New efforts!

[blacksly]

Color me prey. I'd repurchase everything, from the client, monthly account fees, bonus packs, free to play material whatever.

Let me at it.

(Throws money at the screen)
"Shut up and take my money!"

No! Take mine first!

[HEATSTROKE]

Just for the heck of it. How many people think we're gonna have an influx of new players if the game comes back? I mean paying subs. F2P doesn't count.

Here is the problem with that. F2P does count. It has been stated by the devs that the game was more profitable when it went F2P than when it was purely subscriber only. Subscribers bought stuff in the store and F2P players bought stuff as well.. So you cannot discount F2P people.. do not forget that CoH was a hybrid model. I had long time SG members who went F2P. Many of them were the Premium Players who would pay for certain things like the Invention license or costumes etc etc..

Also keep in mind should this endeavor be successful. You will have A LOT of fanfare.. figure that every MMO and Gaming site will probably report on it or at the very least link reports. Then you have the word of mouth of the player base.. Think of all the people who are playing DC or Marvel Heroes or even CO that never got a chance to play City of Heroes..

Think of how HUGE the Super Hero genre has gotten in the last almost two years since the Shutdown.. Its like we are getting a Super Hero movie every three months.. if the game is marketed correctly (keep in mind that NC Soft NEVER marketed the game well AT ALL).. you could have a good sized influx of new players..

[HEATSTROKE]

I think it's too early to say yet.

If they were to bring COH back as it was, then I think you're mostly going to see Old Timers returning because of the age of the engine.

I think if it was ported into Unreal 4 you'd have the potential to do REALLY good business because you'd have over 8 years of content with some amazing powersets that just isn't available anywhere else.

I think if I were the buyers I'd be tempted to roll old the old game as soon as possible, and then work on an Unreal 4 version. Perhaps give it a new zone or two and maintain both games concurrently.

I believe this is the best plan of action.. there were new zones planned like Khalista Wharf

[Harpospoke]

Although losing bases would obviously be annoying and frustrating, it could also be viewed as a chance to totally rewrite the base system from scratch without having to worry about its impact on existing bases.

Not a bad way to look at it.

I did have a pretty big solo base, but something tells me a new base system would be much easier to work with....so rebuilding wouldn't be a huge pain.

[Ironwolf]

No, you have this completely wrong.

What I am mad about is NOT that a new company won't honor payments I made to a different company but rather I am mad that a second company would try to profit from transactions made to a FIRST company through no work of their own.

I don't expect any new buyer to honor contracts and purchase I made with someone else years ago, what I do expect is that they won't try to sell me a second time work that someone else did and they had nothing to do with.  It makes no sense to me that EVERYTHING in the game files and databases that they get from NC won't just be freely available to us as part of the new base game.  As I said in the above post, I have no issue with making purchases related to any work they might do with the game in the future, that's a whole different kettle of fish.

Please don't see it that way. These are fellow players and members of the community. They are spending considerable cash and taking all the risk - for US.

They are in talks and they are going forward - but we don't know yet if all of the stuff is possible to recover yet. Please don't get yourself worked up over something the new group may have no control over. I am certain they will be fair and consider the players.

[Harpospoke]

Believe or disbelieve as you like, your choice. But in absence of  evidence to the contrary, I'll side with hope rather than with the comfort of skepticism. The world should not be defined by only what is likely but also what is possible. I'll take the possible.

I tend to be a skeptical person myself.   I also have the tendency to "be pessimist so I don't get let down".

But from knowing people who are endlessly optimistic and always believe good things are going to happen....they certainly seem like happy people.   Being let down just doesn't get to them....they go right back to believing in the best is yet to come.   I'm envious of that and maybe they are doing it the right way after all?

[Mageman]

Bottom Line.. i already spent thousands of dollars over 8 years.. if it was 50 or so bucks to get all my toons and my wife's toons back...

I couldnt give you my money fast enough...

Agreed

[Harpospoke]

SCoRE? Nothing. Simply nothing. For what...three years? How much hope do you have to have?

I'll re-state... I HOPE that this works out. I have FAR more hope in this project than anything that anyone could tell me about SCoRE at this point.

