New efforts!

[FloatingFatMan]

If I were involved in such a licensing deal (and to be clear, I am currently not), significant setup work on the business side would already be complete but not divulged to the public, and plans would be in place to have all hosting/account/store arrangements in test mode prior to the official handover of the software from NCSoft.  There's no particular reason to delay all prep work until after a deal is concluded, and delaying even further until a disk is provided would be a downright awful strategy.  It is in both sides' interests to make the transition successful and fairly quick, so the basic information needed to do advance planning (especially for programming of the missing pieces) would be shared prior to finalizing the deal, unless the deal-makers aren't looking out for their own best interests.

Thus, Arcana's 30-day estimate for a first outside login is reasonable, assuming competence from both sides of the deal.  Also keep in mind that "outside login possible" is not the same as "launch day" - for the former, there is no strict requirement for a store, launcher (besides the .exe and command line parameters), advertising, in-game support staff, or even a particularly robust account system.  I was personally involved in one case where MMO server-client software was received in reasonable condition, followed by a successful outside login within a day - the server environment and tech knowledge were ready beforehand, then the server-side software was copied into place, config files adjusted, and the test player was given the necessary instructions to install the client and log in remotely.  I hope this effort has equally-good fortune and tech expertise.

I would have plans in place, certainly; but it would be rather dumb to actually pay out a single cent on actually carrying any of it out until the deal is signed.

[FloatingFatMan]

1.  I'd take that bet.

2.  You do not need time to set up a corporation, because its safe to assume on the day you get the server code one already exists.  It would have to in order to close the deal with NCSoft.

3.  Advertising is not mandatory, and not even desirable initially because it makes more sense to soft-launch to iron out the kinks before mass advertising.

4.  You really don't need to deal with the launcher or patcher, because both are irrelevant and unnecessary for a maintenance mode server.  All you need is the I23 client (with a single config file changed to point to the new servers) which can be easily distributed, vis-a-vis Icon.  Downstream, it would be trivial to write a better patcher to distribute updates, if updates were necessary.

5.  Replacing the store is the only thing that would take a significant amount of time.  I contend its not necessary to launch.  But assuming it were, it would definitely take less than a month to write.  In a week I could write one that was better in all respects.

6.  The fact you even mention "organizing hosting" as if that's a noteworthy thing suggests you're wildly overestimating the effort necessary to do this.  If you were ordering your own racks in a hosting company, provisioning cross connects and internet from scratch, ordering servers and deploying them from scratch, then yeah, that would take about sixty days to spin up.  Or you can stick your servers into EC2 instances or cloud provider du jour in an afternoon.  And I'm not sure why you would need to organize hosting for the client "separately."

The maintenance team might want to put a lot of polish and finish on things, and make a nice web page with links to the client and other stuff; they might want to add optional infrastructure to manage the servers and the player accounts, they might literally have no idea how to set up an AWS account and would have to learn everything from scratch. Or they might take a very streamlined approach to get something out immediately and clean it up over time.  I split the difference and guestimated a month.  But the only thing I'm guessing about is the intentions and technical capabilities of the maintenance team.  I am not guessing about what's required to make this work.

I confess to no expertise in the needs of hosting an MMO.  However, I -do- possess rather a lot of expertise in the needs of hosting business software and its requisite dedicated SQL servers, etc.  In fact, we just completed the process of moving our main client from in-house servers in Belgium to 3rd party hosting in London.

That was rather a big project that took the best part of a year to complete, including negotiations and various business agreements needed to get everything into place with the needed contract service levels etc.

I wouldn't expect an MMO to take that long as it won't have all the complicated legal stuff we had to deal with, but to presume it could get done within 30 days is just clutching at straws.

[Sergio526]

I confess to no expertise in the needs of hosting an MMO.  However, I -do- possess rather a lot of expertise in the needs of hosting business software and its requisite dedicated SQL servers, etc.  In fact, we just completed the process of moving our main client from in-house servers in Belgium to 3rd party hosting in London.

That was rather a big project that took the best part of a year to complete, including negotiations and various business agreements needed to get everything into place with the needed contract service levels etc.

