New efforts!

[adarict]

Actually, guys.  I seem to remember an episode of junk yard wars where they had to build machines that would take the force that 2 rams put on each other when they headbutt.  Part of the show covered why 2 rams can headbutt hard and yet walk away without any apparent head trauma.   If I remember right, the upper skull and horns are honey combed in some fashion so that the pockets could absorb the impact and provide a way for the brain not to experience a hard stop.  Could have been bighorn sheep.

I don't remember that particular episode, but you get bonus points for referencing one of the greatest shows on TV.  Robert Robert Llewellyn's best appearance other than Kryten.  Loved Junkyard Wars/Scrapheap challenge.  There is also a survival type show that was on not too long back, with 3 guys doing survival challenges.  Not intended to be a "here's how you really survive".  It was really a combination of survival shows with Junkyard wars.  It was made even more similar, because one of the three guys, was Colonel Dick Strawbridge.  One of the master bodgers from Scrapheap Challenge and Junkyard Wars.  :)  You couldn't miss his magnificent mustache.

[Vee]

I once had the joy of doing a Synapse TF with my Fire/Fire blaster and 7 Kin defenders. It took 45 minutes and I could use my nuke almost every group and was just a buzz saw.

I'm guessing you mean citadel or manticore as you'd not have had your nuke for synapse.

[LateNights]

Ashton Kutcher is the new Michael Knight.

No bullshit.

(I know people)

[LateNights]

Oh no, what have I done now?

Saturday...

[slickriptide]

Ashton Kutcher is the new Michael Knight.

Ashton has frequently surprised me with his acting and his general acumen. If you get a chance to see one of his guest-shots on Shark Tank, you'll see what I mean.

I don't hate this idea.

[Twisted Toon]

Early on, I thought healers were pretty essential.

Healers weren't 'essential' however, the best healer I ever met...helped me stay 'upright' (as an en/en blaster) when I picked a fight with a red tank show freak in Brickstown.  Rezzed me a 'good many times' on a 'this is how we roll' team on the way to my 1st L50.  (En/En!)  (For some reason, I thought I was a 'tank' as a battle crazed blapper blaster.  My defences weren't quite up to front line battle...vs. Mobs.)

Latterly, I found that duo-ing with two Defenders you can 'walk' the game's content by force multiplying your 'strengths'.  A good defence build with 'buff other' with two Force Field defenders rolled over even Nemesis content.  We got to L47 before my duo partner lost interest or something. 

Imagine 4 defenders.  1 rad.  1 son.  1 FF.  1 dark.  That would be a potent team of Defs.  I'd love to do Striga content with a team like that...

Early on in the game, I didn't quite make the connection with 'not being' hit.  It was hard for the 1st Dark defender to explain that...  But I thought his ten' tentacles were cool...

Azrael.

I recall seeing a screenshot of an 8 man Defender team in action. the buff icons were 6 rows and change deep. I'm fairly certain that the mobs were as debuffed as they could get as well.

This talk about collisions reminds me of a silly rule from Car Wars.

Because the game only had one set of collision rules (intending for cars hitting each other), two pedestrians who walk into each other on the sidewalk each have a 50% chance of dying.

Also, becuase of the quirkiness of the rules, you had a 50% chance to miss when firing at the ground...at point blank range.

[Mister Hassenpheffer]

Blizzard has already stated it won't be Blizzard devs meeting with the Nostalrius team.  Common sense would dictate that of course it won't:  It will be their team of lawyers who are on retainer anyway who will meet with the Nostalrius folks instead. 

These lawyers will, of course, have NDAs for the Nost team to sign up front, right after which there will be contracts that the Nost team will be forced to sign promising that they will never release that vanilla WoW code they've got to anyone, nor will they release that anti-cheat software they developed and used on Nostalrius.  It will then be revealed to the Nost team how much pain and suffering lawyers' fees and jail time will cause them, should they refuse to sign said paperwork.  By this point, they will also have to hand back over all of WoW's code they've misappropriated and altered.

Then the Nost team will be forced into "Smiles, everyone, smiles!" plus fake bravado and whispers of NDAs on their Twitter, Facebook and forums.  Eventually, much like with the CoX rezzes, enough years will pass without anything else ever happening that the gamers wishing for official vanilla servers will finally give up and move on.

/Rant on

There is a thing to be said about PR here.

Their PR up until the "meeting" has been a nightmare.

Instead of showing up with "cease and desist" they should have done a "classic blizzard" move and showed up "for the party"

I see how well that worked out for them, and so did they.

