Searching for a CoH replacement

[Pinnacle Blue]

I feel like we're being a little too scared of NCSoft. If they cared, SEGS would've been sued awhile ago.

I'm sorry-- what, exactly, is stopping you from getting your own emulator project together and making it as public as is humanly possible, since you have a problem with things not being done that way?  Surely the platform you're standing on to criticize the current efforts is made out of the requisite technical expertise to do it on your own.

[Gleech]

I'm sorry-- what, exactly, is stopping you from getting your own emulator project together and making it as public as is humanly possible, since you have a problem with things not being done that way?  Surely the platform you're standing on to criticize the current efforts is made out of the requisite technical expertise to do it on your own.

Who said I'm criticizing anyone? You quoted me saying "NCSoft doesn't care"!

Back to Tony,
I actually appreciate that bit of information very much. I was led to believe the project was a lot further in production than it appears. My bad on that part.

[Arachnion]

Thank you, Tony.

Your insight is as always, very insightful and much appreciated.

If there's one thing I know about this community, it's that we look after each other.

Really now, if there were a functioning, viable, server out there at this moment, I'm sure the people behind it would come forth publically with it.

As it is, we just have to wait, and place our faith in SCoRE, SEGS, or the successor projects (CoT, H&V etc).

I hope no one here finds my post in bad taste, simply my opinion on the matter.

Plus, there's always Titan Icon. Who can argue with being able to create unlimited costumes, and fun time had with the maps and such?

[Kyriani]

I take Tony's posts as hope cause I believe that he knows what's what. Anyone else claiming there's some coh server running that the people HERE don't know about better have some proof or else they are just blowing smoke up our butts and trying to get a rise out of us and that's just plain cruel

[Drauger9]

While I'm still realatively new to these forums.

I've learked unregistered for awhile before CoH was closed and after. So in the case of a "supposed" server running at this moment. I'd personally only believe it if it came from a source I knew and trusted (like Tony or CodeWalker ect..). If it came from any other source I'd have to see it to believe in (as in a link to a working download).

[Leandro]

Why all the secrecy around SCoRE?

You of all people should know. Though you have openly admitted there is something going on, I have yet to see any patch notes or proof such a thing exists.

I mean honestly that's all I'd need to be satisfied for awhile. Just seeing progress is enough for me.

Two words: Infinite Rasa. After Tabula Rasa closed, this group started developing a server emulator, and much like SEGS, NCsoft appeared to completely ignore them.

The moment they had working combat on a server, they were C&D'd into oblivion. So saying "NCsoft is not doing anything about SEGS" is no guarantee whatsoever. Publishing patch notes of progress will just be a great way for NCsoft to gauge when to jump in and shut it down for greatest damage -- when the most people involved will be affected by the C&D, crippling future development. It happened with Infinite Rasa; even though what they wrote is public on GitHub, nobody wants to risk continuing on it.

Publishing progress is bad. Some people might think they have good intentions, but nothing good comes out of making noise and saying "hey look, this is exactly how much is done, sue us whenever you think we've done too much".

[WWE-Tazz]

Or is themself being trolled by such a person. One of the "perks" of being a forum admin is often getting to see the stuff the gets deleted and the discussion surrounding it. It's not the first time I've seen such rumors (even some as soon as a month after closure! Talk about fast turnaround!).

There has even been the occasional "proof". Some are just screenshots from Icon (you really think I wouldn't recognize that? Seriously). Some are obviously bad photoshop jobs. Some are good enough to make me wonder and put out some feelers to see if there is some super secret underground even more secret than the reverse engineers we (sort of) know about. Man, that's a mouthful. Nothing concrete has come of those, so they get filed in the same trash bin as the obvious bunk. There's already more than enough baseless "what if" talk around here threatening to get people's hopes up who have already been severely hurt once.

I'm a skeptic by nature, so my gut instinct is always to think it's fake. Still, I can't help but admit there's a small part of me hoping that maybe it is true, that maybe somewhere Paragon City lives on. On the off chance such a place does exist, my advice to them is to make sure that we never find out, and never let anyone in who would be careless enough to post on public forums about it.

I find this hard to swallow when I have received an email from one of the forum admins on coh titan admitting to having knowledge of it, telling me they have seen it first hand, and then sending me a screenshot of the game where people were obviously annoyed at the fact that I had mentioned the bootleg server. There are people actively looking for me because of my comments, and I say if you want me, you know where to find me. dgrant@nycap.rr.com .