I wouldn't expect an MMO to take that long as it won't have all the complicated legal stuff we had to deal with, but to presume it could get done within 30 days is just clutching at straws.

Also, down time is not a concern. I find, with my migrations, a considerable amount of time and money is spent on minimizing down time.

[Goddangit]

6.  The fact you even mention "organizing hosting" as if that's a noteworthy thing suggests you're wildly overestimating the effort necessary to do this.  If you were ordering your own racks in a hosting company, provisioning cross connects and internet from scratch, ordering servers and deploying them from scratch, then yeah, that would take about sixty days to spin up.  Or you can stick your servers into EC2 instances or cloud provider du jour in an afternoon.  And I'm not sure why you would need to organize hosting for the client "separately."

We've had some dealings with Limestone Networks in Texas for OpenSimulator usage.  On a weekday they can have a server up and ready to have software loaded onto it in a few hours.  Good customer service, gigabit fiber to the 'net and between our machines.  No, it doesn't take long if you go with a good experienced server farm.

[edit: If you're looking to do something like backup servers in a different location or shards in other countries, yeah that's obviously going to take time, but if you want a beta up fast for testing while all that is put in place (and I assume that's what we're talking about) it doesn't take very long.]

[FloatingFatMan]

Also, down time is not a concern. I find, with my migrations, a considerable amount of time and money is spent on minimizing down time.

Actually, downtime is quite a big concern.  If you've got paying customers, and your servers are going down for hours at a time, this is not a good thing.

The only downtime you want in an MMO, is scheduled maintenance downtime.

[Noyjitat]

I believe that there were at least a couple of Carnival who seemed to retain a certain degree of autonomy, although it has admittedly been a while since I played and could be mistaken. Of course, even if the EAT was enslaved by Vanessa, that could be part of their storyline- to break free of her mind control.

Additionally, now that I think of it, a Carnie EAT could have both villainous and heroic versions- via the Carnival of Light. Perhaps it could be the first EAT that had the same EAT progression, but with two different (but likely interrelated) storylines depending on the side one selected?

First time I've really read any of the lore questions... Positron said "Yeah, players made it clear that they were getting sick of Praetoria, so we expedited its demise."

Who hated Praetoria? Man I loved Going Rogue and everything involved with it! Praetoria was beautiful and mysterious at the same time. The factions, the detail of the city, the improved quality of missions and story, more involvement with the contacts, the underground. I just don't see why anyone would of hated the zones that felt more city like than anything the game has seen so far.

[Waffles]

First time I've really read any of the lore questions... Positron said "Yeah, players made it clear that they were getting sick of Praetoria, so we expedited its demise.

Huh? I liked Praetoria, My main gripe with it is that it was very, very easily outleveled, and that my loyalist/resistance status means absolutely nothing after level 20.

If the game acknowledged the fact I was a Praetorian, I woulda stuck with it :c

[FloatingFatMan]

First time I've really read any of the lore questions... Positron said "Yeah, players made it clear that they were getting sick of Praetoria, so we expedited its demise."

Who hated Praetoria? Man I loved Going Rogue and everything involved with it! Praetoria was beautiful and mysterious at the same time. The factions, the detail of the city, the improved quality of missions and story, more involvement with the contacts, the underground. I just don't see why anyone would of hated the zones that felt more city like than anything the game has seen so far.

I was sick of Praetoria in the sense that I was sick of the majority of the new stuff being Praetoria centric, and ignoring the rest of the game which was badly in need of updates.

Our old devs had a bad habit of focussing on new things to the neglect of everything else. They had more balance issues than the badly broken PvP did.

[kierthos]

First time I've really read any of the lore questions... Positron said "Yeah, players made it clear that they were getting sick of Praetoria, so we expedited its demise."

Who hated Praetoria? Man I loved Going Rogue and everything involved with it! Praetoria was beautiful and mysterious at the same time. The factions, the detail of the city, the improved quality of missions and story, more involvement with the contacts, the underground. I just don't see why anyone would of hated the zones that felt more city like than anything the game has seen so far.