As far as that NDA-  I'm sure there was one, I'm sure it was signed and I'm sure it's going to mean zilch to the hard core dedicated fanboy lol pvpers who will be spreading all the words on all the alt acct social medias. <--- the bastages. 

If Blizz is trying to do damage control and fix their rep, persecuting their players further is the wrong way down a one way street.

The smart thing to do would be to offer the same server setup as an option for all wow players at login.

That would put subs back in their pockets and a version of the game that they would never need to update. Everybody would win, if only they wanted.

Still, it wouldn't solve the real problem which still remains unaddressed: Take out the face palming head desk that is making these bad company decisions that leads to these nightmares.

That would require someone intuitive enough to see real opportunity when it presents itself in its many different forms. Is there anyone at Blizz that's like that anymore?

Back to us. What is this "give up and move on" in which you speak? That sounds like an ability I would have to learn and I'm just too lazy for that.

CoH 4eva

/Rant off

[TimtheEnchanter]

Early on, I thought healers were pretty essential.

Healers weren't 'essential' however, the best healer I ever met...helped me stay 'upright' (as an en/en blaster) when I picked a fight with a red tank show freak in Brickstown.  Rezzed me a 'good many times' on a 'this is how we roll' team on the way to my 1st L50.  (En/En!)  (For some reason, I thought I was a 'tank' as a battle crazed blapper blaster.  My defences weren't quite up to front line battle...vs. Mobs.)

I remember an era where no team would do anything until they could get a healer. I don't know if this was a case of balancing or if a lot of players coming from other games simply didn't know what they were doing yet. I ended up making one because they were in such high demand. I never even had to announce I was looking for a team. My healer would be getting cold invites before the map even completely loaded.

[Ulysses Dare]

I remember an era where no team would do anything until they could get a healer. I don't know if this was a case of balancing or if a lot of players coming from other games simply didn't know what they were doing yet. I ended up making one because they were in such high demand. I never even had to announce I was looking for a team. My healer would be getting cold invites before the map even completely loaded.

I remember that era. I even got kicked from a team when I showed up with a Trick Arrow/Archery after someone advertised they were looking for a "defender". Because what they really wanted was a "healer". As far as I saw, it was mostly folks who'd only played Everquest. Most of them either learned better or moved on, but a few never did.

[Azrael]

I remember an era where no team would do anything until they could get a healer. I don't know if this was a case of balancing or if a lot of players coming from other games simply didn't know what they were doing yet. I ended up making one because they were in such high demand. I never even had to announce I was looking for a team. My healer would be getting cold invites before the map even completely loaded.

Aye.  I remember it being like that for a while.  I think it was a bit of the 'newness' of things.  But yeah, many teams wouldn't move unless a healer was found!  'Are you a healer?'  Heh.  I remember explains as a 'bubble' Defender that not all Defenders are healers.

I had the good privilege as an en/en blaster to be healed by an excellent Illusion/Healer Controller. !

Azrael.

PS. 

The smart thing to do would be to offer the same server setup as an option for all wow players at login.

That would put subs back in their pockets and a version of the game that they would never need to update. Everybody would win, if only they wanted.

Still, it wouldn't solve the real problem which still remains unaddressed: Take out the face palming head desk that is making these bad company decisions that leads to these nightmares.

That would require someone intuitive enough to see real opportunity when it presents itself in its many different forms. Is there anyone at Blizz that's like that anymore?

Hubris. 

Control freakery. 

Fear.

800k players.  'Vanilla' log in option.  Many MMO games would kill for those kind of numbers.

PPS.  Re: CoH.  It's personal of course.  I think it got real personal in the Paragon talks. 

Somebody I know, with experience of 'egos' in the software industry and their 'downsizing' by the people with 'real' power suspects that was how it went down with Paragon.  Somebody got too big for their boots.  And over at NC Soft central somebody decided to show them who was THE boss.

I can't substantiate that.  But the speed of the shut down and the thorough dismantling in haste(n) suggests talks didn't go smoothly.  Maybe a bit of American vs Korean business culture ruffled feathers.

To be 'one stroke' away from that vital signature.  Hm.  Some irresistible object couldn't be navigated.

Perhaps re: above.  Power.  Who has it.  Who doesn't.  WoW.  It's Blizzard's IP.  CoH.  It's NC's IP.  Apple have 250 billion near enough in the bank and their protection of their IP knows no bounds.  If you don't protect it maybe you lose it?