[Codewalker]

@Agge: Restored that post because I know exactly that they're talking about and don't want to add more fuel to the conspiracy theory fire by deleting it (even though it's bogus).

If you're talking about the email that you replied to (I got a copy, since I have access to the admins@cohtitan.com address), it was obviously spoofed, and not even very well. Here's an excerpt, name hidden to be more courteous than the person trying to masquerade as us.

---- "XXXX_XXXXX_rules@msn.com" <admins@cohtitan.com> wrote:
> I actually was going to contact you because I believe someone on the server is looking for you for some reason.

That wasn't sent from us. That was sent from "XXXX_XXXXX_rules" after setting their outgoing email address to "admins@cohtitan.com" to try to look more official.

There are exactly 3 Titan Network Admins, and I've personally spoken with the other two, so I find it very hard to believe that one of them would send you a message from a badly concealed alias.

EDIT: In retrospect we should probably make that more clear somewhere, as who is a sitewide admin vs. who is a forum mod or a sub-site admin for the wiki, etc. isn't entirely obvious just by looking at someone's forum profile. From the looks of the email though, it wasn't from anyone associated with Titan at all. You, my friend, are being played by someone. To what end I can only guess.

[Aggelakis]

Oh OK. I thought someone here might have gone insane. I'm pretty sure if one of you three knew about a "bootleg server", I should hope I'd be in the know too ;-;

[Drauger9]

I find this hard to swallow when I have received an email from one of the forum admins on coh titan admitting to having knowledge of it, telling me they have seen it first hand, and then sending me a screenshot of the game where people were obviously annoyed at the fact that I had mentioned the bootleg server. There are people actively looking for me because of my comments, and I say if you want me, you know where to find me. dgrant@nycap.rr.com .

You do realize that if NCSoft was watching for a CoH emu server. The place they'd be watching the most is "right here" on these very forums right?

So even "if" there was a "supposed" server running right now. It'd be a pretty bad idea to go blabbing about it so publically. Since all NCSoft would have to do is have an employee make an account here and send you an email. How would you know who they was? Get the info from you and find out who's running the server. Mail the a C&D order. Then you lose CoH twice.

[Kyriani]

@Agge: Restored that post because I know exactly that they're talking about and don't want to add more fuel to the conspiracy theory fire by deleting it (even though it's bogus).

If you're talking about the email that you replied to (I got a copy, since I have access to the admins@cohtitan.com address), it was obviously spoofed, and not even very well. Here's an excerpt, name hidden to be more courteous than the person trying to masquerade as us.

---- "XXXX_XXXXX_rules@msn.com" <admins@cohtitan.com> wrote:
> I actually was going to contact you because I believe someone on the server is looking for you for some reason.

That wasn't sent from us. That was sent from "XXXX_XXXXX_rules" after setting their outgoing email address to "admins@cohtitan.com" to try to look more official.

There are exactly 3 Titan Network Admins, and I've personally spoken with the other two, so I find it very hard to believe that one of them would send you a message from a badly concealed alias.

EDIT: In retrospect we should probably make that more clear somewhere, as who is a sitewide admin vs. who is a forum mod or a sub-site admin for the wiki, etc. isn't entirely obvious just by looking at someone's forum profile. From the looks of the email though, it wasn't from anyone associated with Titan at all. You, my friend, are being played by someone. To what end I can only guess.

There must be some rule or something about impersonating site staff right? Is there some way to take action against whoever the person spoofing their address and making these bogus claims? Either way I guess whoever they are wins. Obviously they wanted to rile us up and it seems they succeeded

[Codewalker]

That's part of why I posted it publicly. I was much less annoyed by the situation before I looked closer and realized that someone was trying to appear as if that was their actual email address. So IHBT, HAND, I guess. Whatever.

At first I figured it was just someone hitting 'Reply' to a PM notification without reading the "DO NOT REPLY" message, but that's not the case.

[WWE-Tazz]

It's perfectly adorable that you circle the wagons and deny, deny , deny. I post proof, and you delete it, or alter it, or go after the place that hosted the image and have it taken down.

for as much as you deny that it exists, it only makes people look at you with suspicion.

