New efforts!

[Codewalker]

I remember it being explicitly stated that at the time that it was extremely unlikely that the individual Sentinel xml exports would be usable with a commercial relaunch of the game. They would be far too risky for any for-profit venture to touch. That was never the purpose.

We still highly encouraged as many people as possible to use it. A commercial relaunch was one of the less likely scenarios.

[Thirty-Seven]

That's an important distinction to make.  When I slung the term "useless" around before, I meant with regard to this current effort, not in general for ANY scenario.

[Tubbius]

Page 171.

Wow.

:o

Definitely pins and needles here.  Sad to see the likelihood of not having anything to go in with.  Funny to see that the NC Soft website no longer lets me log in with my old CoH name/pass, saying a message that the games associated with that account no longer exist.

Here's hoping for a positive resolution.  If that means I24 in ongoing maintenance and nothing else doing. . . as long as we can get access to all character archetypes again to start, I think I can do this.  I mostly miss my Controllers.  There's nothing else quite like them out there.

To the folks going for the bids and the deals and the like. . . Best of luck, and best wishes.  Please don't let the bickering here and the confusion get you down or pressure you.

As Ironwolf's said, "Step 1: Get the game back."

[Scendera]

As someone who messed around a fair bit with an EQ emulator during times when I couldn't sub, I'd have no qualms about importing into a personal use private server, nor using as an alternate means to restore costumes...I think someone posted a little converter for that?

I have to agree tho...it's not something they can or even should do, for one reason. Everything was locked up after the announcement. If you had lapsed to F2P and didn't have something unlocked...there was no way to make a S+ file. I wasn't personally in this position, but I know a lot of folks were.

I'm not advocating a clean sweep by any means, but at the same time, restoring without any chance for those characters would be BRUTALLY unfair.

[ukaserex]

I'm not advocating a clean sweep by any means, but at the same time, restoring without any chance for those characters would be BRUTALLY unfair.

Not sure I follow you. Either way, we're getting ahead of ourselves - but, what's unfair about a non-ncsoft company bringing CoH back online without account information? You just start over from scratch like everyone else. What's unfair?

All those hours put into getting badges? Unfortunate? Yes. Unfair? Nah.

[Thirty-Seven]

No no, they mean if Sentinel+ or some other means is used to bring back SOME characters but not all.  They are saying THAT'D be unfair.

[MWRuger]

After reading all the posts since Ironwolf stirred the pot up nicely, I think I have finally figured exactly what I would like. Also some observations on what seems to concern people

I just want to play again. That's first.

Second, it would be nice, very nice to have my characters back.

I am willing, happy to, repurchase anything I need to support the game and make whatever costume, powers, slots, etc are necessary to play my old characters again.

For example. I used Ninja Run on my main as he was basically just a normal guy with some minor mental manipulation and dual pistols. So as soon as i can I'll acquire ninja run so I can play him (assuming character restoral) and dual pistols, if Going Rouge isn't given gratis at launch.

Third, the market. the market will take care of itself. I expect instability for the first few weeks, but after that it should be fine. We already know what happens when the market is restarted. The faction merge showed how this worked. The only difference will be the pace since there will likely be no accumulated inventory. By two weeks the people who race to 50 will have run a lot of task forces and alignment missions. What do you think they will do with extra stuff?

Finally, People who want everyone to start over and people who want to have everything they had at close: you may or may not get your wish. It is entirely up to other people. Those people have read this thread and are very aware of what you want. They will make the best decision for the game based on equity, ability and timeliness.

It may take time to get character data restored. If they say "yes, eventually we will be able to" then I will play new characters that I hadn't finished leveling or outfitting. If they say "Sorry, we can't" I'll remake them.

There is no point in pounding on each other every time someone says "I want it all" or "I want everyone to start over". You won't change their opinion and the people who can make the decision already know what you want. All you are doing is bringing acrimony to an already tense situation. But if you feel you must respond, then just try and remember we are all ultimately on the same side regardless of faction.

[Scendera]

Aye, 37's correct.