As was pointed out, the "S" stands for "secret".   The most important facet of it is that no one know much about it.  So really your view of them is exactly what they want.    Shhhh.   :D

[downix]

Amazing that apparently its not understood that the first letter in SCoRE stands for

SECRET !!!

First rule of SCoRE is we do not speak about SCoRE.

Second rule of SCoRE is we do not speak about SCoRE.

[Harpospoke]

If the buyers can't get any account or transaction data, they have no way to prove you have ever paid for anything other than your word.

I would hope knowing your account name and password should prove something.   That's all I ever proved before when I logged in.

Every time I hear someone say "I won't play unless I get items I paid for back", I can't help hearing "I want my stuff back more than I want the game back".

My characters were a huge part of the game for me.   Getting the game back without my characters isn't really "getting the game back" for me.

Personally, I want the game back and screw the stuff. Anything I have to rebuy is more money in the pockets of the new devs. I have to buy all the costume packs I paid for? Ok, that's more money that keeps the servers running just that little bit longer. I have to buy the powersets again? Ok, that's another day that I get to spend in the city I love. I really hope there are more people out there who want the game back, than people who want their stuff back, otherwise if the deal goes through this could be a very short revival....

I'm not as concerned about stuff I bought.   The time I put in to make the game what it was for me is what I'm really concerned about.

[Harpospoke]

I would be SHOCKED if we have an influx of new players.  I would say a fair assessment might be a "trickle."  There are likely a lot of folks out there that meant to play the game at one point or another and missed their chance, a come-back may convince some of those folks to try it now they have the chance.  But, an "influx" is a little too charitable, methinks.

Can't wait to read about "all the new AE babies" on the forums.  :D   That used to make me chuckle a little....how many new players were we really getting at that point?   To hear some people tell it, there were thousands of new players pouring into the game and going right to the AE building in Atlas Park.

[Thirty-Seven]

Well, technically, they'd have invested several million to buy the game, so it could be viewed as getting a return on their investment.

Sure, it could.

But what they should be selling is the game, not the individual components, because, if you think it's okay to re-sell all the packs and powers (that they got as a package deal for buying CoH), why couldn't they monetize everything, including making you buy each and every individual power set?

[Thirty-Seven]

Please don't see it that way.

Until I know who we are dealing with, and see what their final intentions are, I don't see a reason to just blindly trust they are looking out for us.  Yes, I get that they are attempting to get the game working again, and investing their money to do it, but I also understand that the game (should it re-launch) is a business, and they do indeed need to recoup their costs somehow.

Until we know they have gotten anything at all, and also how they plan to monetize it, well, I will reserve my trust until that moment.  In the mean time, all of this thread is so much speculation an whooey anyway.

Plus, I, unlike a lot of people I find, like to argue and speculate and spar with folks in forums.  No one should take it personally or some kind of affront to an undisclosed "company"'s honor.

[Fanta]

August is gonna be a long time coming isn't it folks!

[Angel Phoenix77]

August is gonna be a long time coming isn't it folks!

Are we there yet?  :P

[HEATSTROKE]

 Let me put it this way... Ive been working on and tweaking builds since March..  Ive decided that several heroes are retiring permanently.. 

I will IMMEDIATELY spend money on Enhancement Unslotters !!!!! And possibly Respecs !!!! Oh and Spuer Packs.. LOTS AND LOTS of Super Packs.. ( I need those Enhancement Catalysts !!! )

[LaughingAlex]

Let me put it this way... Ive been working on and tweaking builds since March..  Ive decided that several heroes are retiring permanently.. 

I will IMMEDIATELY spend money on Enhancement Unslotters !!!!! And possibly Respecs !!!! Oh and Spuer Packs.. LOTS AND LOTS of Super Packs.. ( I need those Enhancement Catalysts !!! )

Yeah I know what you mean.  I'd retired a few char builds of mine even before the shutdown was announced due to things like redundancy and for character slots.

[MWRuger]

First rule of SCoRE is we do not speak about SCoRE.

Second rule of SCoRE is we do not speak about SCoRE.

I'm perfectly fine with that. I think most people are. I also think that we are owed NOTHING by anybody working on this project. People working on it are spending their time to try and do a difficult thing. I hope work continues and if I could help I would, but I would probably just make things worse. Unless you need some 2D vector art, then I could help.