PPPS. 

Anyone could match that, that's willing to take risks which is how you accomplish everything in life. I'll gladly accept the risk because I like to do more than just talk. Because talk is all you're getting (or the lack there of, from ncsoft) Getting a cease and desist doesn't mean you got sued or are going to get sued. Emulators do not get sued as often as the know it all's here are trying to fear monger and convince you of.

First you don't put the emulator on an obvious website searchable like cohemu.com

second in the event you actually do get a cease and desist (which isn't going to happen, if they really cared the game deal would of been a yes or no by now) you backup and move all the data and progress elsewhere to a new host or mac id and resurrect under a new name. The big emulators usually collapse but the smaller ones (cohemu ---> Segs) unlucky enough to get caught do this until the project is ready.

third you spread your code around the net so others have the chance to try should your project collapse. This is ultimately what happens to keep the movement from ending. Some emulators develop a import function to bring characters and accounts over from other projects. A good plan B for those apocalyptic events you think happen all the time to emulators which do not.

The most common way an emulator fails is due to in fighting and drama caused by poor staff management or lack of donations to maintain server operation costs.


There are others that feel the same way I do but they either get silenced, bullied by trolls or haven't spoken up yet. So I felt it was time to speak up and try to find the nerds that happen to be reading this forum that care enough to try something besides putting all faith into a deal that should of been done over a year ago.

[slickriptide]

I remember an era where no team would do anything until they could get a healer. I don't know if this was a case of balancing or if a lot of players coming from other games simply didn't know what they were doing yet. I ended up making one because they were in such high demand. I never even had to announce I was looking for a team. My healer would be getting cold invites before the map even completely loaded.

In the early life of the game, a lot of people came over from Everquest and similar games and assumed that CoH played just like that.

My main for the entire life of the game was an Ill/Rad controller. Even before you got it leveled up and heavily slotted, Accelerate Metabolism was a pretty huge buff on both recovery and movement speed. With Empathy buffs on top, you literally could not run out of endurance no matter how hard you tried. Just one more way that Ill/Rad turned out to be too good, heh.

The only time I ever told someone "you're doing it wrong" was the time I joined a team and asked for Fortify and Adrenaline Boost.

"I don't do that", he replied.

"I'm sorry? You don't do that?"

"No. I'm a pure healer."

I facepalmed in real life and I started trying to explain why a defender, especially an Empathy defender, was not a "cleric" but he was having none of it. He'd grown up on Everquest and he knew how to run a healer and damned if he was going to be told how to be a "healer" in this game. I stuck it out to the end of the mission and then went my merry, if bemused, way.

[TimtheEnchanter]

Perhaps re: above.  Power.  Who has it.  Who doesn't.  WoW.  It's Blizzard's IP.  CoH.  It's NC's IP.  Apple have 250 billion near enough in the bank and their protection of their IP knows no bounds.  If you don't protect it maybe you lose it?

I've heard that claim numerous times that something about copyright FORCES businesses to be aggressive about it or it magically enters public domain before the mandatory time period. But that doesn't make sense either. Lucas gave people free reign to do their own Star Wars-related stuff, as long as they didn't profit from it.

Aye.  I remember it being like that for a while.  I think it was a bit of the 'newness' of things.  But yeah, many teams wouldn't move unless a healer was found!  'Are you a healer?'  Heh.  I remember explains as a 'bubble' Defender that not all Defenders are healers.

I had the good privilege as an en/en blaster to be healed by an excellent Illusion/Healer Controller.

Yeah I could see how confusing CoH team dynamics would be, coming from other games that have very rigid classes. The one exception maybe being SWG which had a very vast and flexible skill system. You could mix and match anyway you wanted in SWG back then.

Defender in general always felt way more rewarding than 'healers' in other games. And I absolutely loved Empathy/Energy. To be able to literally throw an enemy off of an ally who was getting pummeled and then dish out the heals. So much fun.

The only time I ever told someone "you're doing it wrong" was the time I joined a team and asked for Fortify and Adrenaline Boost.

"I don't do that", he replied.

"I'm sorry? You don't do that?"

"No. I'm a pure healer."

I had all the lower tier empathy buffs, but I never had AB. *hangs head in shame*

[Arcana]

Early on, I thought healers were pretty essential.

Healers weren't 'essential' however, the best healer I ever met...helped me stay 'upright' (as an en/en blaster) when I picked a fight with a red tank show freak in Brickstown.  Rezzed me a 'good many times' on a 'this is how we roll' team on the way to my 1st L50.  (En/En!)  (For some reason, I thought I was a 'tank' as a battle crazed blapper blaster.  My defences weren't quite up to front line battle...vs. Mobs.)