What I meant is that due to when they shut down the ability to resub, some characters became locked out with no chance of recovering. Which...seems to me like one of the cruelest things I've ever seen, to begin with.

Compounding it by also making those toons unrecoverable now while free players could get back their brutes and blasters, etc, seems like one of the biggest dick moves I can think of.

I'm fine with recovering character data, fine with not as well, whatever gets the game back. I'm not bitching at the S+ folks or the new team by any means, so please don't think so.

If I'm angry at anyone at all for that situation, it's 100% NCSoft for not at least either allowing ppl to sub to the end as long as they clicked a disclaimer acknowledging they'd simply lose any paid time still on the clock, or unlocking all existing characters for everyone from announcement to the end.

[Minotaur]

I remember it being explicitly stated that at the time that it was extremely unlikely that the individual Sentinel xml exports would be usable with a commercial relaunch of the game. They would be far too risky for any for-profit venture to touch. That was never the purpose.

We still highly encouraged as many people as possible to use it. A commercial relaunch was one of the less likely scenarios.

Is there any downside to allowing the importing of costumes from Sentinel+ ? Or more likely, somebody writing something to convert sentinel+ into the costume save file format for import ?

[Scendera]

I'm 99% sure I saw a costume converter linked on FB earlier.

[Thirty-Seven]

Is there any downside to allowing the importing of costumes from Sentinel+ ? Or more likely, somebody writing something to convert sentinel+ into the costume save file format for import ?

There is a utility to do the latter thing.  I believe it is called SentIcon?  Something like that.  If you plop in the XML it'll spit out a costume file.

It may not be possible for the folks who bring back the game to do anything with the S+ XMLs.  Based on Ironwolf's reports, it looks very unlikely that they will be getting any of the proprietrary tools that were custom built to work on the game.  As such, they wouldn't be able to craft anything for the UI to integrate reading of said file.  Plus, it isn't theirs to work with.  And while I can't for the life of me imagine that the folks here would start legal action against the new owners, it behooves them not to do anythig without a firm CYA Policy in effect.  AKA, it'd be irresponsible of a for-profit business to make use of others' work.


Edit:  Yep, here it is: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,9637.0.html

[Minotaur]

There is a utility to do the latter thing.  I believe it is called SentIcon?  Something like that.  If you plop in the XML it'll spit out a costume file.

It may not be possible for the folks who bring back the game to do anything with the S+ XMLs.  Based on Ironwolf's reports, it looks very unlikely that they will be getting any of the proprietrary tools that were custom built to work on the game.  As such, they wouldn't be able to craft anything for the UI to integrate reading of said file.  Plus, it isn't theirs to work with.  And while I can't for the life of me imagine that the folks here would start legal action against the new owners, it behooves them not to do anythig without a firm CYA Policy in effect.  AKA, it'd be irresponsible of a for-profit business to make use of others' work.


Edit:  Yep, here it is: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,9637.0.html

I understand the reasons why fully equipped level 50s cannot sensibly be loaded in, but technically it should be possible without touching the game code. The "character data" must be modifiable, as people create new characters, so is likely not part of the compiled game code. That data could be modified by other means, at worst some sort of batch utility during downtime if it couldn't be done in real time.

Funnily enough I had a job with the constraints for political reasons that I could mass modify live data, but I couldn't compile anything, so I have quite a lot of experience of doing this sort of update in a mainframe context.

Since allowing characters in with their equipment would break the game and be open to fraud, and letting them in without it would break the characters (as you wouldn't have the money to reequip them), just importing the costume would make sense.

[Voltixdark]

I am just curious why everybody is talking about a COH 2 game? We don't know the details of what the negotiators want future wise. Everyone it's spewing out COH 2 when we haven't even gotten the game back yet. What makes you so sure we have coh 2 down the line? Perhaps the team's purpose was to simply get the game back and just be happy at that. Unless there are other developers here building such an entity. We don't even know what the team plan to do with the game.