[Codewalker]

I thought you'd get a kick out of that! ;)

I didn't quote the rest of your post earlier, but the WoW example doesn't involve "porting to a new engine" at all. Its client got a few graphical improvements like character-only shadows and reflections in water, and they're getting ready to replace some art assets (character models) with more detailed versions. The core of it really hasn't changed much in the last 8 years.

The thing is, COH actually got two of those upgrades. The first was with COV when the renderer changed from a fixed-function pipeline to a shader-based one, and again with Ultra Mode when the shaders got redesigned from scratch for modern hardware and had lots of new graphical features added, including full realtime shadow mapping (which WOW didn't have for terrain).

I find the proposition of "porting" COH to another engine to be a bit silly for multiple reasons. Unreal gets tossed around a lot, and while it's a fine engine and I've been a big fan of Epic since it was just Tim and Potomac Computer Systems, it's rather nonsensical to discuss in that context. Unreal isn't a rendering engine, it's a game engine that expects to run all aspects of a game from physics to actor state tracking to animations to how the maps that the world is build out of are stored to being at the center of whatever other logic you tack on to it.

But COH already has a game engine, and removing that means basically recreating the game from scratch. You'd be ripping out that meat of what makes it COH and be left with nothing. The Atlas Park revival effort for instance reuses some of the assets (though I have to wonder how much time they spent fixing them to work with an engine that makes different assumptions), but has no gameplay to speak of. You'd have to invest a lot more time not only recreating 9 years of system development, but endlessly tweaking it because it would never "feel" quite right compared to the original.

Or, for a lot less work, you could take the original engine and enhance the graphics again to bring them up to the same level as Unreal. The rendering techniques used aren't exactly a trade secret. As a bonus, you can leave in the old path as a fallback so you're not jacking up the system requirements and locking out a portion of your player base.

The only reason to talk about replacing an engine is if you don't have any programmers capable of engine development. It's a huge undertaking and the benefits rarely outweigh the costs.

[GN2]

I didn't quote the rest of your post earlier, but the WoW example doesn't involve "porting to a new engine" at all. Its client got a few graphical improvements like character-only shadows and reflections in water, and they're getting ready to replace some art assets (character models) with more detailed versions. The core of it really hasn't changed much in the last 8 years.

The thing is, COH actually got two of those upgrades. The first was with COV when the renderer changed from a fixed-function pipeline to a shader-based one, and again with Ultra Mode when the shaders got redesigned from scratch for modern hardware and had lots of new graphical features added, including full realtime shadow mapping (which WOW didn't have for terrain).

I find the proposition of "porting" COH to another engine to be a bit silly for multiple reasons. Unreal gets tossed around a lot, and while it's a fine engine and I've been a big fan of Epic since it was just Tim and Potomac Computer Systems, it's rather nonsensical to discuss in that context. Unreal isn't a rendering engine, it's a game engine that expects to run all aspects of a game from physics to actor state tracking to animations to how the maps that the world is build out of are stored to being at the center of whatever other logic you tack on to it.

But COH already has a game engine, and removing that means basically recreating the game from scratch. You'd be ripping out that meat of what makes it COH and be left with nothing. The Atlas Park revival effort for instance reuses some of the assets (though I have to wonder how much time they spent fixing them to work with an engine that makes different assumptions), but has no gameplay to speak of. You'd have to invest a lot more time not only recreating 9 years of system development, but endlessly tweaking it because it would never "feel" quite right compared to the original.

Or, for a lot less work, you could take the original engine and enhance the graphics again to bring them up to the same level as Unreal. The rendering techniques used aren't exactly a trade secret. As a bonus, you can leave in the old path as a fallback so you're not jacking up the system requirements and locking out a portion of your player base.

The only reason to talk about replacing an engine is if you don't have any programmers capable of engine development. It's a huge undertaking and the benefits rarely outweigh the costs.

The problem with just slapping more rendering enhancements onto the existing engine and keeping the old methods around for compatibility's sake is that it would make the game's apparently already-bloated codebase even worse. A full engine port would result in much cleaner code overall, but for reasons you stated, that's not really feasible either. If they were going to put that much work into porting to an entirely new engine, they might as well make CoH2.