Latterly, I found that duo-ing with two Defenders you can 'walk' the game's content by force multiplying your 'strengths'.  A good defence build with 'buff other' with two Force Field defenders rolled over even Nemesis content.  We got to L47 before my duo partner lost interest or something. 

Imagine 4 defenders.  1 rad.  1 son.  1 FF.  1 dark.  That would be a potent team of Defs.  I'd love to do Striga content with a team like that...

Early on in the game, I didn't quite make the connection with 'not being' hit.  It was hard for the 1st Dark defender to explain that...  But I thought his ten' tentacles were cool...

Azrael.

The truth is a little more complicated than "healers" are necessary or unnecessary, because its not just a question of capability.  Fundamentally speaking, most healing isn't used at its maximum capability most of the time because heals take activation time.  They have to be actively used.  So they are only used when they have to be.  This means when the team gets in over their head there's often "more heals" the team can tap into.  They can easily increase the overall team mitigation, because in a sense there was a "reserve" of damage mitigation they could tap into.  Stop attacking and start healing more.  With defense and resistance, that isn't really true, at least to the same extent.  A team protected by defense and resistance buffs is at its peak damage mitigation all the time.  If they get in over their head, there isn't the same reserve damage mitigation they can tap.

When you're a beginner (or playing in a team of beginners) the difference between having a healer and not isn't a question of numbers or damage mitigation formulas, it is the difference between being able to tap into extra healing and not.  Heals are an Omega 13: you can erase a single team mistake with them.

However, the problem is that healing and regeneration are brittle.  When you finally do reach the peak amount of heals and regeneration and then exceed *that*, it falls apart much faster than with defense and resistance.  That's because defense and resistance proportionately reduce *all* incoming damage.  When you make a mistake under defense and resistance, that mistake is proportionately reduced.  Put simply, make a mistake that causes your team to eat 100 dps more damage, and your defense and resistances might reduce the net impact of that mistake to just 20 dps.  It might still be 20 dps more than you can handle, but that's why we have health bars.  It takes 50 seconds to eat 1000 health with a 20dps mistake.  Experienced players have time to adjust to that mistake, and use other tools at their disposal to react to that mistake.  Strong teams can find themselves constantly balanced on a knife edge of taking on just a little too much, then compensate and shift down to give everyone a breather, then shift back up again.  But when you make a 100 dps mistake on a team protected by healing, that's a 100 dps mistake.  You have only 10 seconds to react to that mistake before it eats 1000 health off of everyone's health bars.  And the stronger the enemies are, the bigger mistakes get relative to the size of everyone's health bars.

So when you are a newer, less experienced player, heals can make sense.  They give you a way to learn how much you can really take on, because your heals can bail you out of mistakes.  If you only have defense and resistance, when you push too hard you have nothing left to fix your mistake and lack the skill to easily get out of it.  You die, thinking a heal would be really good now.  But when you are experienced, you are probably a stronger player taking on stronger threats.  You don't need to be bailed out of mistakes, you just need time to work your way out of them.  It is then that you realize that heals (alone) are too brittle: when you exceed your heal strength you tend to die too quickly to do anything about it.  But defense and resistance buy time, and thus they seem to be the better tool for you.

Telling newer players that defense and resistance are "better" and "no one needs a healer" might be like telling a child that training wheels aren't necessary and they only slow down the bike.  That's true, but only for people that have already learned how to ride a bike.

By in large I think we, meaning the quant community of City of Heroes, did a good job with the numbers in general, and I think we were better than average among MMO communities (actually far above average from what I've seen).  But where I think we were still learning, and even I was still evolving my techniques, and where I think the entire rest of the MMO community is basically nowhere on, is what I would call the computational psychology of gameplay.  In other words, the study of how the players perceived and used the numbers of the game, separate from what they were.  I think that's an underappreciated field of video game design.  If the game was still around, I'm pretty sure most of my efforts today would be in building that space.

[katycat737]

I absolutely loved playing my Empathy defender/controller, and in the beggining when Pain Domination wasn't out, the Thermal Radiation (I guess it was the equivalent to Empathy back in CoV).

Healing was the most iconic trait for those 3 power lines, and with good reason too. But the fire shields, recov/regen aura and the worlds of pain made it all the better. Not even counting the other skills like Forge, Fortitude and Painbringer.