[umber]

I remember being thoroughly indifferent about bothering to capture my stable of characters with the Sentinel tool as it didn't seem to have much future utility to me.  The thought process was somewhere along the lines of "if the game were to ever re-open, either my characters will be still there waiting for me or they won't, surely there is no way someone would let me populate a Clean Slate relaunch of the game with dozens of L50s, many with uber-expensive builds, based on nothing else than easily edited text files?"  Heck, until I went and checked my Dox\CoH folder I wasn't sure if I *had* any Sentinel exports.  Looks like I did but the way I stored them looks like my intention was for it to be personal info only, with no expectation that I'd ever get these characters back via this tool (I dropped them in with some of my hand-rolled notes of IO builds).  And I still lack that expectation.  Too few of us were lucky enough to know of the tool and use it, there is zero security to confirm the files aren't fabrications, I see no way a commercial relaunch of the game could allow their import.  Chalk me up as one of the old-timers who stands to lose the most, so many L50s, so many billions of inf, and I'm still firmly in the camp of a Clean Slate relaunch rather than an iffy scheme to allow Sentinel imports. 

And the thing is, "lose" is not an accurate description, this is stuff I've already *lost*, I'm afraid too many people will shift the blame from the game's closure to the game's relaunch.  NCSoft killed my stable of alts when they closed the game 18 months ago.  If/when the game relaunches we should not lay those losses at the feet of the team trying to bring back as much of the game as possible.  The sins of the father are not the sins of the son.  Whatever we get back is pure bonus, not a single thing in "CoH Reloaded" should be considered a loss, any and every functionality restored would be a check on the Plus side of things.  It won't be "I lost my LotGs", those vanished on Nov 30th 2012, it'll be "I *gained* the game".

[Mouse-Man]

Since allowing characters in with their equipment would break the game and be open to fraud, and letting them in without it would break the characters (as you wouldn't have the money to reequip them), just importing the costume would make sense.

Just my two cents, but it still makes no sense to use Sentinel files if all your doing is importing costumes. The costume creator had a feature to save costumes and import them in game already. I know I used it before shut down to archive my character's suits.
Why on earth would the buyers waste resources to reinvent the wheel?

IMO, If they can restore account data, great... if not we need to bite the bullet and start over. I had a lot of 50s with tons of enhances and influence too, but at the end of the day it means nothing if I can't play the game.

[AlienOne]

NCSoft killed my stable of alts when they closed the game 18 months ago.  If/when the game relaunches we should not lay those losses at the feet of the team trying to bring back as much of the game as possible.  The sins of the father are not the sins of the son.

This. So much this.

I think a lot of us (myself included) are still smarting from the pain caused by having the characters we spent so many years on just *POOF!* deleted. We need to be careful not to direct our anger/pain about that towards the people who are trying their darndest to get our game back.

If I had to guess, I'd say the people trying to get our game back lost a lot themselves. I mean, Ironwolf did say "they are us."

Just my two cents, but it still makes no sense to use Sentinel files if all your doing is importing costumes. The costume creator had a feature to save costumes and import them in game already. I know I used it before shut down to archive my character's suits.
Why on earth would the buyers waste resources to reinvent the wheel?

IMO, If they can restore account data, great... if not we need to bite the bullet and start over. I had a lot of 50s with tons of enhances and influence too, but at the end of the day it means nothing if I can't play the game.

Also agreed here. I think if Sentinel can't be used for character import, then it can't be used for costume import. There are several reasons for this. One, it's pretty damn easy (and fun!) to just re-make your costume. Wasn't that one of the strongest points about CoH? Their costume creator? Why would you want to skip that?

Lastly, if editing Sentinel files is so "easy" as reported by some on these boards, then it also becomes a liability. What's to prevent someone from injecting their imported Sentinel file with code that screws up something in the game? it's happened before in many games, and it could happen again. You're telling me people would not be willing to "risk" having someone edit their game import-able file to max the amount of influence they have, but they'd be perfectly willing to risk having someone edit their game import-able file in order to preserve their costumes?

Give me a break. If you're going to argue "Sentinel can be edited," then you have to assume EVERYTHING about a Sentinel file can be potentially compromised--and by extension, the game can be compromised. Any file that you allow a player to "import" into a game can be injected with something harmful.