The problem was that after GR came out, most of the remaining issues between that and when the game closed had major Praetorian content.

You want to do an Incarnate trial? Here's the Praetorian(s) you're facing off against.

I think Issue 22 was one of the few without any Praetorian stuff.

[FloatingFatMan]

Huh? I liked Praetoria, My main gripe with it is that it was very, very easily outleveled, and that my loyalist/resistance status means absolutely nothing after level 20.

If the game acknowledged the fact I was a Praetorian, I woulda stuck with it :c

Which is a good example of the devs neglecting the old game. They shouldn't have allowed you to go from Praetoria to Paragon without first updating Paragon enough to recognize the new faction.

[Power Gamer]

True Praetoria was outleveled easily, but its main problem was lack of content.

See, you could turn off xp and play until you ranout of content but that happened way too fast.

Going Rogue did not live long enough to get the love it desrved.  :gonk:

[Phaetan]

The reason I suggested the Praetorian Clockwork and the Goldside Carnies were manifold.  First, each of them have a distinctive appearance to them, but one that has shown significant variation. 

Secondly, they each have a natural inclination toward one alignment or another (Loyalist for Clockwork, Resistance for Carnival,) but both have multiple factions including ones that work against the original groups.  There's the Antimatter/Neuron conflict along with Siege and Nightstar, as well as Metronome's Clockwork for the Clocks, not to mention an established oddity like Victoria to set precedent for sentient and autonomous PCs.  On the Carnival side, you have The Carnivals of Light, War, and Vengeance, plus the chance of someone slipping a Shadows Mask in for a little mayhem if you want to be nasty about it.  Sure, the last two are somewhat less autonomous than the others, but still not any more limited than what a Bane Spider should have been according to the lore, and I don't think anyone ever threw that big a fit over the fact that you could have one of them go Blueside.

I feel that the two groups, and the nearly invisible backbone of how Praetoria functions and the guiding framework of the unity of the Resistance respectively are firmly enough enmeshed in the Goldside lore to qualify for EAT consideration.  Both groups are important parts of big storylines, but neither one has been fleshed out enough to be restricting for the development of the interesting storyline missions akin to what Kheldians and Spiders enjoyed.

Eh, that is probably enough off-the-cuff rambling before I get the coffee going.  Particularly since this would all be for CoH 1.5 if/when we get it, since adding an EAt would require some hefty code modification.

[silvers1]

First time I've really read any of the lore questions... Positron said "Yeah, players made it clear that they were getting sick of Praetoria, so we expedited its demise."

Who hated Praetoria? Man I loved Going Rogue and everything involved with it! Praetoria was beautiful and mysterious at the same time. The factions, the detail of the city, the improved quality of missions and story, more involvement with the contacts, the underground. I just don't see why anyone would of hated the zones that felt more city like than anything the game has seen so far.

I cant say I "hated" it, but I disliked some aspects a lot.

1.  I didn't like being forced through a network of tunnels full of mobs just to get to my mission entrance.  This is done in so many other games out there, and I hate it.
2.  I didn't like some of the mission designs - especially those with non-stop ambushes.  My low dps toons just couldn't keep up.
3.  I didn't like being forced into missions with EBs at that low of a level.   There was one in particular which I couldn't solo with any of my toons.  After the zones started to empty out ... you couldn't get help.
4.  If you're going to have a whole new world and a 3rd faction, there needs to be a path all the way to max level IN THAT WORLD.  Didn't like that at level 20, oh, we drop you in primal earth and now you're just like everyone else.

Once DFB came on the scene, that was pretty much the end of people using Praetoria.
Pretty zone & nice story arcs, but so flawed in other respects.

[Remaugen]

There were some things about Praetoria that I didn't like, but for the most part I really enjoyed it. The biggest problem I had, was getting my regular gaming group to play there, as most of them did not like it. I was dismayed that at the end of the storyline, Praetoria was left in flaming ruins. It would require a lot of rebuilding (Storywise and in art assets) and I was worried that it would just be written off and left to the Hamidon to devour and that would be the end of that.

I do sincerely hope that we will be able to maintain and incrementally increase goldside content in the years to come.