I barley had to heal in later levels, but when it was time to play medic, i don't think my team wouldn't have survived without the heals

It was a support player's dream :). Not even counting that we could choose any attack power line as our offense (or pets/control). Usually in other games, a healer is stuck with Holy Jesus beams or hippie nature plants (ironically my first character was a plant dominator)

[Ulysses Dare]

I've heard that claim numerous times that something about copyright FORCES businesses to be aggressive about it or it magically enters public domain before the mandatory time period. But that doesn't make sense either. Lucas gave people free reign to do their own Star Wars-related stuff, as long as they didn't profit from it.

That comes from people mistakenly conflating copyright with trademarks. You're absolutely correct about copyright. Once you have it, it lasts until it expires or you deliberately give it up—it's never lost. Trademarks, on the other hand, must to be defended or risk being lost.

[Arcana]

That comes from people mistakenly conflating copyright with trademarks. You're absolutely correct about copyright. Once you have it, it lasts until it expires or you deliberately give it up—it's never lost. Trademarks, on the other hand, must to be defended or risk being lost.

You're absolutely correct, but I think it is worth a little bit of explaining *why* this is.  The principle of copyright is that creators have certain rights, and among those rights is the right to control who gets to use their works.  Copyright doesn't require that the owner refuse to allow anyone to use their works.  In fact one of the purposes of copyright rights is to allow creators to allow some people to use a work for whatever reason while blocking others.  So when someone decides to defend their copyright in some cases and not others, they are in effect exercising their right to decide who gets to use the work and who doesn't.  There's no contradiction there.

But trademark is based on a completely different principle.  The legal basis of trademark is that a business has an interest in building an identity for itself, like the principle of branding, and a business may choose to use "marks" to identify itself to customers.  Trademark law allows a business to protect its marks from being used by someone else or even something very similar to their marks from being used on the assumption that someone using their marks or something similar could confuse a customer into think that business was related to or even owned by the original company.  Trademark protection is designed to ensure that once a business starts using a mark to identify itself to its customers, no one else can try to confuse the issue by using an identical or similar mark.

Here, you can't just pick and choose who to go after, because your legal argument is that it is vital to prevent people from being confused about who we are.  If you allow other companies to use similar or identical marks without a specific legal agreement to do so, you are effectively saying you don't care if someone dilutes your mark.  And then your legal argument for protecting the mark against anyone else collapses.

This is also why copyright is not domain specific but trademark is.  When you write a story, you own that story as a creator.  If someone makes a movie based on that story, it is a derivative work based on your story.  Making derivative works is one of the rights protected by copyright law.  You cannot translate someone else's copyrighted work into another medium, or use it in a totally different way.  It is still infringing.  But when you protect a trademark, that is always for a specific business purpose.  When Marvel comics trademarks "Iron Man" they do so specifically in the area of comic books, movies, novels, and other forms of story telling.  That doesn't prohibit an athletic event from being calls an "Iron Man" competition because so long as they do not try to connect the two, an Iron Man triathlon takes place in a business realm different from that inhabited by Marvel Comics.  You can't really confuse the two (or rather, as a legal principle no reasonable person should assume Marvel Comics sponsors every Iron Man triathlon in existence).  This exact principle came up famously with Apple Computer.  Apple trademarked the Apple name but the problem was that there was already an Apple trademark in existence: Apple Records, the label founded by the Beatles.  Apple Corp, the parent company of Apple Records, sued Apple computer for trademark infringement.  The two companies settled, with Apple Computer agreeing to not enter the music business and Apple Corp agreeing not to enter the computer business, allowing their respective trademarks to remain valid.  Over the years, until about 2007, the two companies had been in court arguing trademark infringement as Apple first tiptoed and then propelled itself into the music business.  Eventually, Apple (computer) essentially resolved the matter by agreeing to buy Apple's (corp) trademark rights and then re-licensing them back to Apple Records for use in their specific musical ventures.  This allowed both trademarks to remain valid, as there was a specific legal agreement between the companies that allowed this use.

[TimtheEnchanter]

Also, adding to what Arcana said about RE'ing: MMO code, especially after years of development is always spaghetti code. That makes reverse-engineering 10x harder than it would be with a standalone piece of software that was written with all of the objectives known beforehand. MMO's are constantly evolving. New content gets added. Entirely new systems get shoehorned into code that was never designed to support it. The capes alone took an insane amount of hacking on the part of the devs. Eventually you end up with layers upon layers of code and what was once pretty streamlined begins to turn into a Frankenstein monster.

