essentially, I'm excited about the new prospects for what can happen when the game is put into community hands. We've always been a hugely creative community, full of imaginative and talented people of all kinds, from writers to artists, coders to mathematicians, and we've now got an opportunity to really make the city we love something even greater. We can take those incomplete Wind Control and Radiation Armor/Melee powersets and give them appropriate effects, put a little polish on them, and truly put a bit of ourselves into Paragon. We can even create new zones, new NPCs, completely new stories, the sky is the limit. We haven't lost the city, we're just in a hibernation state before we ascend and start doing cosmic stuff with our new powers. ;)

How many of us write fanfiction for our favorite television series, movies, Japanese Animation or Live-Action... the list goes on and on. Those writers can create, in words, brand new content for developers to animate around. To include new powers in that writing, even better.
Then there is Tom DeSanto's project that was chucked when NCSoft closed down City Of Heroes- a movie of 5 different origins highlighted by Statesman & Lord Recluse, and a television series that would include new material. How many of us would want to be involved in the television series?

[Surelle]

Honestly, I think the community will fight a lot harder to keep the game running if it goes up again than NCSoft ever did, too.

My biggest hope for quite a while now of ever seeing CoH alive again has been the reverse engineering going on.  And thank God for it!  And best of luck to it!

I doubt any PS ex-employees will be there helping us, though.  Most of them work elsewhere in the gaming industry where this sort of thing is frowned upon, not to mention that they used to get paid to do this professionally.  It'd be a bit of a kick in the pants to be doing it for nothing in their spare time, I'd imagine.  I guess a couple of them might peek in once it got going though, just to see what kind of shape it was in....

[JKPhage]

Haha, well I didn't mean that they'd be helping us to code stuff or putting in development time, more that certain members of the community that are still floating around and happen to have worked for PS might be willing to slip us a bit of info from the Lore Bible so we'd know what direction to take the story. ;)

If the game were to be revived by NCsoft I'd be just as glad to play it, though loathe to give them any money for it, but if it was stable, provided with bug fixes and we had a guarantee that it would be around for a long time then I'd not complain. If we must resort to a community server though, I choose to look at the potential perks. We wouldn't have to worry about valuable development time being devoted to something "trivial", as certain things were termed, just because the devs were working on something else that sucked up all the resources. If the community wanted a new effects theme for Energy Blast, or new animations for Dual Pistols, anybody in the community with the skill could contribute to it, and if everyone clamors for a new powerset, then the community as a whole can have a voice in creating it, and even in designing visual effects. I know it isn't a trivial matter, but let's be honest, when you have an entire community of devoted fans putting in effort I think at the very least we could crank out a powerset or two fairly quickly. We have no shortage of technological, graphical, mathematical and creative geniuses among us, so if reviving Paragon falls to us, then by God we might as well make it as fantastic as we damn well please. :)