Same applies to the Rogue Isles, there has to be enough islands out there for a new zone or three or five when the time is right!



We're almost there!   ;D

[MM3squints]

The only thing that bothered me about Praetoria was its was only used for lvl 1-20. It was a great zone, but all of the Praetoria story arc past lvl 40 were all through Protal Corp instances instead of actually going to Praetoria and doing missions. Seems like a waste in investment when you spend all that time creating a entire new zone and not utilize it to it's full potential. One of the response I might get is, this is supposed to be a lvl 1-20 zone, you don't want lvl 40+ mobs running around. Just have Praetoria have mobs with no level but +1 to whatever level the highest character in the party is.

[Aggelakis]

The only thing that bothered me about Praetoria was its was only used for lvl 1-20. It was a great zone, but all of the Praetoria story arc past lvl 40 were all through Protal Corp instances instead of actually going to Praetoria and doing missions. Seems like a waste in investment when you spend all that time creating a entire new zone and not utilize it to it's full potential. One of the response I might get is, this is supposed to be a lvl 1-20 zone, you don't want lvl 40+ mobs running around. Just have Praetoria have mobs with no level but +1 to whatever level the highest character in the party is.

...nearly all of the "our Earth" Praetorian content (especially that above 40) existed before Praetoria existed as a game world. (Some of it got minor rewrites when Going Rogue launched; some of it got a complete overhaul; some of it only had enemy models swapped out to the new ones.)

[MM3squints]

...nearly all of the "our Earth" Praetorian content (especially that above 40) existed before Praetoria existed as a game world. (Some of it got minor rewrites when Going Rogue launched; some of it got a complete overhaul; some of it only had enemy models swapped out to the new ones.)

I know, I remember the CoT cave back before the conversion Tyrant's throne room for Statesman Pal Badge. I mean to actually go to Prartoria instead of generic instance missions. One comes to mind is the Shadowhunter mission where they just put him in the Hydra map. Who knows they probably thought about it, but realized people will think it's like a Dr Q where you have to travel back and fourth so they just kept it all in Portal Corp

[Scott Jackson]

Praetorian zones and low-level content were mostly fine in my opinion.  My only complaint (not one that I ever actually mentioned to anyone) was that Incarnate content was hyper-focused on Praetorians.

For the sake of those who spent little time on the Incarnate system, imagine if nearly every sub-50 task force involved the same enemy group (let's say Circle of Thorns) as the main antagonists.   Now imagine taking 50+ characters, each one lovingly crafted by you, to level up and get slotted almost exclusively via repeating those TFs, because street sweeping and regular missions weren't available, and when made available later, earned progress at less than one-tenth the rate.  ...Yeah.

I was looking forward to some non-Praetorian Incarnate progression variety, but the shutdown closed that door.

[Techbot Alpha]

I got sick of the Praetorian Raid content. It was basically 'Oh, end-game, uh... people like raids, right? All the other games have raids?'

The reason I loved CoH was because it WASN'T like other games. And no other game has satisfied me like CoH did. The Trials/Raids were annoying and grindy if you wanted Incarnate progression, which was what, until that point, CoH had AVOIDED. The way everything was gated behind trials/raids, even some bloody *RP content*, emotes and costume parts and the like, really, really grated with me. As folks from Union possibly remember, heh.


Speaking of, if we get CoH back, what servers will we get? I for one would very much like to see Union return for the EU side, heh.

[Teikiatsu]

First time I've really read any of the lore questions... Positron said "Yeah, players made it clear that they were getting sick of Praetoria, so we expedited its demise."

Who hated Praetoria? Man I loved Going Rogue and everything involved with it! Praetoria was beautiful and mysterious at the same time. The factions, the detail of the city, the improved quality of missions and story, more involvement with the contacts, the underground. I just don't see why anyone would of hated the zones that felt more city like than anything the game has seen so far.

I loved the work done on Praetoria in so far as alignments and storyline choices.  As far as I was concerned GR was what CoV should have been.  What I didn't like was that there wasn't that much to it but I expected that to change in time.