So, just re-make your costume. It's not that hard.

Also, if you argue that it IS hard, then perhaps you will see the flip side of the argument: you're essentially saying the same thing to people who want their characters imported... "Just remake it! It's not that hard!" ;)

[Minotaur]

Just my two cents, but it still makes no sense to use Sentinel files if all your doing is importing costumes. The costume creator had a feature to save costumes and import them in game already. I know I used it before shut down to archive my character's suits.
Why on earth would the buyers waste resources to reinvent the wheel?

IMO, If they can restore account data, great... if not we need to bite the bullet and start over. I had a lot of 50s with tons of enhances and influence too, but at the end of the day it means nothing if I can't play the game.

I sentinel+'d my characters but didn't otherwise save the costumes. It seems I can use the utility detailed above to convert these to costume files so we end up in the same place.

It appears that CoH will be on borrowed time if/when it comes back, so if I can't load in my 85+ 50s, I'm not going to recreate too many of them, I'll play it for fun then recreate the old toons in CoH2 or CoT.

[r00tb0ySlim]

I am just curious why everybody is talking about a COH 2 game? We don't know the details of what the negotiators want future wise. Everyone it's spewing out COH 2 when we haven't even gotten the game back yet. What makes you so sure we have coh 2 down the line? Perhaps the team's purpose was to simply get the game back and just be happy at that. Unless there are other developers here building such an entity. We don't even know what the team plan to do with the game.

Ironwolf has previously mentioned it (i.e. see post below).  It appears that the team has at least considered CoH2 as a viable option moving forward when/if the game is procured.  Speculation is fun  :)

Yes, the whole of my post is - the CoH game engine is likely not worth the money to buy. Get the game running - start development on CoH2 and move it to Unreal4 or whatever engine seems likely.

I know this is very sobering. I said from the start I would tell you what I can openly and honestly. Running from the truth and facts is silly. I will again state this is the status of things at this point. It might change but it seems very unlikely. I would say the most realistic situation is that the game will re-open at Issue 24 with some sort of Open Beta.

[DragonCommando]

It may take time to get character data restored. If they say "yes, eventually we will be able to" then I will play new characters that I hadn't finished leveling or outfitting. If they say "Sorry, we can't" I'll remake them.

There is no point in pounding on each other every time someone says "I want it all" or "I want everyone to start over". You won't change their opinion and the people who can make the decision already know what you want. All you are doing is bringing acrimony to an already tense situation. But if you feel you must respond, then just try and remember we are all ultimately on the same side regardless of faction.

+1

[HEATSTROKE]

Harpospoke I've given up on the getting my characters back argument.. First the game has to come back. Character data may or not be available. Depending on whether it is or not will dictate how much time, effort, energy and money I put into CoH. For me.. if I can access my data I will be MORE likely to Sub.. play and spend more time playing because I can jump right back in where I left off... If not.. I will have to see if I want to invest that time again..

Simply put.. Its not the fault of the new developers. I think we all acknowledge that. They didnt shut the game down. However I think the new developers have to realize that they are going to take the brunt of the issue if/when the game returns. Its like what I have dealt with in real life when an old business is taken over by a new owner... While I might be the new owner of that business.. the OLD customers with issues and problems are going to confront the new ownership with OLD problems.. Thats a reality..

And the reality is that they might not have a solution. It might not be available. It might not be in their hands. It might not be purchasable at this time. I believe what is being stated emphatically definitely by myself is this.. INVESTIGATE getting character data back.. And if there is a fee attached some people like myself are willing to pay a service fee to assist with the costs associated to retrieve that data IF its possible. 

The Have and Have nots and starting on equal footing argument IMO is utterly stupid. There will be level 50's on day one or two.. and some people will have.. and some will have not.. Ive never cared what anyone else has anyway. Im too busy working on my own stuff to worry about who might have more.. Silly argument to me..

But First off we have to get the game back..

Ad until that happens.. the character data argument is moot...