[Leandro]

Maybe you should get the hint and stop trying to shine a spotlight on things that are being kept dark for a reason. Keep pointing fingers and going "it's here! it's here!" and when the NCsoft lawyers shut everything down, then you can pat yourself in the back, say "see, I was right" and COH can join Tabula Rasa in the graveyard of games that have a semi-working bare bones server emulator and nothing else because somebody didn't know when to shut up.

Bottom line is that TonyV doesn't want public progress postings from SCORE, and so there will be no public progress postings. I'm surprised as much of your posts have been allowed to remain; if I were in charge of the forum and I wanted something not discussed, then I would be more thorough in my pruning and I'd ban people who are trying to rile others up and demanding it to be discussed.

SEGS is discussing their progress in public, if you want regular postings with a progress timeline, that's the forum you should be posting on.

[Pinnacle Blue]

It's perfectly adorable that you circle the wagons and deny, deny , deny. I post proof, and you delete it, or alter it, or go after the place that hosted the image and have it taken down.

for as much as you deny that it exists, it only makes people look at you with suspicion.

It must be unfathomably sad not to have even a semblance of a life.

[Zerias]

It must be unfathomably sad not to have even a semblance of a life.

Heh.  That made me laugh.

What I find funny is that Tazz hasn't quite figured out what's at stake here. Let's say he's right. Let's say that there is a proof-of-concept server. Let's say that former Paragon Employees did what was morally right and not legally correct and save information they were supposed to destroy. Let's posit for a moment that those same potential employees even made sure that the software or data they saved; which could be anything from design documents to (gasp) actual source code; wound up in hands of former players with the coding skills to carry on. What if such information didn't actually come from within Paragon or Cryptic... or even NCSoft itself? Let's posit that such information might have come from Transgaming, AMD, Nvidia, or Intel. Every single one of them had similar access at some point.

What exactly does Tazz think is going to happen to anybody involved, on any level, with such a massive undertaking?

Does he seriously really believe that NCSoft won't be pressing for jailtime for those involved?  Does he seriously believe that NCSoft won't have people searching known forums and hangouts of CoH fans for any hint of any such activity?  What about any hosting companies or ISP's that might be involved in running a quote/unquote "Bootleg" server.  What exactly is their legal culpability?

Let's make this clear. Even if we look beyond NCSoft's reputation for shutting down reverse engineering efforts by sending Cease and Desist letters; they've got a nasty reputation for getting personal with subsequent attacks. Case in point; what Taek Kim did to Richard Garriot while Richard was, quite literally, not even on the planet: http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/07/30/richard-garriott-wins-lawsuit-against-ncsoft/

This is a company led by a CEO that actively practices the idea that CRIMINAL TACTICS are Ethically acceptable methods of action to get what they want.

* * *

Speaking directly to Tazz for a moment; I don't think you'll find people looking at the Titan staff with suspicion.  Many players remember Tony saying outright at the NCSoft shutdown that Titan already had enough information in hand to get a reverse-engineered server up and running. It's been common knowledge for a long while that players associated with Titan had been picking apart the game engine and client even before Taek Kim threw his legendary "There Will Be Dire Consequences" fit at Brian Clayton.

Ergo; it shouldn't surprise anybody that maybe... just maybe... the Titan staff may know something that they can't, or won't, tell anybody else. It also shouldn't surprise anybody that anybody involved with Titan won't give that kind of information out. Not with NCSoft's history.

The only one here attracting suspicion is YOU Tazz. You've got this obsession that really makes me want to backcheck your IP address and posted email; because you are striking me quite like a couple of NCSoft employees I had the displeasure of encountering at various E3's.

[Manga]

I heard these three groups were conspiring to put together several CoH successors.  Rumor is they're called Missing Worlds Media, Plan Z Studios, and Valiance Online.  Shh...don't tell anyone.  I hope I don't get banned for mentioning it.

[Leandro]

No, Manga, you'll get banned for being a filthy Mac user. Duh.

[Aggelakis]

EDIT: In retrospect we should probably make that more clear somewhere, as who is a sitewide admin vs. who is a forum mod or a sub-site admin for the wiki, etc. isn't entirely obvious just by looking at someone's forum profile.

tadaaaaa!

[GamingGlen]

*munches on popcorn*

The game may be dead, but the drama lives on!