[pinballdave]

Mmm, I love the old defender stories.

Good times:

The Sis Psyche where the 3 melee quit after the larger outdoor missions, and the 3 remaining defenders convinced the two remaining blasters it was still feasible and quite successfully finished it with a dark, storm and bubbler  for the two blasters pleasure.

The AR/energy melee blaster that said with bubbles, all things are possible.

I remember the 8 defender teams freakstirminating in Crey's Folly, piling up freaks and relentlessly fulcrum shift/nuking everything.

The Energy/energy blapper  that thrived teaming with my Earth/kinetic controller. Clever blapper even knocked stuff INto the quicksand :)

Head scratchers:

I remember the RAD defender telling me she was a healer and didn't use her toggles because she wanted to HEAL. ::facepalm::

I remember the Kin defender in the Kahn TF dutifully speed boosting and ID'ing each member. When I suggested she could hit transfusion a few more times between buffs she was insulted that her buffs were more important than that healing.

I remember the blaster that ran all over the map demanding my kin defender heal him.

...

I spent way too much time on my defenders in that Terra Volta reactor room. In the early days, that Skyraider respec was a real challenge. Some teams really needed the bubble lovin' to fix their broken early attempts at heroes. By the time teams did the Freaks or Rikti respec's they were either badging or showing off :p

[slickriptide]

HOW TO MAKE AN EMULATOR

1) Complain that there's no emulator
2) Demand that someone else make an emulator
3) ????
4) Profit!

A whole lot of people seem to believe that there's some sort of magical, Universal Emulator Toolkit in the world and that "making an emulator" involves little more than wishing for there to be one.

You see this a lot on the Facebook groups.

"Why doesn't someone just make an emulator? It must be that they're afraid of something. Well, I've spent a half-hour googling this and I give you my personal assurance that nothing bad will happen, so somebody make an emulator already."

There was a guy recently who was positive that City of Heroes was "abandonware". After all, he'd searched with keywords, so he knew. Those were his actual words. "I searched with keywords", as if that was a mantra that made everything he said incontrovertible.

The thing was - even if he was right, which he of course was not, he never wanted to address the question of who would make this emulator for which he personally vouched to assume legal responsibility based on his extensive Google legal education.

He just seemed to think it would materialize like magic if he could just convince enough people that it was "legal".

A lot of other people who just want to play the game and have no background in software tend to imagine the same -that an emulator is just something that happens. Heck, there was a guy in the same Facebook group who claimed to be a game programmer who was positive that it would be a no-brainer to just "implement City of Heroes one zone at a time". He may have been a whiz at Unreal engine like he claimed but he apparently didn't have a clue about client-server architecture. He assumed that the whole game was there in the client files and all he had to do was find the switch to flip that would turn it on.

When even the self-professed "pros" think that way, it's not really surprising that the rank and file players tend to think of the game as a monolithic "thing" that they could use if someone would just unlock it.

[blacksly]

When even the self-professed "pros" think that way, it's not really surprising that the rank and file players tend to think of the game as a monolithic "thing" that they could use if someone would just unlock it.

I coded on part of an emulator for a long time. And the part I worked on had thousands of lines of code, and it was ONLY THE ADD-ONS to the real emulator core. The real core had many more thousands of lines, as I saw on occasion when I had unfortunate reason to have to look at the guts/core of the emulator in order to see why it was acting in some particular fashion. I can tell you that it took many coders several years to create that emulator...

... and that was ULTIMA ONLINE. It was SIMPLE compared to CoH. The amount of work in that emulator would scare any knowledgeable programmer, and I doubt that it was a quarter of the size that a CoH emulator would have to be. I think it was at least a tenth, but probably not a quarter. And, as I said, take the 20-40 thousand of lines of code that were in our custom packages, multiply that by several times... and you have the UO emulator (or one of them, at least, as there were several). Then, multiply that again by at least 4 times, and you get the CoH emulator.

Who is going to join into that kind of work, just for kicks? And knowing that they may face legal issues at the end? I mean, there are probably ways around it if you start the project from the beginning with the expectation that you want to try to hide IP addresses and such, but it's still a risk that you're taking. And you know what you could do instead? Just write up a game with the same amount of code, base the concepts on CoH, but use your own design and a more modern engine. And you could even profit from that, maybe, and with no worries about litigation.

Basically, why work on a City of Heroes emulator in the shadows, instead of creating City of Titans without restrictions?